Many of us rely on our smartphones to tell the time, rather than a watch, but because phones run out of battery relatively quickly, there is always a risk of not being able to see the time when this could be important, and With iOS 18, Apple has a partial solution to this problem.
As noted by Reddit users (via MacRumors), with iOS 18, your phone can show you the time in small text in the top left corner of the screen, even when the battery is low.
We say “essentially” because this obviously wouldn’t work if the battery was completely dead, but the iPhone’s Power Reserve feature holds back the last trickle of life to ensure your iPhone is still discoverable and allows you to go contactless payment and access to digital keys, even if there is not enough battery left to use the other functions.
Only on iPhone 15, for some reason
This Power Reserve feature isn’t new, but the addition of a clock to it is. Strangely, this only seems to work on the iPhone 15 line – so if you have an iPhone 14 or older, even with iOS 18 you’ll have to make do without access to a clock on your phone when it’s out of juice.
This is a strange limitation, as we cannot imagine any technical reason for this. So it could just be a case of Apple withholding the feature for arbitrary reasons, or perhaps – since this is a beta – the clock will be more widely available in Power Reserve once iOS 18 is ready. Then again, maybe there’s a real reason for its absence on older phones, we’re just not sure what that could be.
In any case, it’s worth noting that adding the clock to Power Reserve will likely increase battery drain, albeit negligibly, which could mean that your iPhone’s battery will actually drain faster with this feature, although the difference there will likely be small are.
If you want to try this feature out for yourself – and you have a compatible phone – you can download the iOS 18 developer beta now, but for most people we recommend waiting at least until the public beta, or better yet until the completed release, which will likely land in September.