It's not that it randomly shuts off, it's that the batteries drain incredibly quickly and the battery % indicator becomes inaccurate. I often see my 5 go from 60% to 40% to 15% to off in less than 60 seconds. The Apple site ran diags on my phone and confirmed the battery had reached "failure" status, but without AppleCare, the warranty only lasts 1 year and the service is nearly $100.

The iPhone 5 is sort of a reverse antenna-gate: instead of realizing how badly made the phone was at launch, we didn't realize it until the iPhone 5S was out, and nobody cares if the "old" model has issues.

That sounds like a regular failed battery, which happens pretty often in all devices. Is it more common in the iPhone 5?

Considering the 18 page thread and the fact that the iPhone 5 came out in Sep' 2012 (not much over a year ago) I'd say that is quite unusual. I have many devices older than 2 years with highly respectable batteries, smartphones amongst them.

You may well be right. That's a lot of complaints. But everyone complains about their phone battery. http://forums.androidcentral.com/moto-x/352798-moto-x-idle-b...

Highly recommend just making an appointment at your nearest apple store and getting the battery tested. I had this problem a few months ago. At around 20% capacity my iPhone 5 would shut down. I brought it to the apple store and they said the battery had degraded. They also noticed the camera lens had a speck of dust in it, do they replaced my iPhone for free.

Had it not been for the speck of dust, they would have replaced just the battery (at least according to the guy who helped me at the store).

(Edited for grammar.)

This certainly rings true for me. I've got a 4S. I must say, I've never experienced the problem before upgrading to iOS 7, but I don't think it started happening immediately after upgrading, either...

Could cold weather have something to do with it? It started happening to me once temperatures started hitting sub-zero. I know that temperatures must affect the batter in strange ways.

I ahd similar problem my phone dies when the battery meter says 20%, Apple genius bar suggested I have to setup my device as a new device and remove all user data(sms. apps etc) and not use the icloud backup :(

Yup I have this exact problem.

Sometimes waiting a few minutes and trying to turn it on again works.

I have a different problem that I know is not just specific to my phone. We have three iPhones in our house: two 5's and one 5s. Over the past 6 months every few weeks they glitch. What happens is that at exactly midnight eastern time all three phones start showing the lock screen for two seconds, followed by a second of a black screen, followed by five seconds of the Apple logo on a white background. During this time the phone is running. When on the lock screen you can actually swipe left and start entering your unlock code, but you will get interrupted. This usually goes on for at least 6 hours. Hard resetting the phone does not fix it: you just boot to the same state. Restoring from a backup does fix it. And seems to be the recommended solution on the Apple forums.

This is a huge problem. First, it slights up the whole room and drains the battery. If not on the charger, the phone will die and our alarms will not go off. If on the charger, the phone will also keep buzzing. BTW, we use standard Apple cables and chargers. Restoring from backup takes a long time and I do not wish to do that for three phones in the middle of the night.

I really hope this new update also fixes this problem. Has anyone else encountered this, and if so, have you had luck talking to Apple about it?

Edit: none of the phones are jailbroken or have ever been. The home network is not special in any way other than having IPv6. My strong suspicion is that this has something to do with automatic app updates + a buggy app, but it seems like a pretty bad OS-level bug to allow this type of behavior.

Do you have 'Do Not Disturb' turned on?

I do not. Why would that matter?

I've been experiencing this lately. For me, it's when the phone gets down to around 30% or less and it almost always happens when I'm using it and doing something that would require data like sending a message. It seems to happen more if that message has a photo in it or something that would seem on the surface to need more battery to get it done.

The other strange thing is that for the next 10-15 minutes I can't restart the phone if I don't plug it in to a power source. I get the "plug it in" graphic when I try. But then after a while it realizes that battery is in fact not fully drained and starts back up with the previously displayed percentage.

I'm guessing this is something where the battery voltage dips enough during a high draw period and tricks the phone in to thinking it's completely drained and in response shuts itself down.

This is exactly what happens to me when the batteries around 10-20%. If I leave it for 10 minutes it will switch on again and the battery isn't drained, it usually switches off when I try to play music or use the map, but not just navigating the phone. I wonder if the battery does just need replacing though, but strange that I have only noticed this since installing iOS7.

I had this same issue for the first time this past weekend. I was using the phone very heavily outdoors. Battery was just over 30% and I was recording videos. The phone cut off like the battery had died. When I tried to turn it back on, I got the same graphic. 20 minutes later, I turned it on and it was fine.

So much for the much touted "less fragmentation". How many phones they have to test a new version on? Like ... four?

Had the same issue. Thought it was low-temps here in Chicago but it's been way too consistent/indoors too.

I had it happen thrice when I was skiing and never since I've been back.

I was suspecting it was due to cold temperatures as well...

My iPhone5 shuts off any time I take it out in cold weather when the battery is under 30%. Buy cold I mean like -5, 5 or 15 degrees F. Then when I plug it in, the battery level immediately shows about 40%.

Other than that and the low battery life in general, I'm pretty pleased with the phone.

There was news yesterday about Apple talking about a fix in the works: http://mashable.com/2014/01/22/iphone-screen-of-death/

Is this not a case of a Springboard rebooting? I've got the same issue with a 4s.

About once/week, my iPhone 5S will reboot itself, which is separate from the battery issue.

To me, it seemed like an intentional feature to keep the phone from screwing up. Like an automatic reboot. not sure if it's a feature or a bug.

I've had something similar happening to me on my iPhone 5 about once or twice a week: the phone will just spontaneously reboot. It seems to happen most often when I'm switching between apps.

It boots pretty quickly and hasn't annoyed me enough to care about it. Haven't had it happen in a couple weeks, though. At least I haven't noticed it.

Regarding iOS 7, the iPhone 5, and battery life I haven't really had any issues. Just noticed that the default screen brightness was higher with the move from iOS 6. Decreased the brightness and now I'm fine.

I'd spoken to apple support about it and told them that I'd done all the restore and backup and restore and testing from blank install.

This was a few days outside of default Applecare (of course) and had been happening for a few weeks before it expired.

Dying at daft times and magically charging instantly when plugged in

Bought a replacement battery but cannot take the screen off, just won't budge with a sucker, almost lost the teeny screws.

So will try the exhaust battery and full charge thing tonight.

very annoying, last night it was at 6% for hours, plugged it in at bedtime, straight to 33% stupid thing.

Instead of the dreaded blue screen, it's now the black screen. Great.

What surprised me, reading http://www.examiner.com/article/apple-promises-to-fix-ios-7-..., is that the OS seems to know the color of the case. White phones get a white screen, black ones a black one.

Is that the normal boot screen for iOS 7 on iPhones? If so, nice attention to detail, especially if the 5C gives you matching colors, too.

That's the kind of little touch Apple likes to do. It's one of my favorite things about them.

the color matches the screen bezel color. silver/gold iphone get white, 5C and space gray get black.

All the phones do come with their background set to one that matches their primary case color though. Motorola does this with the Moto X as well. Definitely a nice 'premium' touch.

Black is way more trendy than blue though.

I had this problem with my 5S (never my 5). It seemed to be related to heat?.. when I had my local hotspot, iTunes, etc, running. The device would get really hot and then shutdown. When it was cool enough, I could reboot it. When I took it to the Apple store, they guy was like 'yeah, this happens to mine too'. He was cool though, he gave me a new one.

Have no idea why it was happening.. if it was a heat issue, then I would have expected it to happen sooner (I had the S for about two months).

what people call the "iphone 5s rebooting" is not a reboot but the springboard crashing. the starting springboard also displays the apple for some period of time.

regarding battery on iphone 4: i've seen this happen yesterday. 40% battery, screwing around in safari, shutdown, please-charge logo. after 5 minutes it could be turned on again, battery still 40%.

it runs well on my jailbroken 4s though.

they really have some crazy issues right there. and it's not the battery suddenly "failing" after changing the os...

I had a similar issue with my 4S where it would shut down when battery got down to around 30%, and only boot up if I reset it (normal boot would show the battery discharged icon) after using it for about a year.

Doing a full charge cycle of the battery (fully charge -> fully drain -> fully charge) fixed the issue.

I had the same problem with my iPhone 5 and actually got it exchanged today. Apple said it was a faulty battery.

Pretty sure this is hardware and not software, my iPhone 5 suffers this in iOS 6.x. I'll be out for run with 30% battery, then suddenly, no music... my phone has shut off and it takes usually 15ish minutes before it'll reboot, so I'm left finishing a run in silence.

I'll occasionally catch my 5S rebooting (once a week maybe) but it's so fast that it hasn't started to bother me yet. The issues with the 5 sound quite a bit worse though.

If it's that fast, it's likely not actually rebooting, just SpringBoard crashing and restarting itself.

I glanced down the other day at my iPhone 5 and saw the apple boot screen. I thought it was just a fluke because I've only seen it once.

"it just works"

</Gruber-esque unhelpful snark>

I have never had this happen on my iPhone but my iPad randomly does this if the battery is low and I have just begun loading a web page. Surprisingly, youtube never poses any issue so it doesn't seem to have anything to do with the amount of data being retrieved. I'm wondering if the sudden network activation as I click on a link causes some power management bug in the OS.

I have 2 Nexus7's and never had an issue.

BTW If my Nexus7 shuts down randomly, I wouldn't be as Mad compared my phone shutting down randomly in the middle of phone call or in random place while using Navigation.

I've never had my phone restart at a particularly bad time. I guess I'd feel different if it rebooted mid-conversation or something (I seem to recall my Motorola RAZR doing that to me once, but it was just one thing).

My Nexus 7 issues are of course merely anecdotal, but I did blog about my solution and that blog entry got a lot of hits and responses (and my blog usually gets few hits or responses).

It happened to me almost every day for a month, then I got a new phone.