iOS 27.01 improved battery life vs. 27.0
Just wanted to share my experience on the 13mini for battery life with different iOS versions recently. I held out with the last version of iOS 18.X for a very long time over concerns about iOS 26 being a worse experience. A couple weeks ago when iOS 27 came out and claimed to fix a lot of issues with 26, I convinced myself to take the plunge.
I first upgraded to iOS 26 for about a week out of curiosity. Battery life seemed okay (slightly worse than 18) but the animations were often not smooth and the overall experience laggy.
iOS 27.0 - much smoother animation and almost no lag vs 26, but this absolutely mauled by battery life, even ignoring the first several days while the OS was still indexing. Like my battery life would sometimes randomly jump down from 25% to 18% at once, and in general I was needing to recharge multiple times per day. (For reference, I'm at 81% battery health).
iOS 27.0.1 - massive improvement in battery life vs 27.0 with the same smooth animations. I'm now back to getting by with my usual 1 recharge mid-day. This OS version is starting to get me optimistic that I might be able to squeeze one more year out of the mini to make it to the XX phones. I'm honestly nervous to update again when future 27 iterations come out since this one works so well for me.