Someone getting down to 40% on the XR would have a dead battery on the SE. Your usage is lighter.

How are you qualifying that?

Power draw in usage vs battery capacity?

I've never really looked at it like that, but I guess we should take the least generous values from both:

Pure Capacity:

iPhone XR: 2,942 mAh

iPhone SE: 1,624 mAh

Draw:

iPhone XR: "Up to 15 hours", so 196,134 mAh of draw if we take the best case for the iPhone XR.

iPhone SE: 12-13 Hrs on Internet (so, LTE, according to apple) that's roughly 129,92 mAh

; while the capacities are wildly different I don't see the SE being so far behind.

If you can get real power draw numbers you can make your own conclusion. I suspect Apple expects a certain about of idle time (which has been optimised for on the later generations).

Yeah, using the battery life test from Anandtech as a guide, an SE gets about 70% of the battery life of an XR: 12.97 hours vs. 9.27 hours.

So I would guess around 28% of its battery when an XR is at 40%.

Using those numbers, when an SE hit 0% after 9.27 hours of usage, the XR would be at 28.5% (12.97-9.27)/12.97. That seems reasonable and makes my original claim that an XR would be at 40% was a hit high, but in the same ballpark. There’s certainly no doubt that the SE’s battery size and power management doesn’t compare to the current phones’.

Though it's worth pointing out that the SE did beat out its contemporary iPhone 6s, with which it shares most of its innards. Differences are the smaller display, slightly smaller battery, 1st vs 2nd gen TouchID, and a lower res front-facing camera.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/10285/the-iphone-se-review/3

24% longer on wifi web browsing. Worse on the graphics benchmark, but only because the framerate is higher (smaller screen resolution) which keeps the CPU from idling as much.

Makes you wonder what the performance of a modern small iPhone could be like.

It is worth pointing out the test were using WiFI and assume best connection. In real usage the XR would get better LTE performance and hence even better battery life than what was tested.

Good. Ugh... I have XS Max and without charging it I usually have around 20% at the end of the day. I use it heavily for commute into NYC on the bus so that might contribute.

My SE goes down pretty quickly even with light use.