Filings from Chinese regulator TENAA show iPhone 7 has 1,960mAh, iPhone 7+ has 2,900 mAh battery; iPhone 6s had 1,715 mAh, iPhone 6s+ had 2,750 mAh battery
If you're familiar with Apple's iPhone events, and practically everyone is, then you know Apple will never mention certain things on stage like how much RAM an iPhone has.
Context & Ripple Effects
Apple's stage presentations have long omitted the numbers enthusiasts care about most — RAM and battery capacity — so Chinese regulator TENAA's filings function as the de facto disclosure channel. The arc here is continuity: last year a [[a:832641|promo video confirmed the iPhone 6s shipped with a smaller 1,715mAh battery than the iPhone 6]], and this year TENAA shows the pattern reversing, with the iPhone 7 at 1,960mAh and the 7 Plus at 2,900mAh.
That makes the regulator filing the first hard confirmation of what Apple declined to say on stage, and it slots into a multi-year record where TENAA and other national regulators end up publishing the specs Apple withholds.
First-order effects
- Buyers and reviewers now have official capacity figures Apple never announced: the iPhone 7 gains 245mAh over the 6s and the 7 Plus gains 150mAh over the 6s Plus, giving teardowns and battery-life tests a verified baseline.
Second-order effects
- Apple's continued on-stage silence pushes press and comparison sites to treat regulator filings as the standard spec source, as later happened when TENAA disclosed the iPhone XS and XS Max's 4GB of RAM alongside their larger batteries.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, foreign regulatory databases — TENAA in China, Brazil's regulator for the later iPhone 12 battery figures — become the permanent public record of iPhone internals, with each generation's filing (including the iPhone 8's smaller 1,821mAh battery) pre-empting Apple's own messaging.
The trend: As Apple keeps battery and RAM specs off its keynote stage, foreign regulator filings are consolidating into the authoritative annual record of iPhone hardware details.