Upgrade to iOS 7 question?

[spacefreakface]

I'm going on a bit of a rant so please excuse me!

I have an iPhone 5 I'd like to upgrade to iOS 7 (mostly because more and more apps I want are requiring it for updates, booooo) but all of my friends warn me that it kills battery life. I wonder if that's actually true or are they just using tons of features, leaving apps open etc. and that's why. Or does it just suck battery regardless of usage?

For reference: right now (pre-upgrade) if my phone is 100% around 9am when I start my day it's good til 9 that night. On a heavy use day it still lasts me until 6ish. I'm pretty good with consuming. I close all apps I don't need in the background, keep my backlight low, data is almost always off, and wifi is on when I'm somewhere I know I can connect. I use my phone mainly for texting, music, and social media (Twitter, Instagram, FB etc) and I have my push settings/location settings set up so not everything is connecting and taking up battery or data or what have you.

Does any of that matter? Should I stick it out with 6 or move up to 7?

[Stephen]

In my experience, for equivalent features, iOS 7 has slightly better battery life, at least on recent mobile devices. However, iOS 7 also has a lot of new features that didn't exist in iOS 6, and if you turn on all those features (and a few are on by default), the battery life might diminish slightly. Overall, I've had no problems with battery life going from 6 to 7. For example, turn off location services if you don't use it. Most people don't realize it is always on.