Is iPhone Battery Usefulness On the Decline? 222
jfruh writes "Every time a company rolls out a new version of a product, it extols how much better it is than the previous version. Thus, Apple spent a part of its iPhone 5 rollout touting the staying power of the latest version of its battery. But have iPhone batteries really seen improvement since the original came out in '07? Kevin Purdy crunches the numbers and concludes that, while the 5's battery beats the 4S's, we still haven't returned to the capabilities of the original phone."
More power for the same battery life is Good (Score:5, Interesting)
And as competitive as smartphones are today that's close to as good as we'll get for a bit. There IS a type of Lithium-ion battery that can store twice the charge of today's batteries at the same volume, but that's apparently coming to electric cars first; which obviously spend a lot more on batteries per unit and are in far more need of it.
But expect these batteries in phones at some point. In the further future the most promising technology is lithium-air batteries, which offer up to 10x the current charge per volume as today. But there are still numerous problems with them, and so an ETA there would be indefinite but quite possibly less than a decade. Still, imagine a phone that would need charging less than once a week!
HUGE DECLINE (Score:5, Interesting)
iPhone 2G, lasts me 12 hours full use or 4 days stand by (2 days average) - still use it btw with new battery
iPhone 4 lasted me (now my wife) about 8 to 9 hours and a day and a half of light use
iPhone 4S with most battery hungry functions (eg. GPS, notifications) lasts me 6 hours of constant use, or 22 to 26 hours of light use
Now the 4S is in the brink of being unacceptable. It's still convenient and the extra speed is very appreciated. But I always need a power outlet nearby when traveling, and I cannot count on it lasting a full day. It just can't if used for browsing and apps for a couple of hours.
Now, I love the iPad 2 battery life. Puts it in the Awesome Stuff list. I am guaranteed it'll last a day. If they could have kept the 2G life and not up CPU I'd have been more interested in the iPhone 5.
Re:More power for the same battery life is Good (Score:4, Interesting)
You're right about the asthetic issue. I've got a candy bar phone that lasts at least a week between charges and if I'm actually using it, it'll last 6-8 hours of talk time in fringe reception area's because it has an actual antenna that I can pull out when needed. Range is great as I've successfully connected to the carrier while 6 miles off-shore (whale watching trip). Surprised the hell out of me an most everyone else when the damn thing rang.
Funny but informative (Score:5, Interesting)
The iPhone 5 is crap compared to the new iPhone 6 that will come out next spring.
Humorous.
And yet in that comment lies a revelation of why Apple's supposedly boring updates are not a problem.
Because from the 4 to the 4s, it was not that much of a leap. Or so it seemed at the time.
But now from the 4 to the 5, that is actually a pretty big jump. So even though we might see something like a 5s next year, you can be pretty sure that waiting for that will not be an amazing leap over the 5 - so there's little point to wait. And yet when the 6 does come out a year or two from now, it will probably be a really impressive gain over the iPhone 5.
Re:As a telephone (Score:4, Interesting)
I got a $20 nokia candy bar with a flashlight and it can sit in my pocket for almost two weeks and have the battery say 2/3, which of course usually means it's pretty empty, but still. Epic.
Re:False Comparison (Score:5, Interesting)
Apple isn't doing anything differently in this regard than any other phone manufacturer.
They use the highest density most expensive option. A few years ago this cost quite a bit more and fewer companies used them.
However, as a consumer, i'd rather a design concept like the motorola razr maxx, prepared to have a bit more thickness if it means the phone will last a weekend without charging.
I understand. I own the MacBook Pro Retina which made huge sacrifices for thin and light. People really like thin and light when they see it, when they try it. But just like the move from desktops to laptops, thin and light likely means 30% less device for 30% more money.
Re:Seriously? (Score:4, Interesting)
Yup. And they're going to do that.. play catch up. It's inevitable. It's close to inevitable for any market leader to be conservative, since it's hard for them grab more share, fairly easy to imagine screwing something up and losing market share. So they don't do anything crazy. And in the tech world in particular, "innovation" is well described as "crazy that works"... you had this nutty idea, a big chance to what came before, and hey, look, it's working. Like the first iPhone... there was lots of "what came before" rolled into the iPhone. The "crazy" part was selling a smartphone to consumers. Because everyone in the business, Microsoft, Palm, RIM, they all knew, with certainty, that only business folk wanted smartphones.
Add to the natural conservative nature of the market leader several of Apple's standard behavior, and I can pretty much make the case that Apple isn't going to innovate anymore. And for the part, past the first iPhone, they really didn't do that much innovation anyway.
Apple sells a crazy number of devices for a single manufacturer... somewhere between 33% and 40% of all the smart phones sold in the USA, for example. They have a very precise formula -- one new model per year. This does tend to make their business skewed seasonal, but it also allows them to generate huge profits, making just the one model. More recently, they've addressed the lower end market by selling the older products at a reduced price. So unlike every other smart phone vendor, they're not spending a dime to address the mid-range and low-end of the smartphone market. And they're seeding the market for future upgrades.
All of this is dependent on their ability to keep the numbers up ... millions flocking to that same yearly new iPhone. If they were to do something in a new iPhone that drove customers away, their whole franchise could fail. Thus, they're never going to do anything particularly interesting with the flagship. There's also a bit of lock in for any smartphone platform... once you're serious about the iPhone, you're not looking closely at Samsung or Motorola or HTC or even Nokia for your next upgrade... you're waiting for that new iPhone. Apple needs to keep something of a parity with the competition... and that's pretty much what the iPhone 5 did. And about all it did. And I claim, that's more than enough. It doesn't do anything to upset the Apple cart :-)
Companies not in the lead are more likely to take risks. And companies with a broad product line are more likely to take risks. So look at Motorola. They had basically no presence in the smartphone business, they had been hurtin' for years. In 2009 they did the Motorola Droid/Milestone... in many way the anti-iPhone.. even THAT itself was a risk... you can tell, by all of the effort some other companies have gone to in order to make an iPhone-ish product. The iPhone was sleek and smooth, the Droid very industrial, and even with a keyboard. And a higher resolution display, which Apple wouldn't do for another year. This was a big success for Motorola, and led to a huge line of smartphones. But they're still struggling a bit. So last year, they took another risk and introduced the new RAZR. Again, kind of an anti-iPhone. More hard industrial edges. Rather than a phone made of mostly glass, they build theirs out of Kevlar -- the thing's as indestructible as phones get. This was a bit of a gamble, but Motorola has a full line of other devices.
It paid off... so a bunch more RAZR models. In fact, in-between the iPhone 4S and iPhone 5 introductions, Motorola introduced five different RAZR models, and a bunch of other devices. That's the other thing about innovation, which goes back to my original claim -- innovation is crazy made successful. If you can't afford to fail, you can't take the risk, you can't bring the crazy, and so, you don't do any significant innovations. Consider that the only significant innovation in the iPhone 4S was SIRI, Apple's integrated speech recognizer/actor... software you can swi