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Is iPhone Battery Usefulness On the Decline?
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."
"As explained around the web, milliamps hours (mAh) are something like a gas tank, and voltage (V) is the amount of fuel the device is drawing."
I don't know who wrote this bullshit, but they need to be shot.
(Yes, I attempted to read the article; so sue me.)
The iPhone 5 is crap compared to the new iPhone 6 that will come out next spring.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Sometimes it IS necessary to upgrade though, it can save you real money. I used to spend $$ on firewood for sending smoke signals; but then I made a one-off payment by switching to semaphore flags. Simples!
-- Cisk for the Cisk God
iPhone 4 lasted me (now my wife)
You married your iPhone 4? That's being too much an iFanBoi.
You think you're saving money?
After getting a mating pair of carrier pidgeons, my transmission costs are minimal, and my bandwidth just keeps increasing. Sure there are a few lost packets to aircraft, bb guns and Richard Gere, and latency is high, but we're talking reverse data cap here.
There is a very good car analogy here.
Over the years cars have become much more efficient, through various refinements and improvements in the design of the internal combustion engine. We are able to produce more horsepower with less fuel. So, did cars stay the same size and increase in fuel economy over the years? Some have, but especially in the USA, designers instead chose to increase the size and power while keeping fuel efficiency relatively constant. So the engine has become more efficient, yet those gains weren't used to produce a more fuel efficient engine, they were used to make bigger, more powerful, cars that had the same fuel economy.
With the iPhone, the battery definitely has become better of the years. So did Apple choose to increase battery life? Nope. As with the cars, they increased the CPU power, screen resolution, GPU power, memory, radios, etc. They packed more powerful components, more efficient components, into the same size with ever increasing battery technology. So battery tech has to keep improving all the time, just to keep up with the increase in power usage from the rest of the system, and it doesn't even always keep up. It takes all the running you can do just to stay in the same place.
I've not developed this very far and I know there are counter-examples, many came to mind while writing this, yet the analogy is apt especially when we confine our comparison to specific segments of the US car market. I'm pleased that, in recent years, this trend seems to finally be reversing, and the US is becoming more--if only slightly--like Europe with their focus on smaller, more efficient cars.
If you build it, nerds will come. Soylentnews.org
And I'll add that I agree they are useful. Without the battery my iPhone's screen is too dark and I can't hear the audio.