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."

Comments

False Comparison

[Anonymous Coward]

This is because the original iPhone used EDGE. If you force future version off the 3G network, talk time beats the first generation iPhone easily.

Re:False Comparison

[jbolden]

Apple from a profit standpoint would much rather have a big cheap battery than the incredibly expensive light thin batteries they have. Heck they would rather sell the phone hooked up to a car battery and give you 1000 hrs talk time. Light and thin is costing them money, this isn't about penny pinching.

Better in all the ways that matter

[SuperKendall]

Did the original iPhone have 225 hours standby?

And the fact that you still get 8 hours browsing, even over LTE, is really impressive. It might be slightly shorter than browsing time on an original iPhone but how much browsing could you have got done on Edge? You could probably read 10x the content on the iPhone 5, so how is it not far ahead?

It comes back to the problem of looking at a raw number on a list, without thinking what that number MEANS to a user on the device.

depends on use

[alen]

ever since i got rid of my work email account off my ipad the battery time doubled or tripled

take 10 people off the street and you will have 10 different use patterns

Not at all.

[SuperKendall]

The typical iPhone user is only considered with the number 5.

Not really. There will be a lot of iPhone 4s users that skip this update.

Heck, they could just take what they have now, make some ridiculously minor change, and then change the name and have a whole new round of sales to the macfags.

Oh the clever wit of the hater!

Oh wait, they already did that with the 4S.

Nope. Some people did upgrade, yes, but Apple had a lot more new sales. I never got a 4s because it was a minor upgrade. And now the iPhone 5 is an upgrade over the 4s, but not very large... however it is a big jump over the iPhone 4. And that's what is really most important because most people have two year contracts. For the iPhone 4 (and older) iPhone owners, the iPhone 5 is in fact a big deal.