Let’s face it, battery life sucks on everything. Your phone can’t last till 6pm on a charge. You can’t work all day on your laptop without seeing the low battery indicator pop up 2 hours before your shift ends. You can’t play your Nintendo Switch or 3DS through an entire airline flight. The unifying feature of literally every smart device we rely on today, is the battery life sucks; but it wasn’t always this way.
Let’s go back in time to the 90’s and early 00’s.
Around the turn of the millenia, most devices had vastly superior battery life, with the exception of laptops of course. I had an old Sony Walkman CD player, that could play MP3’s off a CD-R disc, using a single AA battery, and do so for 40 hours at a time. Get a modern Sony Walkman hi-fi player, and you’re lucky to get 10 hours. Cellphones? Even worse! Some older Nokia devices could go a week or so on a single charge, and now I’m occasionally eyeballing the charger by noon.
To be fair though, we have drastically changed how we use use smart devices. They have ever more radios, sensors, larger screens, more powerful processors, etc. We do more work than ever before on our smart devices. To make up for this fact, battery sizes and capacities have grown tremendously. My first Blackberry had an 800mah battery or so. My Galaxy S8 has a 3000mah battery. Clearly there has been an understanding that batteries needed to grow, but why have we come to accept poor battery life? Battery life has gotten worse with time on these devices, not better.
Now let’s step back and take a look at laptops again. Here I was just complaining about laptop battery life, but when you look at the trends, it’s the ONLY device category that has consistently improved over time. Early laptops might only get 1-2 hours of battery life at best. The first laptops didn’t even have batteries at all. After a few years or so, we had moved up to 4 hour battery life, then 6 hours, and now we’re finally seeing devices than can make it through a work day, if just barely. Laptop manufacturers will claim ludicrous 20+ hour battery life (looking at you Dell and Microsoft), but they at least truly can be considered all-day devices. Laptops are the only product category I can think of that has seen consistent improvement and refinement over the years.
So what happened to phones?
Phones, much like laptops, are relied upon by millions of people to do research, communicate with friends, family and colleagues, play games, provide news, and connect us with the world around us. Your phone is the most important device you own. It’s not the best at anything, but it’s the device you always have with you. With a device as important as the phone, battery life ought to be a priority, not an afterthought. I use a Mophie battery case on my Galaxy S8 for those days when I’m harder than usual on my phone, and it doubles the capacity with an additional 3000mah, and yet is still no thicker than most of my older smartphones from a decade earlier.
There has been a strange obsession with fashion, thinness, and appearances, rather than actual usability in phones these days (that’s another post entirely). We have notches in screens, bad fingerprint sensor placement, or no fingerprint sensor at all no less. We’ve got uber-fragile all-glass phones designed to explode on the first drop, and impossible to repair devices that are made entirely of glue. It’s time for device manufacturers to follow the lead of the PC market and focus on what matters most: battery life.
All my other complaints are less important. A device with a dead battery is literally a brick. A $1000 brick, if you’re an iPhone owner…
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