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Comment by nlitened | Hacker News Reader

Airliners? Just give me a damn iPhone that reliably lasts a full day of work.

They could have made it years ago, but in advertising dominated by design, being thin wins over battery life any day.

Plenty of people would choose a fatter phone. Phones are thinner than wallets. I always assumed it was discharge heat surface. Phones are hotter than wallets.

Plenty of people would choose a thicker phone with better battery life if given the choice but companies have long fought to use it as a marketing feature and don’t want to draw attention to the compromise.

The batteries themselves only dissipate heat relative to the charge/discharge rate/current but the total capacity would not change that.

Everytime a company releases a big battery phone onto the market it fails to sell at significant volumes.

Some people want huge battery phones, but most don't, consumers have been voting their wallets for over a decade now.

When have you ever gone to get your phone replaced and have them ask you "do you want the model with the long battery life or the model that's thin?" The failure of niche competitors most people have never heard of is not consumers voting with their wallet, it is anti-competitive behavior entrenching established players.

Motorola has spent years trying selling phones with large, 5000mAh batteries, with no success.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/02/motorolas-2019-cheap... includes-a-5000mah-battery-option/

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/04/the-2020-moto-g-goes...

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/01/motorola-shovels-the...

Here is HTC trying to sell a phone with a large battery

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/06/htc-still-makes-smar...

Right now ASUS will happily sell you a phone with a very large battery

https://www.asus.com/mobile/phones/rog-phone/filter?Series=R...

Motorola will sell you a 2022 model with a 5000mAh battery

https://www.motorola.com/us/smartphones-moto-g-power-gen-3/p...

But, want to know a secret?

If you want almost any smartphone to have a battery life of 5+ days, don't install any chat or social media apps, and turn off background email syncing. For that matter, turn off all background data transfers.

Problem solved.

Because it isn't hardware that is at fault, it is software. Batteries have actually been getting bigger and bigger, the iPhone 6 everyone loves from 8 years ago had a battery that was under 2000mAh.

Here is a graph of iPhone battery sizes:

https://9to5mac.com/2022/12/29/iphone-battery-mah-capacity-l...

Batteries have been getting bigger, as have screens, and the software demands put on devices.

It isn't some conspiracy or market failure.

For what it's worth, my wife was annoyed by this same thing and just bought a battery case for her iPhone, made feasible by the phone's thinness.

Honestly I'd prefer a fatter phone. The dimensions of the early generation smartphones were in my opinion ideal, they fit in the hand well, it was easy to reach the whole screen with the thumb of the hand holding it, and there was enough meat for it to feel substantial without being heavy. In addition to packing more battery, a deeper phone would also allow better optics for the cameras and more freedom for antenna design. I don't really see the value of a larger screen which would justify giving this all up.

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