The Decline of Battery Life (2021) | Hacker News Reader

The Decline of Battery Life (2021)

brainbaking.com

21 pointsakyuu31 comments

There was definitely a period of (at least subjective) declining battery life in the 2010s but IMO things are shifting the other way. Some devices these days have much improved battery life over what came before, like Apple silicon, the Steam Deck, and most flagship phones. They're not always an order of magnitude better than the past, but better enough to unluck many use cases (doing a long work session away from a charger, being able to game for several hours anywhere, and not worrying about having to charge my phone until I get home, respectively).

If I had to describe it loosely, we've had 3 "eras" of battery-powered computing:

  - Relatively simple devices (like the Gameboy) that lasted forever, because they just didn't do much
  - Full-featured personal computing finally becoming "viable" on mobile devices, but with a clear cost (I remember <1 hour battery life laptops)
  - More power-efficient HW and kinda-sorta-maybe-starting-to-be optimized SW that makes full-fat mobile computing much more bearable

They really can't game for several hours though. I have an m series. If you actually are hitting the cpu the battery life is basically the same as a laptop from 10 years ago in that situation where you are bound to your charger or its dead in 2 hours. The efficiencies of this stack come from it being able to throw things onto the e cores. Most (all?) games are not written in a way to benefit from that paradigm, they might still be hammering a single cpu.

To be clear, I meant on the Steam Deck (and of course it depends on the game).

Gaming is a special case imo, and more affected by the additional power drawn for the GPU. For CPU bound apps, there's still a night and day difference between new apple silicon vs the previous generation of x64 processors. I've used a laptop to DJ shows for several years, always requiring AC power for anything longer than an hour. With my m1 macbook, I've DJ'd 6+ hours with no power adapter, also powering hardware over USB. It's literally a 4x improvement over my previous i5 setup.

Most of the games I play are CPU heavy incidentally, eu4 etc. I will say the biggest difference is the computer does not get very hot and the fans only spool up to 2500 rpm or so (out of their max of 6000rpm), but eu4 on full tilt will still drain the battery like it has a leak in about 2 hours or so. It isn't a very intensive game but it is one that has a speed setting where the max setting is basically "as fast as the cpu can compute." It does run noticeably faster at the max speed setting on this cpu (single core game, as expected going from 2.5ghz to 4.05ghz per core) but I don't think the battery life differences are significant. Especially considering the health of this battery compared to my 2012 intel computer (which I eventually replaced the battery for).

Outside of that the computer is good for probably 6 or 8 hours of my usual use case (ssh to remote server, a couple browser tabs, mac mail client open). I think the screen is a big power suck and I tend to find that autobrightness is putting it on max brightness setting even in an indoor room (like right now in fact). When I replaced the battery on the intel mac I was good for about 5 hours but I had to put the screen brightness on a minimal setting.

2 hours is a huge improvement vs old gaming consoles. Anyone remember changing batts every half hour?

> But as a gamer, or even as an end user of any embedded piece of hardware, the trend towards shorter battery lives of devices is definitely visible.

No it isn't.

Also, apples to apples isn't even close. Even just the gameboy vs gameboy color ignores that they used different batteries. Also rechargable vs not.

I had a Gameboy and the move to rechargable batteries is a GOD send. I don't need battery-life as much as I needed to not be spending $$$ to play my games.

The Game Gear, Atari Lynx, and TurboExpress all got around 4 hours of battery life and burned through 6 AA batteries.

And missing plenty of others too (e.g., WonderSwan, Neo Geo Pocket). And the site's graph even shows improvements during the DS era versus the decade earlier. And it also ignores the more hybrid nature of certain more recent consoles like the Switch versus handheld-only ones.

Wonderswan had fantastic battery life on a single battery. 20 hours or so if I remember correctly.

4 hours on TurboExpress may be pushing it. I think it's more like 3hrs+. There is no disappointment though as any kid should be amazed that getting that kind of graphics (one and only full current gen console -- none of the 2 older gens made it) into a 2 gameboy sized system for 3+ hrs is quite impressive.

Well, first this should be marked as (2021).

The rest is just a bunch of BS anecdata that definitely does not tell the story the author wants it to tell. The chart is sorted by battery life rather than date which really muddies the picture. Looking at the dates I don't see "the decline of battery life" but rather "battery life is highly variable but devices are getting more efficient as they get more powerful".

Progress in the last 4 years (through mid-2025) shows this post has aged poorly even if the premise had been supported by the data. Many handhelds gaming devices get over 6 hours continuous play, and several like the Odin 2 have larger batteries and can get 10-12 hours easily. And they can be recharged from typical USB chargers.

Honestly I feel like a lot of the “battery life is worse now” talk kind of misses something important. The way we use our devices has completely changed. Back then we used them in short focused bursts. Now we want our phones and laptops to stay connected all the time, keep background apps running, drive high refresh screens, and even run AI features locally. That’s a big shift in expectations. So maybe battery life didn’t actually get worse. Maybe we’re just expecting way more from our devices than we used to, and we don’t always think about what that really costs.

I believe the PS Vita only got about 6~7 hours of gaming time per charge, but it held charge while sleeping/powered off better than any portable electronic I've ever owned (which to me is a more valuable quality than total battery life).

OTOH I remember my DS Lite being surprisingly terrible about preserving the battery with the lid closed on "sleep." It wasn't much of a sleep state as it were, you got maybe a day in that state which wasn't all that much different than its active battery life in general. At least the games would boot very fast so there wasn't all that much friction unless it was the sort of game that wouldn't let you save. A chip like an r4 was a huge boon in that regard as you could "save" state at any point and have that write to the microsd and then fully power down and reboot right back in where you left it.

> a 4:3 LCD screen (the same as a PSP)

I assume this is a typo for 4.3", because PSP is definitely 16:9 and photos of the Evercade look to be as well.

As an aside, I do not remember Game Boy lasting 25 hours on 4 AA batteries. They were 4-6 hours AT BEST for me, and I played on it quite a lot. But maybe my memory is hazy.

Did you always play with a light? 4-6 hours is closer to GameGear territory.

The Gameboy Pocket certainly had the shortest battery life of the GB/Pocket/Color trio due to using 2 AAA batteries. My experience with the original is that the batteries last a long time.

It takes real effort to write code that is mindful of power draw.

Writing code that is mindful of power draw is the same as writing fast code.

Race to yield to the os as soon as you can.

Minimize data movement. Use efficient algorithms. Be mindful of abstraction overhead, etc.

And if the platform you’re working with gives you the means to easily offload appropriate tasks to increasingly-ubiquitous efficiency cores, it’s probably a good idea to do so. Your app will feel more responsive as a side effect since the main thread and P-cores won’t be as busy.

In my experience, it can be quite a struggle to achieve this at one's day job, who often does not like to allocate time for such things.

I wish the graph was sorted by release date.

ChatGPT to the rescue

https://imgur.com/SzbwCEb

>Power for battery life—a fair trade-off? I’m not so sure.

A GameBoy from 1989 is highly likely to still function.

If you do not like the battery life of new products, continue to use the old ones.

There is no tradeoff.

We can write modern products like this. It is a lot fun and it feels really good afterwards.

Will people buy them?

In the 80s you had to get long battery life because you were generally throwing the batteries away and shoving in new ones. Now with rechargeables you just plug in the cord and you can both play and recharge at the same time. It's not a big expensive hassle.

Do customers want more features/graphics or more battery life?

Probably depends on the customers and the products. I'm not into gaming handhelds, but for my other battery-powered electronics, battery life is probably the most important characteristic. Charging things is a real hassle, and the less I have to do it, the better. Particularly when so many of these things don't have user-replaceable batteries.

But I know there are others who prioritize other aspects over battery life.

It’s all about diminishing returns.

I’d argue that we’re deep into that territory with graphics and have been for at least a decade now. Yes newer games look better, but the different isn’t radical like it is when comparing ~2005 games to their ~2015 counterparts, and outside of high settings junkies most people would be perfectly happy with 2015-2020 graphics for the foreseeable future.

Battery life on the other hand is nowhere near the point of diminishing returns for many devices. If Apple released an iPhone that got a week of real world battery life for example, it’d be an instant hit. I’d personally love for gaming handhelds to have that kind of just so they never need to be plugged in while used and I rarely have to think about recharging.

Charging stuff is very annoying if you are not just always home; I am on the go mostly and you'd be surprised how few places allow you to charge stuff. Also, there is a lot of improvement possible on all optimisation, but most people are; if it works somewhat, ship it. I can only hope now for a future where I can tell an AI 'here is a working app, optimise the crap out of it, thanks'.

If its been used its pretty clapped out at this point. The glue on my gameboy lcd panel failed which required frequent regluing whenever that old dab of superglue would also eventually fail. I bet if I took it out of the drawer right now it would be loose again and need another dust off and glue job. The buttons also go. My gameboy color is sadly basically unplayable because the buttons aren't very responsive anymore. I'm sure that is coming for my ds as well. My switch joycons are already shot. None of my original game cube controllers really work anymore and the system itself has stopped reading disks (thankfully new oem controllers are still built for that for the japan competitive smash market at least).

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