Geoffrey A Fowler, Washington Post:
If you recently bought a new flagship phone, chances are its battery life is actually worse than an older model.
For the last few weeks, I’ve been performing the same battery test over and over again on 13 phones. With a few notable exceptions, this year’s top models underperformed last year’s. The new iPhone XS died 21 minutes earlier than last year’s iPhone X. Google’s Pixel 3 lasted nearly an hour and a half less than its Pixel 2.
Phone makers tout all sorts of tricks to boost battery life, including more-efficient processors, low-power modes and artificial intelligence to manage app drain. Yet my results, and tests by other reviewers I spoke with, reveal an open secret in the industry: the lithium-ion batteries in smartphones are hitting an inflection point where they simply can’t keep up.
In a nutshell, the case being made here is that battery efficiency is growing very slowly, while screen technology (and other) power draw is growing somewhat faster than that.
Yes, but aren’t the batteries on this year’s iPhones smaller, because of the increased efficiency? I thought I had read that.
Strange, on a few travel days since getting the XS Max, I didn’t bother to charge it during the day and still had power to spare that night when I went to bed at my destination.
I’ve always had to give my iPhone (using iPhones since 2007) a bit of a boost to make it through all the flights and connections and shuttles of a busy day of travel. For years I’ve kept a battery and charging cable in my bag to keep it topped off so it wouldn’t run out. I’m quite certain i use the Max for quite a bit more now than any time before with all the photos i’m taking with its amazing camera!
Perhaps it’s just that i’m holding it right.
One thing the last year seems to have finally taught people with a lick of sense is that batteries decay over time. I don’t think Apple ever really built battery lives for the day it comes off the shelf; they built it for a few months down the line. And now people know if things get really bad they can replace the battery. It’s not that anyone likes that, but it gives Apple a spot to cave to the various competing pressures they just didn’t have before.
So a few minutes shorter isn’t that much of a surprise to me. For example, according to The Washington Posts’s own data the iPhone 8 Plus ran for 10:10 and the iPhone XS Max ran for 10:06. Four minutes. Time to rip clothing and cover ourselves in ash! (To be fair, the X to XS is 20 minutes.)