It’s probably also a matter of hardware limitation. If you want a bigger battery, you’d probably have to give up something else; it’s a trade-off. So those wanting a bigger battery - what other aspect of the phone would you prefer to give up or have reduced? Thinness/lightness? Camera? Haptic engine? Structural durability?
A fair question. For me I would compromise on thinness and lightness. Not to a crazy extent, everyone has their own sweet spot and of course that’s one of Apple’s problems. With 200+ million customers a year it’s not going to hit everyone’s sweet spot unless it releases millions of models and in some cases it will be quite far adrift from an appreciable number of people’s sweet spots.
I just wish one year they would come out at the key note and say:
"There is absolutely nothing new on this years phones other than we made the battery last twice as long."
I agree with that. Current indications seem to be a 20-25% performance increase with the A14 and as per the specs on Apple’s web site 0% battery increase (on the Pro Max which is the one I care about). I said on another thread that I would have been way, way more excited if this year Apple had delivered 25% battery life increase and 0% performance increase rather than the 25% performance increase and 0% battery life increase that we’re actually getting.
Maybe next year Apple can come out with an iPhone 13 Battery Edition...it can be a half inch thick and weigh 12 ounces, for those who don't care how thick or heavy their phone is. Seriously though, if you don't care about thickness or weight why don't you just use one of those battery cases? At least you have the option. You obviously don't have the option to go thinner/lighter.
As mentioned it’s about sweet spots and yes, battery cases add battery capacity but in a very inefficient way given that the extra thickness tends to be spread over about 2/3rds rather than the whole area of the device which makes the maximum thickness more than it might otherwise be and there are multiple layers of extra casing that wouldn’t be necessary if the battery inside the device was simply made bigger.
I do appreciate that not everyone is like me and that they want thinner and lighter. What I want takes those people in the wrong direction in the same way that what they want takes me in the wrong direction. Maybe one possible solution might be to, as well as releasing the regular lineup of iPhones also release a few XL (eXtra (battery) Life) variants, probably not for everything but maybe just offer Pro & Pro Max in slim 7.something mm thickness and XLnversions at maybe something in the 8.6 (11 Pro thickness) to 8.9mm (which would still be thinner than iPhone 4’s 9.5 mm thickness). I would buy a Pro Max XL in a heartbeat and pay a reasonable premium to get it. I wish Apple would at least try that for one year to see how it’s customer base splits between the 2 options. It’s worth remembering that for quite a long time Apple insisted that one screen size fitted everyone.
If Apple was ever to succumb to the calls (admittedly not from everyone) for reverse charging that makes internal battery capacity more important. Also, if Apple does go totally connector-less in 2021 or 2022 as has been rumoured in a few places then getting to multi-day battery life for average (not heavy) users making them able to go on weekend or ideally long weekend trips without needing to pack a wireless charger would be valuable too.
Of course just maybe one day some new battery technology will take this whole dilemma away. We’ve had innovation after innovation in the lab offering to double or even triple charge density for batteries but so far every one has either been too expensive, impractical to produce in volume, not able to sustain enough charge-discharge cycles, or not really practical in some other way. Hopefully eventually something will make it to market at an affordable price and change the whole equation but until that happens I suspect that this tension between those wanting lighter and thinner and those wanting more battery life will continue.
