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Comment by Shekelphile | Hacker News Reader

Never seen this claimed, but apple absolute does trounce qualcomm and everyone else in terms of perf/w. iPhones with 3300mah batteries are getting longer sot than android flagships with 5000mah (and greater) batteries. The state of the android ecosystem is a complete joke and has been for years.

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Of course they don't, it is simply not possible, outside of some awful models maybe. For instance in the current gen, iPhone 15 Pro with 3300 mAh gets 86 score at GSMArena, and S23 Ultra with 5000 mAh gets 126. A dramatic difference. S23 non-plus, which is a better opponent to 15 Pro as they are the same size, has 3900 mAh and scores 101 at that site. So all is quite proportional to the battery size. Or we can throw in for comparison newest Sony 5 5, with the same 6.1" form factor and 5000 mAh battery (shame on all other vendors, not fitting such batteries in flagship phones), it has a score of 130!

So, anyway, iPhone has a just a little bit better optimizations in some specific usage modes and that difference is mostly long gone. Today if we see 3300 battery in a phone it will definitely have a shitty autonomy.

Taking those scores on GSMArena at face value is bullshit (if anyone is wondering, that's 86h and 126h on their 'endurance rating').

The S23 Ultra only gets 126h 'endurance' because it can do 40 hours of phone calls, a lot more than the iPhone. How many phone calls do you make? It has worse battery life for things you actually do on a phone.

From their data, S23 5000mah vs iPhone 15 3300mah:

- games: 8h44m vs 8h16m

- video playback: 15h47m x 18h20m

- web browsing: 10h51m x 11h43m

Comparing against the iPhone 15 Max (still a smaller battery at 4400mah) it's a lot worse.

Max is better, but non-Max is bad. Call duration metric is actually good and useful. For example new Pixel 8 and 8 Pro have crap call score. What does it mean in real life - some people say that their pixel 8 has ok autonomy but after some investigation they admit that they use it at home/work on wifi. And then people using it on a cell network, especially in the bad reception zone, report atrocious life time, due to bad modem or something in that area. So it is important metric too.

Basically optimizations of the iphones can compensate maybe a few hundreds of mAh, but not 2000, that's not possible.

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