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Comment by sureIy | Hacker News Reader

Every tool has a correct way to be used. You can’t tell me I shouldn’t slide my electric toothbrush from side to side “because of market forces”.

Battery technology just isn’t there. Bigger battery means heavier device. Duracell made a smartphone with a huge-ass multiday battery… that the market did not ask for. It has to be a compromise unfortunately.

As for the Touch Bar I don’t really understand the hate for it. The execution was subpar but I miss its ability to autofill forms just like on the iPhone and generally using the autocomplete UI the same way. There’s no replacement now.

As for the batteries, I hope they’re eventually forced to fold on that issue, but it will come at the expense of design, size and weight. Again a compromise.

The reception one you’re right.

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No I still don’t understand the Apple Watch battery issue.

I have a xaiomi mi band 9. The body to screen ratio is roughly the same as the Apple Watch. It does HR tracking, workouts, has excellent 1000 night brightness, weather, notifications etc. I get about 15 days from a charge. They say I can get 21. But either way. I understand the Apple Watch is running better hardware and more things in the background, but there’s also significantly more space in the watch for battery. It might be doing more but a factor of 15x is a crazy differential.

Comparing Apple Watch to Mi Band makes no sense. Apple Watch is more of a microcomputer than a cheap smart band. It would be better to compare it to something like Garmin Fenix 7X that lasts you almost 40 days with 120 hours in GPS mode and does much more than a Mi Band.

Calling it a "microcomputer" is meaningless.

What is it doing? Monitoring some sensors, communicating with a phone via bluetooth, running a screen.

It's miniaturized iPhone as it can be used without phone to make calls, receive messages, stream music etc. as it has e-SIM capabilities. It runs Game Boy Color games which is pretty cool even if not very useful.

Mi bands are low powered, low-feature and fairly miserable experiences if you interact much with the screen. They are great at no-effort tracking of fitness metrics and providing basic information.

Apple Watches are designed for much more interaction and variety of capability.

It can be hard to understand this if you haven’t used an Apple Watch.

You’re misinformed about the space for substantial additional battery. Look at any teardown to see the compact component fitting.

Your mi band is a great device; just be realistic about the tradeoffs. Other devices don’t have to suck for yours to be good.

(I’ve owned multiple Xiaomi and Apple devices.)

> As for the Touch Bar I don’t really understand the hate for it

You don't understand why people wouldn't like something that takes away what they used regularly (function keys) and gave them something that necessitated looking away from their screen in order to even use and provided extremely limited use cases?

Seems pretty easy to understand

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