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Comment by dfabulich | Hacker News Reader

Check out the battery life!

> iPhone 16e has the best battery life ever on a 6.1-inch iPhone, lasting up to six hours longer than iPhone 11 and up to 12 hours longer than all generations of iPhone SE.

Their page comparing models claims the new 16e gets "26 hours video playback."

  iPhone 16e: 26 hours
  iPhone 16:  22 hours
  iPhone 15:  20 hours
  iPhone 14:  20 hours
  iPhone 13:  19 hours
  iPhone 12:  17 hours
  iPhone 11:  17 hours

The new battery life seems to be mostly due to their new Apple C1 cellular modem, replacing the Qualcomm modems in earlier models.

> Expanding the benefits of Apple silicon, C1 is the first modem designed by Apple and the most power-efficient modem ever on an iPhone, delivering fast and reliable 5G cellular connectivity. Apple silicon — including C1 — the all-new internal design, and the advanced power management of iOS 18 all contribute to extraordinary battery life.

View on HN

I'm sure the modem contributes, but IMO the battery life is probably mostly from just having a bigger battery due to the new internal design (and maybe chemistry changes). The new design moves the frame's structure into the middle of the sandwich, making it more rigid and allowing them to make the frame thinner to pack in more battery.

Lots of people are mad about losing magsafe but in magsafe phones the magnets sit flush with the frame in a huge circular cutout just below the back glass. The hole weakens the frame so the frame has to be thicker because of it.

I don't think there is really a world where this phone gets 6 more hours of battery life while still having magsafe and fitting into the existing shape of the iPhone 14.

https://youtu.be/mFuyX1XgJFg?t=227

Sounds reasonable, but why can't we just compare it, the mAh of this phone's battery is a secret or something?

> the mAh of this phone's battery is a secret or something

It can easily be measured from the time required to fully charge the phone (when turned off), and continuously monitoring the power it draws from the charger.

I'm pretty sure it isn't even that complicated. Reviewers just open it up and just look at the battery.

The exact mAh is only secret until the first non-Apple person who wants to know gets one.

Apple generally doesn't publish their battery specs so we'll have to wait for it to get into reviewers hands

I don’t understand—if the frame is in the middle why can’t the MagSafe go on the outside?

It can. You can get a case that simply adds the MagSafe(/Qi2) alignment magnets and then you've got a MagSafe device (albeit limited to 7.5W charging)

It could, but as it is all the components are directly against the back glass. The magnets have thickness so the phone would have to be thicker or the battery would have to be thinner for everything to fit.

> "I'm sure the modem contributes, but IMO the battery life is probably mostly from just having a bigger battery"

According to reports, the 16e has a slightly smaller battery than the iPhone 16. 3279 mAh in the 16e vs. 3561 mAh in the 16.

Though, the youtube commercial states new internal design “optimized for new battery”.

IMO somebody just made that up based on it sharing the outer dimensions of the iPhone 14 which also happens to have exactly 3279 mAh. I can't really figure out what "larger battery" could mean in their release video if it isn't larger than at least the 14 if not the 16.

I can’t understand how someone can say with certainty the capacity down to a single digit (3279).

There would be manufacturing differences that would induce at least some variation from phone-to-phone.

It is the capacity published by Apple. Apparently some regulatory bodies [1] require that information.

[1] https://www.mysmartprice.com/gear/mobiles/mobiles-news/apple...

But it is an interesting question: What is the manufacturing tolerance? Naively I had assumed that it's much smaller than a watt-hour. But that's based on ~no knowledge :D

You can still have a specific "normal"/expected capacity, even if you're producing them +-20 mWh.

Surely the battery is over-provisioned to be able to deliver the stated spec for at least some warranty period fraction?

Well it could be that the capacity is 3200-3349, and they publish the number that is in the center of confidence interval. Rounding up would be received badly, and rounding down suggests it has less capacity than it really does (on average)

It’s a nominal capacity that’s printed on the battery, and encoded into its firmware. In practice, batteries tend to exceed this nominal capacity when they’re brand new which is why you see new batteries stay on 100% charge for a long time. As it ages, the true capacity will degrade and eventually falls below the nominal capacity.

The iPhone 16e is based on the iPhone 14 chassis, with various internal hardware components swapped out. Just like the previous iPhone SE was based on the iPhone 8. So I guess there was an assumption that maybe it uses the same battery as the 14.

But given that the cameras got swapped out for a single lens, the MagSafe magnets were removed, etc, it’s certainly conceivable that they freed up space internally for a larger battery in the 16e!

With almost everyone using a case, magsafe doesn’t really need to be in the phone, it would probably be fine if it’s just in the case.

A lot of cases pass through the MagSafe. I personally charge almost exclusively via MagSafe desk and night stands. My phone is in a case.

I found that this heats up the battery thus shortening its lifespan for no good reason if a cable is available.

Its been a long slog for Apple, they have been working on this since 2018, and they had to keep extending its supply agreements with Qualcomm...

"Inside Apple’s Spectacular Failure to Build a Key Part for Its New iPhones"

>The 2018 marching orders from Apple Chief Executive Tim Cook to design and build a modem chip—a part that connects iPhones to wireless carriers—led to the hiring of thousands of engineers. The goal was to sever Apple’s grudging dependence on Qualcomm, a longtime chip supplier that dominates the modem market. The obstacles to finishing the chip were largely of Apple’s own making, according to former company engineers and executives familiar with the project. Apple had planned to have its modem chip ready to use in the new iPhone models. But tests late last year found the chip was too slow and prone to overheating. Its circuit board was so big it would take up half an iPhone, making it unusable.

https://kanebridgenews.com/inside-apples-spectacular-failure... [2023]

Apple managed to design its own state-of-the-art CPUs. I wouldn't have imagined that designing its own modem would be such a difficult challenge?

Except making a decent modem is indeed harder than start of art CPU. People loves to shit on Qualcomm but dont appreciate that amount of work involved.

s/work/patent blackmail/g

I would buy that a decent modem is harder than many CPU designs, maybe even most. But harder than state-of-the-art? Surely not, have you seen the complexity?

And even CPUs (esp state of art) have to worry about radio effects, as in avoiding internally and across chipset.

State of the art CPUs aren't fundamentally different to more basic CPUs. They just have fancier microarchitectures, better branch predictors, more cache, etc.

Easy to believe radios would be an order of magnitude harder, what with the ancient proprietary standards and actual physical radio stuff. (The closest CPUs get is serdes and in my experience those are bought in from Synopsys et al.)

I never worked on radio modems, but I've worked on wireline modems: the issue is not the math or the standard algorithms, it's making it interoperable with everything that's existing out there and all environment conditions while working around bugs of other implementations.

It is a ridiculous amount of work and if you're new to the business, it takes a long time just to be build the lab test suite. And you need to support not just the latest and greatest protocols but also legacy ones. The operators have their own say and test labs as well and they all have slightly different setups and requirements.

> And even CPUs (esp state of art) have to worry about radio effects, as in avoiding internally and across chipset.

Radio effect are rarely an issue with regular chips. Crosstalk within a chip only happens between wires that are within hundreds of nanometers separated from each other.

> Radio effect are rarely an issue with regular chips.

I'm an amateur, so welcome correction with this, but I'm also not convinced. For one example, ref this RFI mitigation with Intel's gen 12 processors: https://edc.intel.com/content/www/cn/zh/design/ipla/software...

I meant RF impact on the internal functioning of the chip, not the other way around. EMI has always been a thing, it's not specific to state of the art CPUs.

The hard part is not the modem design per se.

The hard part is designing a good modem while also unambiguously working around all the Qualcomm patents in all the jurisdictions that have iPhone, which is all of them.

Because if you don’t do that, you’re still paying Qualcomm which defeats an important purpose of making your own modem.

Apple is most probably paying Qualcomm for these technologies. They think however that it is commercially beneficial to have their own implementation.

All those patents are standards-essential, which means Qualcomm (and anyone else involved in the standardization process for cellular networks) has to license them under "FRAND[0]" terms, which at least for this scenario means "for the same price we'd license them to Samsung or Intel[1]". It also means that design-arounds are not possible; if you design a different technology from the one Qualcomm owns, you're not speaking 5G anymore. That's why we have these legal rules on standards-essential patents.

[0] Fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory. Each one of those words has a funny legal definition separate from whatever English you're thinking of.

[1] Who, incidentally, sold Apple the modem division that made the C1, because Intel is nothing but a bottomless pit of bad management decisions

I’ll admit with not being up to speed here, my information is actually fairly old, but Qualcomm is famous for skirting its FRAND obligations and as far as I know “no license, no chips” is still de rigor. https://www.sunsteinlaw.com/publications/no-license-no-chips...

In 2025 it is time to give credit for Apple's PR spreading whole misinformation online during and after the trial. Macrumours and 9to5mac loves to repeat those narrative about Apple no longer has to pay any patent fees when they make their own modem.

As the reply below, Apple still has to pay its SEP. Given Apple has its current deal with Qualcomm until 2027 with time to extend further we likely won't know the full details. Previously it was 5% of Wholesale price for all Qualcomm patents whether they are SEP, wireless or not. With a cap or maximum $20 per smartphone meaning the Pro range don't have to pay a lot more. And rebate towards the modem Apple purchase. The reality after deducting rebate Apple was paying closer to 5%. For reference Ericsson ask for 3% on 5G SEP, previous Cory ruling suggest reality was closer to 2%.

Modems are harder to get right than CPUs. A CPU needs to do math and work with digital data lines. A modem needs to talk to the mobile network, using radios, and a bunch of standards that were built up since the 90s.

Tacking on: the devil in a modern baseband is in the firmware. The analog domain stuff is generally handled by increasingly commoditized RF frontends outside of the baseband processor, and then either clean analog IQ or more recently, even digital samples (DAC and ADC moved to frontend) are sent to the baseband processor.

A baseband is a really fancy specialized SDR. Most are based on arcane VLIW DSP architectures like Qualcomm’s Hexagon or Samsung Marconi - you’ll usually have several DSPs handling the different physical layer channels, and then some coordinating DSPs doing L1 channel mixing and timing (in 4G and 5G, various logical and transport channels are muxed into the same physical channels).

Then a set of higher level processor cores (usually referred to as CP, sometimes still a DSP but often a general purpose application processor like ARM) will handle the MAC and above. There will be occasional fixed function blocks for some common protocol functions, but generally it’s less “analog magic” in the way people think when they hear “radio” and more “DSP magic.”

If you look at the math it's not even that complicated. Basic statistical inference and information theory.

Seems like the difficult part is doing that effectively while avoiding IP issues -- patents on software and math have entrenched Qualcomm's dominance.

Imagine if all of the IP for ML or AI were held by a single company that got the regulating body (ITU/3GPP) to require their use. Makes a mockery of FRAND terms.

Patents are the main thing here.

Building a cellular modem, complete with working protocol stack, entirely in software has been done as a 1 person open source project.

Making a production -ready modem is clearly more complex, but far from hard for a company with the resources of Apple.

However, doing so whilst not violating any of qualcomms huge array of patents is the real challenge.

I'm willing to bet that the release date of this phone probably closely aligns with the expiry date of a patent they couldn't work around.

Patents are the dumbest thing on the planet.

Where do you draw the line for protection of innovative ideas?

There might be someone in government right now willing to flush obvious software patents

It is extremely hard to design a modem like this. Just the ADCs and DACs you need are like 2-3 year development and 1-2 year testing before going into production.

Also patents. Everything in the cell modem world is horribly encumbered by patents -- many of which I believe Qualcomm owns.

CPUs can be easily developed in an ecosystem where annual updates and the ability to end-of-life hardware older than a decade are the norm. Cellular network opereators share none of those properties with Apple, and so any new modem chip designed to interoperate with carriers would necessarily be an order of magnitude more difficult to implement than an CPU that only needs to interoperate with Xcode would be.

The original M-series chip team left years ago, or at least the major drivers. Also: radios are hard, super hard.

I wouldn't expect these initial baseband implementations to be fantastic software wise.

That's probably why it's in a weird release between 16 and 17.

The final round of beta-testing has been assigned to Apple's economy-class customers.

Someone has to be first.

Their CPU is based on ARM IP, it’s not like they designed it from the ground up. The modem they might have had to? Also I guess a big challenge are all the patents you need to be aware of and find ways to license or circumvent, not sure if that’s worse for modems but it seems all wireless / cellular technology is riddled with patents (not saying CPUs aren’t but again ARM is probably taking care of some of that for Apple).

They bought intel’s entire modem unit, so it’s not a ground up design, but maybe that makes it worse… who knows what was causing intel to not be competitive in that space…

No, that's not how the Apple Silicon works - it was at the very start, but the processor cores haven't been based on Arm IP since the A6, since then the Arm designed cores were replaced with fully custom cores that are just compatible with the Arm instruction set.

Same with the GPU except that was later on - it was a licensed PowerVR IP until Apple started using their own custom GPU from the A11.

> Their CPU is based on ARM IP, it’s not like they designed it from the ground up.

It's the opposite, AArch64 was designed by ARM in order to produce their CPUs.

Their first CPU was launched in 2010, and development likely began in 2006-2007. The M1 launched to much fanfare in 2020.

In fairness, Apple started by licensing the ARM core which gave them a base to work from. The modem is fantastically harder unless you can license an existing design that's not qualcomm.

They bought out Intel's modem business (giving them something like to work from), afaik.

One difficult I remember reading is: they can't always do things an obvious way someone else did because... patents.

Which is ironic, considering that patents are supposed to be non-obvious.

And similarly, copyright was supposed to "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts", but here we are

We're talking about a company that took another one to court because both of their products had rounded corners.

The CPU/SOC operates independently with limited protocols (such as PCIe, NVMe, etc.). In contrast, a baseband processor must communicate with various base stations and core networks, requiring precise timing, physical signal alignment, and correct message formats. Even though the 3GPP defines mobile network standards, achieving full compatibility remains extremely challenging.

When you're apple, you can just be mostly compliant, and the worlds mobile networks will have to work around your bugs.

Nobody will use a phone company that doesn't work with iPhones.

Not necessarily. People will notice if it doesn’t work as well as their last iPhone.

A lot of the mobile networks use off the shelf hardware. That was one of the reasons Huawei was painful to remove from global phone networks. If they don't work, they will not work over multiple networks.

If there are reports of iPhones failing to work reliably from Kansas City to Kuala Lumpur then it would be unlikely to be the operators being blamed here.

M chips are ARM so while they designed their particular architecture for it they were still building on some pretty solid foundations.

A modem, well nobody's going to help them build one of those; it'd put them out of business - ARM's business _is_ selling access to its body of work.

I wonder who manufacturers them. Time to sell Qualcomm and buy ???

Partly due to being able to fit a bigger battery with the smaller modem size https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mFuyX1XgJFg

timestamped: https://youtu.be/mFuyX1XgJFg?t=233

It's possible the battery chemistry has also changed. In the last 12-18 months, a bunch of Android phones have gotten large battery capacity upgrades, apparently thanks to silicon-carbon anodes being mature enough for mass production. Presumably Apple is now doing the sam thing.

> In the last 12-18 months, a bunch of Android phones have gotten large battery capacity upgrades

Can you give some examples? I'd like to test one out but I'm not buying the most recent product as a rule.

The OnePlus 13 and Oppo Find X8 both got 10% capacity upgrades over their previous iterations but with the same size/weight. The Honor Magic V2 also has a huge battery despite being a very slim foldable (5,000 mAh, compared to 3,000-3,500 on the ones from Samsung and Google).

Oneplus 13 with lithium-silicon battery tech. This is the new tech which allows for higher capacity at the same size as before.

Do signs point toward Apple adopting a unique, new cell chemistry for what will be their high-volume budget product for the next few years? It would have probably been a marketing line if so, similar to the C1 modem. A bigger battery doesn't imply new tech.

(Yes, the phone expensive now, but these SE-tier phones typically get discounts pretty quickly after release through carriers/non-apple retail; and then a bigger & formal sale price decrease when the next phone generation comes out.)

The overlap of the “cares about battery chemistry” and “purchases the lowest tier device” is probably close to 0

The C1 modem gets a line because Wall Street has seen that expense for a decade now, so this is a “win” for them. Battery chemistry is completely 3rd party, so they’ll claim the battery life improvement

The C1 modem is also not a feature that users care about, other than the increased battery life (that Apple does advertise). In fact, there will be concerns that the modem isn't as good as the existing ones in some edge case.

Putting the new modem into the new "budget" phone reduces expectations so that the impact of any issues will be blunted. Only when all the problems have been ironed out, that will be when the mainstream iPhones will get the new modem.

Yes which is why I explained making the modem a highlight is for Wall Street.

They acquired part of Intel and worked on this for many years. Shareholders want to know what the result of all that money and time was.

Modem has always been a pain point since it's an entire SoC that had to be shielded from the rest of the system. Apple producing their own modem is a giant undertaking.

So the video test is done with the video streaming over cellular data?

Otherwise what would a video playback time spec have to do with the efficiency of the cellular radio?

I am wondering exactly the same. Maybe the standby costs? The chip needs to always have power to be able to receive the radio waves, it uses less power in that way but still quite a bit, I guess.

The surprise is how much power that is. It's either that or misleading marketing. I know Apple struggled to make this modem, so maybe it's still not great when it comes to standby power consumption. Since it's Apple we will only know after quite a bit of independent testing...

Phones maintain a cellular connection even if most data is being transmitted over WiFi at any given moment

Cellular modems are constantly reading and broadcasting messages to the cellular network unless they are explicitly turned off

But they use much more power when they are receiving data.

Sure. But they also use a massive amount of power when they’re out of range so constantly searching for the network

Turning off your modem is second only to turning off your screen if you’re looking to save battery

Not nearly close enough to when they are receiving data, especially video.

When actively receiving data, a cellular modem will use significantly more power than when idle, with the exact amount depending on factors like network strength, data rate, and the specific modem technology, but typically ranging from several hundred milliwatts to a few watts

Sending data with a radio is always much more power intensive than receiving data unless the channel is extremely asymmetric in bandwidth and/or data rate.

In the video, they did say that the C1 is the "most power-efficient modem ever in an iPhone." They also said that they have an "all new internal design for iPhone 16e that has been optimized for a larger battery."

Part of it is certainly the modem, but part of it is also likely to be the larger battery.

I'm really curious to see both how the Apple C1 performs and also how they changed up the internals for a larger battery and how much larger that battery is.

My Nokia 3310 lasted for over a week before recharge in 2000.

But how many hours of video playback?

As many as I do on the smartphone I own in 2025

My iPhone today last for less than a day while I dont watch any video on it, In fact, i barely use it currently, and it still drains batteries in no time. And yes, I disabled most background services and location services and run screen on low brightness - all the popular hacks to reduce battery usage.

How old is your phone/battery? When you say less than a day, do you mean 24 hrs or the period of time you're awake?

iPhone 13 mini, i mean 24 hours

Of course your phone has a short runtime, it both has a small battery and it's 3 years old so the battery's worn out. One of the main reasons why small phones remain a niche is that improvements in battery technology have been far outpaced by improvements in SoCs, so the easiest way to improve a device's battery life vs. the older model is to make it larger so it can fit a bigger battery. Even when it was new, the regular iPhone 13 had a 3220 mAh battery while the 13 mini had a 2400 mAh battery, despite both having the same processor. You end up sacrificing battery life to achieve the small size.

How low the quality bar has gotten! A device with a battery is now considered "worn out" after a measly 3 years?

They never said the device was worn out. The battery is and can be easily replaced.

All batteries degrade when you subject them to 1000 full recharge cycles.

The device is fine but the battery is worn out after some 1000 full discharge/recharge cycles.

If only one could open the back and replace the battery, the thing that has been known to everybody to wear out while the rest of the device is perfectly functional. One could only dream of such advanced technology. Maybe in 10 years.

capitalism breeds innovation!

Lol, indeed! That was a given with the Nokia.

I know you're trying to make a point or something, but Apple or an independent service center will do just that for not much more than the price of the battery.

You can. Or at least Apple can (for which they’ll charge you $80 or so). Sure, you can’t “hot swap” during the day, but if you like the size, it seems well worth the expense to get a new battery installed.

I have found low-battery mode to be very useful. I also have background updates turned off for most apps, but this greatly extends my battery life. When traveling, I turn it on by default at the beginning of the day.

I have an automation that turns it on whenever I take the phone off the charger. You can also set it up with locations. So I have an automation that tweaks a few settings when I get to one of the disney parks here in FL. It's usually keep the screen fairly dim on manual brightness, but set it to auto there. Its really hard to see the screen when it's bright in the great big room.

I think the iphone does a lot more in the background than you might consider initially. Here is an experiment to try. Use your phone as you currently do, but turn on airplane mode when you aren't otherwise using the phone. Leave it on overnight too. You should only lose a few percentage overnight on airplane mode even with an old phone.

> I think the iphone does a lot more in the background than you might consider initially.

I understand that. My point being that 25 year old tech, before the real miniatyrization of circuits and power efficiency mind you, has 7x charge time and yet we are impressed by a few additional hours.

> Here is an experiment to try. Use your phone as you currently do, but turn on airplane mode when you aren't otherwise using the phone. Leave it on overnight too.

Sure but to what benefit?

I already addressed the tweaks i did do in a sibling comment. Putting the phone in airplane mode is no different than having a dead battery in terms of usability.

The difference is passive. Your phone is constantly pooling for both 4g, and 5g signal. Then using that to pool for notifications from apps.

This is stuff your Nokia didn’t do at the same scale. At best some sms at a significantly reduced polling rate.

My apps auto update in the background. Something my Nokia from 2007 didn’t do.

So there are many passively provided features but by definition they are not obvious to you and as such harder to appreciate.

If you have an iPhone: I use low power mode constantly. I have an automation to use it at 75% or less battery.

I get roughly 2 days of battery life without any YouTube usage.

> At best some sms at a significantly reduced polling rate.

SMS was piggybacked onto the control plane messaging. That is why the limit was 160 chars (only space available) and why texts can still work when the cell towers are overloaded.

> I understand that. My point being that 25 year old tech, before the real miniatyrization of circuits and power efficiency mind you, has 7x charge time and yet we are impressed by a few additional hours.

Yes because those phones by comparison do nothing so it’s a meaningless comparison.

It’s like arguing that we shouldn’t be impressed about EV range improvements because the bicycle exists.

> Yes because those phones by comparison do nothing so it’s a meaningless comparison.

We were able to call with them and send messages. On top of that I mostly use browser with my current phone on comparison, while not necessary.

So most people make heavy use of applications like TikTok, Instagram, Facebook etc, take photos and videos, real time video calling, getting directions etc. All whilst on a colour, high-resolution screen orders of magnitude better than the Nokia phones.

Acting like physics doesn’t exist and we should be able to get a month long battery life whilst doing all of the above is idiotic. No other way to describe it.

Well i use none of those apps, and I made a point about 25 years of technical progress, not heavy phone usage.

I see it got you riled up for some reason, but I cannot see why.

> Putting the phone in airplane mode is no different than having a dead battery in terms of usability.

Well, it's about the same as using Nokia 3310.

We are talking about phones right? Things that make calls

My iPhone today last for less than a day while I dont watch any video on it, In fact, i barely use it currently, and it still drains batteries in no time.

Odd. I wonder if you have some apps updating in the background a lot.

Both my personal and my work iPhones are two-years-old, and both will last several days even with audio streaming.

I put my work phone in its drawer last Thursday, and when I took it out on Tuesday, it still had 11% left.

Tailscale and Wireguard absolutely murder the battery if the network is down/flakey.

Agreed. I so wish this was fixed. It’s so bad.

When I was working the polls some months ago I was in an unusually low signal area and my phone ended up completely dying (not had that happen in a decade probably) due to Tailscale using 50% of my battery. Crazy bug.

My 7 year old iphone lasts almost two days if I don't do anything too taxing (i.e. video). I don't think I do anything special. I guess YMMV.

Try disabling Bluetooth from within the settings. My iPhone and iPad would drain like 50% of their batteries overnight if I left Bluetooth on. Now they drain about 10-15%. Still a lot for devices doing nothing, but better than before.

The drop down menu doesn't actually disable bluetooth so that alone won't work.

ikr, it had amazing camera and ran the latest linux kernel /s

I haven't done this in a while but when I used to travel I'd get a local SIM and then put my home SIM in an old Android phone. Since the home SIM was roaming (expensive), I'd turn off data, I just wanted to receive calls and texts.

It'd usually last around 2 weeks with data off. I imagine an iPhone would fare even better.

Fairly misleading, since according to the comparison on their site (https://www.apple.com/iphone/compare/?modelList=iphone-16,ip...) the slightly-bigger 6.3 inch iPhone 16 Pro gets 27 hours of video playback vs the 16e's 26 hours. (Regular iPhone 16 is 22 though.)

> iPhone 16e has the best battery life ever on a 6.1-inch iPhone

Yes I know, that's why it's misleading and not wrong.

What should they have said to make it non-misleading?

"It has more battery life than the iPhone 16 but less than the iPhone 16 Pro."

Bigger phones have bigger batteries, making it not a like for like comparison.

You can argue my comparison is not like-for-like enough, I'm simply arguing the comparison they chose is misleading.

This is a word salad.

no it isn't. also im not trying to make it punchy, im trying to clarify my point.

> im not trying to make it punchy, im trying to clarify my point

Your phrasing requires prior knowledge of the iPhone 16 and iPhone 16 Pro. It's also defining an interval without giving context to whether that interval is meaningful, where on the interval the 16e exists, and if any of the preceding are meaningful. The increased precision comes at the cost of conciseness and clarity.

Apple's, on the other hand, tells me that this is the best battery life an iPhone has had in this form factor. No unnecessary priors being pulled; I just need to know if I like a 6.1" screen.

I'm arguing that the 6.1" screen and 6.3" screen both represent the same form factor since they occupy the same slot in the iPhone product matrix.

That isn't misleading at all.

Of course it is, it makes you think they're talking about the non-Max size class iPhones when in fact they're splitting hairs about a 5mm difference in screen size to make it sound more impressive.

Not sure how much modem is contributing here. My guess is it is primarily due to the lack of ProMotion. 16e has a 60Hz display.

As does iPhone 16.

Ah right. I stand corrected.

There's maybe other simplicity things that make it more battery efficient, like no dynamic island, only one camera, no magsafe, maybe stuff like that. But I am not an expert or anything

Wow. This is fantastic. This is the first time in nearly fifteen years they've had a feature I've actually wanted to purchase.

26 hours of battery life but you still have to charge it with a cable (they didn't add MagSafe). This might be a deal breaker for me…

It has wireless charging, just not MagSafe.

Yeah but the MagSafe charger I've spent $150 on doesn't work without the magnetic part.

I assume it's some elaborate mounting thing if you spent that much on it, but actually a magsafe charger will act as a standard Qi charger as well.

Yep. Switched from iPhone to Android but still use my magsafe charger on my bed stand for the new phone.

I wonder if one of those MagSafe cases that basically "passthrough" the MagSafe magnets in the phone would work.

Absolutely. Plenty of even cheap cases have the magsafe ring to align the charger and then would work with the magsafe puck just fine.

Just as well as any of the other ones for Android phones. Heck, you can even buy adhesive magnet rings to stick directly to any case or phone back, as long as you align them properly.

Well I have an ancient wireless charger (power unknown) that doubles as a stand that I got for free as swag from some conference. I just keep my magsafe supporting phone on it when I'm not using it and done.

Look ma, no magnets!

It works fine, you just have to manually align it, like any other Qi charger.

I half suspect you're trolling based on this and your other comments under this post, but in case you're not, the Magsafe charger specs state they are Qi compatible.

https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MX6X3LL/A/magsafe-charger...

  > The MagSafe Charger is compatible with Qi2 and Qi charging, so it can be used to 
  > wirelessly charge your iPhone 8 or later, as well as AirPods models with a wireless
  > charging case, as you would with any Qi2 or Qi-certified charger.

PS: What MagSafe charger cost you $150? The regular Apple charger costs $39.

Not OP but I have the Anker 3-in-1 Cube and it was $150 when I bought it a year or two ago. It charges a phone, watch, and airpods at the same time, and sparks joy for me.

https://www.anker.com/products/y1811

I got a Belkin one 5 years ago for about the same price. Charges my phone and watch! Awesome. Then the next year I got a 13 Pro Max, and the charging coils didn't line up. Phone won't charge. I swore to never buy $150 chargers ever again.

I paid $25 for something from China. It took a month to arrive, but it works great.

does the target market for a cheap iphone spend $150 on a charger?

Literally just replaced the flimsy clip-on vent mount charger in my car with a ProClip custom fit mount and a Qi2 charger that ran me ~$115 all-in. I wanted longevity with this solution.

I was pretty close to picking up the new SE4 to replace my iPhone 14 Pro and I'm balking at the lack of MagSafe on top of the $599 pricetag.

Is MagSafe worth it? I think I've misaligned my iPhone 12 mini once on my Qi charger total over the past five years or so.

Then sell it and buy a $10 Qi charger.

The article says it supports wireless charging.

Do you not use a case? Even cheap $20 cases have a magsafe ring in them which would make this work with the magsafe charger puck.

MagSafe chargers are Qi/Qi2 compatible. They'll charge without a magnetic ring.

https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MX6X3LL/A/magsafe-charger...

Well yes of course. But the whole point of the ring is to align them perfectly so the efficiency is high and so you can use the phone without it falling off or losing alignment.

Using a case with the magnet ring in it solves this problem for the 16e without the ring in the phone itself.

I figure you knew it, but OP seemed to be unaware of this.

The improved battery life is BECAUSE there’s no MagSafe lol

You’ll need to answer for yourself: more battery life or MagSafe?

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