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Comment by Retr0id | Hacker News Reader

But how many hours of video playback?

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.

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

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