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Comment by homebrewer | Hacker News Reader

Is it normal for Apple to not mention the capacity of their batteries, or are they worried about how bad the numbers will look on paper?

I'm pretty pissed at them (again). Over the last couple of years, we've seen significant gains in battery capacities for the first time in more than a decade — you can now buy “standard” thickness phones for sane amounts of money with 6-7.5 A·h batteries, and I expected to see 8 A·h shortly. Two times the capacity of just a few years ago with the same volume and for the same amount of money.

What does Apple do with these gains? Crap out a new thinner phone, of course. Now other manufacturers will follow suit, just like they did with the 3.5" jack, and we will be back to square one.

Not once do I remember thinking "I would like this phone to be thinner", yet I wish that this thing would have a bigger battery almost daily.

Thanks again, Apple.

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> Is it normal for Apple to not mention the capacity of their batteries, or are they worried about how bad the numbers will look on paper?

Their numbers do look awful on paper. Battery capacities tend to be a lot lower than Android phones. OTOH, Android phones consume far more battery, so comparing raw numbers isn’t really a fair comparison.

It’s purely an Apple choice. They could use good batteries and have even better battery life.

They know however that battery failing is the first thing pushing consumers to change phone and being Apple they always have to take the most anti consumer stand possible.

Admittedly it’s a less of a problem that it used to be. Outside of the Air their batteries are still not state of the art but they look less punny than they used to.

Selling phones with generally longer real world battery life yet lighter batteries, and longer battery longevity due to superior battery recharge rate management is the most anti-consumer stand possible?

Are you at any point planning to address the core of my comment: Apple was for a long time purposefully undersizing their battery compared to the state of the art and what they should have shipped, or will you entirely refuse?

Because your comment is entirely missing the point at the moment.

Do you think that the most important metric for the state of the art is raw battery capacity, or hours of real world usage?

The point is not how long it lasts, the point is that it should have lasted significantly longer if they didn't skimp. There was absolutely no valid reason to not provide a decently sized battery in these phones.

Lower weight while still having longer endurance isn’t a valid reason?

How long the battery lasts, for it’s weight, is pretty much the only point of a battery.

Having the most accessible and convenient and in some cases cheapest manufacture’s battery replacement service is anti-consumer? What does that make every other phone manufacturer?

No offense but Apple is one of the only manufacturer which requires you going through them to get a battery change and aggressively restrict the availability of spare parts for their phone.

It’s also not cheap at all especially if you don’t pay their extortionate extended warranty fee which should be included from the start.

You don’t have to get the battery through Apple.

The spare parts are readily available through their parts portal.

And it cost less than $100 to get the battery replaced on any iPhone as far as I’m aware at an Apple Store without a warranty.

Well lucky for you Apple have actually brought out an even thicker phone, with and even bigger and longer lasting battery. Its named the iphone 17 pro and iphone 17pro max.

The air is not for you.

You can just not buy this phone. If you want an iPhone with a larger capacity battery, you can buy the one that they sell with this feature.

Not once do I remember thinking "I would like this phone to be thinner", yet I wish that this thing would have a bigger battery almost daily.

Samsung Galaxy S25 Edge was first with a thinner phone (and some Motorola that most people have probably never heard of?). But it is also quite misplaced, since they just released the 27 Pro, which moves the (stacked) logic board close to the camera to be able to fit a larger battery, going from 3582 mAh in the 16 Pro to 4252 mAh in the 17 Pro (both US eSIM capacities, 18.7% more!). But they also used the space to add a vapor chamber for better sustained performance.

The Air is just a different market. The Air and Pro optimize for almost the opposite:

- Thinness vs. battery life.

- Thinness vs. an additional GPU core.

- Thinness vs. sustained performance.

- One back camera vs three back cameras.

I like this year's line-up because there is much more choice: getting the absolute thinnest phone, getting an absolute performance monster with a large battery and plenty of cameras, or getting a great middle ground, which is almost as light as the thin phone, but has longer battery life, and one more camera, and no lousy 60Hz display this year.

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