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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

The z1c has a 60% larger battery and weights 25% more. Ounce for ounce, or per mAh, though, the iPhone has really impressive battery life. Where it really excels is standby and radio power management. 10 hours of LTE browsing on Anand's and GSMArena's tests. My Nexus 5 is often on its last legs by midday with less than two hours of screen-on, because it'll chew through its battery in weaker-signal conditions. The iPhone tends to avoid killing itself that way.

On the desktop side, Apple is in the 10-12 hour range of light use with the MBA and MBP Retina. Comparable ThinkPads require the six-cell add-on battery to get there.

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I haven't seen much difference between Macs and other laptops. My current MBP 13" (non-Retina) lasts for about 5 hours when doing normal dev work (text editing, compiling, debugging), I would consider this "light use". This is similar to the Dells, Sonys and Lenovo's I had before or currently use. One difference I see is that battery life doesn't seem to degrade as quickly as on other laptops I owned a few years ago.

I don't have "cross-platform" experience with phones, but my iPhone4 running iOS7 is pretty much drained after a normal day's use (it was better with iOS6).

All "anectodical evidence" of course ;)

The MacBook Pro Retinas and MacBook airs take advantage of newer battery cells, and have greatly improved battery life in my experience. The 13" MBP battery never impressed me.

Also, not sure when you bought your particular iPhone, but the iPhone 4 is coming up on being 4 years old (announced round about the same time as the Galaxy S for comparisons sake) and it's still able to last a full day with the latest software, and all on single core processor. I find that really impressive, to say the least :)

10-12 hrs sounds exaggerated, I've never once seen a MPB last even ~5 hrs with light use.

No MBP boasts 10-12 hours, that's only the MBP Airs, which from my experience, follow up on that promise.

The MBP Retinas boast up to 9 hours, at the max, although those models I haven't used routinely. However it has been my experience that the MBP Retina's battery life are significantly more preferment than their non-retina predecessors.

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