On paper, it looks pretty reasonable. The Apple battery case for the iPhone 6/6S looks ungainly, a one-piece silicon shell with a rectangular bulge under its skin, but in functionality it couldn’t be simpler: connect it to your phone and at that point it’s automatic – plug in your Lightning cable and use normally, and the phone will draw off the external battery seamlessly before switching to the internal. Functionally it’s the same as increasing the size of the internal battery.
And there’s the rub: this is a $99 fee to make your phone do something it should have been capable of all along. It’s a tacit admission that the battery is not large enough in the 6 (and even smaller in the 6S) and that the price of making the phone hipster-jeans skinny is making it unable to cope with the power demands of an ordinary day. It is a concession in everything but words that Jony Ive’s industrial design ran out ahead of usability.
It’s not the first time, either. More than one website is showing pictures of the updated Magic Mouse, which is rechargeable with a Lightning cable…by flipping it over and plugging the cable into the bottom, rendering the mouse unusable. The Apple Pencil, for use with the iPad Pro, charges straight from the iPad’s own Lightning port…where it juts directly out like some kind of wack-ass antenna, just asking to be broken off. Don’t even get me started on the MacBook’s single USB-C connector, rendering it functionally useless as a desktop system – even with the adapter, you can at best attach a monitor, power, USB Ethernet at 10/100 speed and hope that you don’t run out of power on the aforementioned Magic Mouse and keyboard.
Yes, I hear the MacMacs argue, but these are horses for courses and the MacBook isn’t meant to be a desktop replacement and you don’t have to charge the mouse every day and…this is not going to wash with Ed Earl Brown. The whole point of Apple’s premium for hardware and software was that it just worked, and the number of pain points where you have to work around their way of doing things is increasing. That’s bad design, full stop. And the rumors of an iPhone 7 with only a Lightning port and no headphone jack only make things worse – if you have to eliminate the headphone jack to make the damned thing even more thin, how much battery do you expect it to have, especially once you’re relying on Bluetooth for headphones?
At the risk of sounding like the other sort of MacMac: none of this would be happening if Steve were alive. The original iPhone eschewed things like 3G and GPS, and for good reason: an all-day battery was a bigger priority. None of the phone’s whizzy features are worth a damn when it’s a dead lump of metal in your hand. Tim Cook is a fine gentleman and perhaps the greatest operations mind in corporate history, but he’s not someone who can tell Jony Ive to reel it in and come back tomorrow with something that doesn’t sacrifice usability in the name of ooh shiny.
It’s chilling but it’s true: the first-generation Moto X, the very one at which Ive threw shade in the pages of the New Yorker, the one that debuted in early-autumn 2013, is still more compelling to me than any iPhone Apple has produced since. Hand feel without giving up screen size, quality materials without outrageous expense, spec sheet glory ruthlessly sacrificed in the name of user experience – Moto, however briefly, got the game exactly right, and all Apple has come up with since is to make it bigger and thinner and plug an extra battery in to make up the difference.
At this point, I’m going to see what happens with this rumor about a notional iPhone 6C, so-called, in March of 2016. Because right now, the camera is the only thing preventing me from just taking the Moto X abroad next summer. That’s what it’s for, and it’ll do just as good a job of getting me through the day without a power cable as this iPhone 6 does currently. And that’s not an endorsement for Apple.