Author: Stagger Lee

So after tons of messing about with the phone, I think the battery life is more or less sorted. Twitter is the main culprit – lose the Twitter app, and the addictive need to keep refreshing constantly (thus taxing the screen and the data connection constantly too) and everything’s fine. Downloading and playing podcasts, some music, mail, Instagram, Wikipedia lookups, what have you – in mixed use without plugging in, I project out to about 10-12 hours mixed use. The last two days at work, I’ve come home with the battery above 50%.

The key thing is, I haven’t turned off that much. I ditched parallax view and animated wallpaper, and shut off auto-updating of applications, but some background data is still updating and location services are full-tilt including Frequent Locations. Work MDM is enabled, and I’m seeing the “right now it would take you X minutes to drive home” in the Notification Center. So this is more or less full featured…and we’re good.

The next big test is Saga. I considered Google Now, but if I don’t use Gmail, there’s really nothing it can give me that I don’t already have in the OS, save for transit directions (not that big a deal since I started driving to work every day). Similarly, what Donna does isn’t really necessary with the Today features. But Saga does more comprehensive location-logging and rolls in Dark Sky notifications to boot (saving me downloading Dark Sky itself – all I need is the precip, not the notoriously erratic temps) so it gets the nod. If it works without slaughtering the battery during a normal workday (tomorrow), I dare say our issues are truly licked. And I haven’t even tried the T-Mobile SIM yet…maybe later.

Ars Technica (which is an everyday read for me, and it should be for you too) absolutely goes in on Google’s control of Android, and how their much-vaunted “openness” is being modified (where by “modified” they mean “kicked to the curb”) for the sake of consolidating control.  The tl;dr version: while Android launched with open source for the OS and the apps, those apps are being replaced with closed-source alternatives and the old ones deprecated to the point of uselessness, and if you want to make a Google app-equipped Android device, you can’t make devices with any other flavor of Android.

Those of you who remember the old days of Microsoft dominance will recall that if you wanted to make Windows systems, you couldn’t make anything else – Hitachi tried to install BeOS as a dual-boot option and had to engage in all kind of shenanigans to make it invisible unless you really wanted it to run, so that Microsoft wouldn’t strip their Win license. To date, the only Android device-maker willing to go that route – to eschew the Google apps and Google Play store and take a chance on going it alone – is Amazon, which has the money and the media library and the server back-end to make it feasible.  It also explains why so many phone makers – Samsung most prominently – are bundling their own versions of what seem like standard apps: it’s a hedge against the possibility that they’ll ever have to cut ties with Google and go it alone.

Ultimately, this drives home how untenable the open-source model is for handsets – it’s no longer enough to have hardware and an OS; you now need services and applications.  Android may technically be “open”, but out in the real world it’s anything but.  There might be a niche for something like the Fairphone or the Phonebloks approach, but you’re really, really, really going to have to want to roll your own to make it remotely worthwhile…especially when a Nexus phone is only $350 off-contract or an iPhone 5C can be had for $50 on contract.

It’s Linux all over again: it can be made easier and many of the edges filed off with the cunning use of Ubuntu, if someone’s willing to create the Android equivalent (maybe Ubuntu themselves?) but for 99% of the world, the juice ain’t worth the squeeze.  Meanwhile, Google really has become the mobile Microsoft; the only difference this time is that when Apple got there first, they fortified their position a hell of a lot quicker and stronger than they ever did on the desktop.  If we’re going to have a virtual duopoly, at least they’re punching at relatively equal weight this time.

If there’s been one hard rap on Barack Obama as President, it’s that he’s too stuck into his own “let us now reason together” shtick.  He’s interested in bipartisan negotiation and dealing for its own sake, rather than lining up Democrats and cracking the whip and saying “you’ll hew to the party line or we’ll find somebody who will.”  It’s how the Affordable Care Act wound up without so much as a public option, let alone a single-payer model.  It’s how the original 2009 stimulus package wound up too small.  And it’s how the Republicans were able to leverage the debt limit increase in 2011 into the sequestration model that afflicts us now…and it’s why they were convinced they could do it again.

Hopefully, Obama has learned his lesson.  You can’t negotiate with zombies. He was an idiot to try it to begin with – when prominent Republicans are publicly announcing that they’re rooting for your failure and they’re going to be the universal “NO” before you’re even sworn in the first time, you have to start with at least the idea that you might have to do things without their help.  But I guess at some level, he had to try it his way and be forcibly disillusioned in the process. Then again, anyone who looked back at the original Clinton budget in 1993 and saw zero Republican votes for it, at all, should have known what was up.

But they held the line this time. Hopefully it’s the start of a different approach.

Ted Cruz is absolutely the huge winner here.  He got to be the ringleader fighting the good fight against the hated brown usurper, without the hassle and inconvenience of actually being on the hook for the credit default.  Notice that Rand Paul and Marco Rubio, his likely rivals in two years, also made sure to vote against the deal.  They’re going to be smoking the straight Dixie all the way to 2016, because whenever Ted Cruz wakes up in the morning, he looks in the mirror and sees the 45th President of the United States.

If he’d won, he’d have to face the consequences of sandbagging Obamacare – restoring discrimination based on pre-existing conditions, kicking freshly-minted college grads off their parents’ insurance, eliminating options for people who can’t get insurance now – and the consequences of trashing the economic system associated with an American default.  But without those, he can howl about “friendly fire” and say that if only the Senate had more like him, they would win.  In the classic “Folkways of the US Senate” dichotomy, Ted Cruz is the Platonic ideal of the show horse.

But he’s learned one lesson that so many in the GOP have learned.  After all, the Democrats have only had complete control of the elected federal government (House, Senate, Presidency) for a whopping total of 8 years since 1969.  The Republicans only had it for 4 or 5, but they also had at least two pieces of the puzzle from 1981-86 and 1995-2007.  And they’ve had a majority of the Supreme Court appointees since about 1990 as well.  So…why isn’t there prayer in school?  Why is abortion still broadly legal?  Why is there no flat tax? 

The GOP at large and Ted Cruz in particular have learned a lesson that any profession wrestling aficionado has always known.  The money isn’t in winning the championship…the money’s in the chase.

So we have a deal.  The main elements are: continuing resolution funding through January 15 (maintaining the sequester, as far as I can tell), debt ceiling clear until at least February sometime, and precious little else.

This was important.  It was very important that Obama stand solid and that the Democrats stand solid behind him, which they did – every Democrat in Congress backed the bill. This was crucial because what they are trying to do here is delegitimize the tactic of government shutdown and debt-limit brinksmanship as a means of allowing one party in one house to hold the budget – or the full faith and credit of the United States – to ransom for things they could not otherwise obtain through legitimate legislative or electoral means.

Too many people expected Obama would fold.  He folded in 2011, for the sake of buying stability until the elections, and in return got a super-committee that failed to produce an official budget (whose chairmen then produced a non-binding statement of opinion that media idiots have since interpreted as the committee’s official report) and some automatic cuts that would take effect if nothing was done.  Nothing was, and they took effect, which is the sequestration that’s resulted in blunt-instrument diminished government services in 2013.

And what’s to prevent us going through all this again in February? Nothing.  That’s right: nothing at all.  Already the mental defectives of the Tea Party are screaming that they were THIS CLOSE to victory before being stabbed in the back by the evil liberal media (you know, like those pinko socialists at the Wall Street Journal) and by people who are Republicans In Name Only (you know, like 2/3 of the elected Republicans in the Senate who voted in favor of this bill and the 85 members in the House who decided enough was enough).  And because they feel entitled to their own opinion, their own facts and indeed their own reality, they will almost certainly try again in February, because they represent the True Will Of The American People and will certainly be swept to victory once people realize the truth about the illegitimate Kenyan socialist Muslim atheist dictator.

The thing is, the GOP is like a drug addict.  Fifty years ago, they sampled the Confederacy, and it was too much for them to handle – and Goldwater sank like a stone.  Then they got a diluted dose thanks to Wallace, and Nixon got into the White House in ’68.  Then they started mainlining it in 1972, won 49 states, and by that point, they were addicted to having the South in their column.  And they could maintain for a while, but they grew to need more and more of it – especially after 1994, when they could get even purer amounts of South.

And now it’s 2013, and they’re just now looking up and realizing that they’ve been shooting Russian street heroin for the last five years and their flesh is starting to turn to stone and drop off.

The GOP no longer functions without the South, without Southern-style politics.  They’ve dug themselves into safe one-party districts, where like the South of old, one gets elected by slinging the shit the loudest and most vociferously. Only instead of throwing around the N-word and defending the flower of Southern womanhood, now they shriek endlessly about death panels and Benghazi and socialism.  Thanks to Citizens United, the party no longer has any leverage via campaign money; you just need a Sheldon Adelson or Foster Friess or some other wingnut with more money than sense and you can run your campaign on his largesse without having to rely on the Republican Congressional organizations for campaign support.  AM radio and social media will give you all kinds of press and publicity from your true believers without ever having to interact with the hostile inquiries of the lamestream media.  And when you get to the House of Representatives, there’s enough of you that you can swing the vote for Speaker of the House – so he’s not going to have anything to threaten you with to get in line.

In short, the teahadists are now a self-propelled, self-replenishing zombie army. And we don’t have the means to win a zombie war right now.  The only way this stops is if the GOP can tear the needle out of its arm once and for all and accept that they’re going to have to go cold turkey for a while, wait for the Democrats to over-reach, and then rebuild with the more traditionally-Midwestern approach rather than getting strung out on the strains of Dixie.

And before we go, repeat it over and over until you get people to understand: this is a one-sided problem.  The Democrats are pushing the health care bill designed by the Heritage Foundation in 1994 as an alternative to Hillarycare, and implemented in Massachusetts by the most recent Republican candidate for President. Occupy Wall Street has no caucus in the Congress.  The problem is coming from one party, and they have to clean it up if we’re ever going to move forward – or else reconcile themselves to a permanent minority.

* So it looks like Glenn Greenwald is going into business for himself, aided by eBay founder money.  This could be yet another attempt at building an alternative media outlet a la Huffington or Grantland, or it could be striking while the iron is hot to maximize the career leverage (and profit) afforded by being the sole conduit of the great Snowden revelations, which are trickling out in a manner that suggests nothing so much as the endless stream of surprise contracts Mick Foley just happened to have signed before being fired as WWF General Manager on Monday Night RAW back in the day.  It will certainly do nothing to dissuade the many people who are convinced that this entire affair is about maximizing the attention and tangible rewards afforded to Greenwald, which once again drives home the point that what should be a huge story is instead being turned into the meta-story, and largely by those claiming to push the story in the first place.

* The saga of the banjo-playing donkey is over: the iPhone 5 is again performing within acceptable parameters.  Now starts the experimentation: restore work MDM, disable a few features to see if we eke out a little more juice, maybe try running something like Dark Sky or Saga and see if it has a major impact, and – most of all – try throwing the T-Mobile SIM in there and see what happens. But the more I look at the new iPhones, the more I keep thinking that my next phone ought to either be the Moto X or a notional iPhone 6 that is more like the X.  I want the slightly larger screen and the larger battery that goes with it, and I definitely want the specialized co-processors for power-sipping ambient monitoring.  For the first time since 2007, somebody’s legitimately stolen a march on Apple in the phone-innovation space, and 64-bit alone isn’t yet demonstrably enough to make up the difference.

* Worth noting: there is no 64-GB iPhone 5S to be had in America, not even for ready money. I did an availability search around Silicon Valley.  Then Nashville.  Then Birmingham, then DC, then New York City, and in a broad swath all the way from Connecticut to Louisiana, there simply exists not one single 64 GB iPhone 5S of any color available for same-day pickup.  Meanwhile, the 5C can be had anywhere, including for half off with contract at the likes of Walmart or Target or Best Buy.   I’d be curious to see how the numbers for the 5C stack up against the numbers this time last year for the 4S, because the 5C is merely supposed to be the iPhone 5 with a candy shell and a bigger profit margin.  And at this point – given that the battery life is even better than the 5S and that my employer doesn’t permit fingerprint-unlocking in the security MDM – I’d as soon have a white 5C as a gold 5S.

* People keep trumpeting market share for Android phones, but iOS still rules the roost as far as actual web traffic goes. From the look of things, the bulk of Android’s market share is coming in the free-with-contract space, and going in large part to people who have a smartphone simply because the smartphone is now the default for “phone.”  The Moto X is the first Android phone to seriously eschew competing on “look how big” and “look how many gimmicks” and “look at this spec sheet” and instead compete on user experience…and it’s going to work.  Hell, it’s working on me, ain’t it?

* It’s diet time again. I’m trying to go back to the simple rules from March: no vending machine food, no extra sweeteners, no bottled soda, no empty starch calories.  We’ll see how well it works out; I already carved out one exemption for some caffeine-free Coke Zero last night and will probably have a few cocktails Thursday night (happy birthday surrogate-sister-in-law!) so I may not be as hardcore this time.  Then again, I made myself kind of miserable last time, and making sure I don’t resent doing it is going to be a big part of making sure I stick with it.

* The city council in Cupertino signed off on Campus 2 last night.  Before Christmas, they’ll be starting construction near my old office, bulldozing a huge old HP property to build something literally the size of the Pentagon.  Call it the mausoleum of Steve if you like…but one thing that stuck out is that in discussing the thing, Jobs specifically mentioned that it would have an apricot orchard. “You used to see them everywhere, even on the corners, and they’re part of the legacy of this valley,” he told his biographer.

And that led me to go back and look…and sure enough, of the big-ticket CEOs currently running things in Silicon Valley, none of them is actually from here.  Most of them came through Stanford, or else got pulled in via some other company.  But Steve and Woz?  They were from here.  They grew up in the orchards.  They bought components cheap at Halted Specialties, they ate pineapple pizza at Frankie Johnny and Luigi’s, they called Bill Hewlett up by finding his phone number in the Palo Alto white pages.  They grew up with the Valley.  They were part of what I think of as the “Wagon Wheel” era, when military and high-tech collided and kicked out the semiconductor industry and set the Bay Area on its way to becoming what it is today.

Steve lived that history, and he thought it was important enough to respect.  Important enough to make sure there were orchards.  I don’t know exactly what that says about him, but I know it’s nothing that comes up when you talk about the Googleplex or SoMa or Facebook’s forthcoming gated community.  And it’s why a hundred wannabe entrepreneurs who think all you need is a signature shirt and a shitty attitude have completely missed the boat on what made Steve Steve.

This isn’t new, you know. A quick look at Michael Lind’s infamous 1995 New Republic article, which anticipated my own thesis and prospective dissertation, will tell you this was largely inevitable.  But I just finished a timely re-read of Rick Perlstein’s Before the Storm – the history of the Goldwater movement of 1964 and how it came to be – and it’s all there.  Paranoia about a “different” President, albeit Catholic rather than black.  Fear of creeping socialism in the form of government health programs – then, the very same Medicare that Teabaggers now defend virulently against the menace of “government health care” and now, the very same individual-mandate program that Heritage pushed in 1994 as an alternative to the Clinton plan. Plus ca change…

So as we sit and watch and wait, we look again at Texas.  Texas, which gave us Dallas, hotbed of right-wing extremism and deathtrap for Kennedy.  Texas, which gave George W. Bush a leg up to becoming President.  Texas, which now gives us Rafael “Ted” Cruz, the Pied Piper of the teahadists, singing a fifty-year-old tune about socialism and imminent doom with a healthy leavening of sub rosa racism.  And meanwhile, they have the weakest Speaker of the House in generations so scared that he will ride the atom bomb all the way down to default rather than risk their wrath.

Congressional government + Parliamentary politics = constitutional crisis.  This was inevitable from the day the GOP was left with only partial control of Congress during a Democratic administration.  It’s also the existence proof of false equivalence, because as much as CNN and NPR want to talk about coming to a compromise, there’s one side that puts its wingnuts in office.  Count how many Congressmen were elected on the back of Occupy Wall Street and balance that against the number of Teabag mental defectives currently refusing to honor the full faith and credit of the American government, and you’ll know who to blame tomorrow morning when things come crashing to the ground.

The only question now is this: when the time comes, will the Village, and the political media, and the public at large – will they finally have the balls to call a spade a spade and lay the blame where it belongs?  Because if the usual plague-on-both-your-houses, false equivalence, both-sides-do-it bullshit persists, you’ll know once and for all that Washington really is rigged for Republicans – even when they only control enough of the government to chuck bombs.

In a strange and chaotic world, it’s good to know that some things are reliable as clockwork…like the Atlanta Braves crapping the bed in the playoffs every single time out.  For at least the sixth time in a row, the Braves reached the playoffs only to be eliminated in the very first series.  It’s like an entire team of Peyton Mannings.

It wasn’t always like that.  The Braves went from worst record in the bigs in 1990 to the World Series in 1991, which is about the time I caught onto baseball (aside from a brief flurry of interest in the Mets-Red Sox in 1986; I regret to say I was on the wrong side of that).  My late grandfather, who was something of my spirit animal in the latter days of my adolescence, had been a huge baseball fan, and his brother-in-law was as fond of the Braves as he was the Tennessee Volunteers.  And it was on a family trip in the summer of 1991 when I caught the bug from him after a couple of nights of watching TBS.  And since this was the beginning of my sports fixation, it did no harm at all to latch onto a team whose exploits could be followed effortlessly on television or radio every single night.

And so I rolled with the Braves through back-to-back World Series losses, and through a gripping pennant race in 1993 when they spent the summer chasing the San Francisco Giants (oh, irony).  I saw my first major league game, and saw the Giants’ new acquisition Barry Bonds hit a home run so hard I swore the ball disintegrated before my eyes.  I watched Birmingham grind to a halt for three days in August as the Braves and Giants battled directly (and the Braves swept, if memory serves) and sweated out the last day of the season as the Braves handily dispatched the Rockies while the hated Dodgers got the better of the Giants.  And the Braves won, 104 games to 103.  The Braves went to the NLCS to lose to the Phillies.  The Giants got nothing.

Then the strike in 1994, then another World Series in 1995, and the Braves won.  And at that point, I sort of felt my obligations were discharged, and stopped paying attention.  And somewhere in there, I found out that the Seattle Mariners were streaming their games over the Internet, and the latter days of my Vandy career are bound up with memories of late nights with an AM-quality crackle of Dave Niehaus coming out of the PowerMac 6100 between RealPlayer buffering.

It was all American League for a while, to be honest. I met a new girlfriend from Ohio, a huge fan of baseball in general and the Cleveland Indians in particular, and so it happened that my second major league game ever was Game 5 of the 1997 World Series.  My baseball affections drifted aimlessly between the Mariners and the Royals before settling lightly on the Red Sox, and my shelves quickly creaked beneath the body of literature surrounding that most star-crossed of franchises.  Besides, it seemed like half my crazy Internet friends were Sox fans, so there you go.

And then the Giants happened.  First I saw them in 2000 on the same road trip where I first met my future wife in person.  Then we took the stadium tour together in March of 2002.  Then they went to the World Series, and they were my default team thenceforth.  I still pulled for the Red Sox when I noticed them in the postseason, but that was about it – any interest in baseball at the professional level went to the San Francisco Giants.  And in 2010 and 2012, it suddenly paid off.  It wasn’t the same as when Vandy won the SEC tournament, or would have been had we won the College World Series or the Skins gone to the Super Bowl, but it was still meaningful.  Just like 2004, when Game 6 of the ALCS found me fixed on a TV in the laundromat, endlessly repeating “Thousands Are Sailing” on a gold iPod mini as the blood seeped through Curt Schilling’s sock.

And now I have a Vandy pitcher for a local team – Sonny Gray, plying his trade for the Oakland A’s mere yards from the stadium where Festus Ezili plies his trade for the Golden State Warriors.  Maybe next year is the year I give equal love to the A’s.  Or maybe Detroit calls up some of their many Vandy selections.  Or maybe the Giants or Nationals sign David Price in free agency (the Nats arrived after I left, but I still feel a tiny pull there).

But it’s out there. And it’s a welcome bit of autumn to have around when the temperatures steadfastly insist on sticking around 80 of an afternoon and the leaves are taking their time about turning…fall is coming.

Of which more later.

So AT&T made it official: effective in two weeks, you will no longer be able to buy anything but a Mobile Share plan for your phone.  Which basically puts them in line with the rest of cellular America: you are obligated to buy unlimited voice and text, and the price differentiator is only on data.  For AT&T, a single user with 2 GB data a month (in other words, typical iPhone setup) will cost you $95 a month…in other words, $40 more than AIO will charge you for prepaid service with no contract on the same damned network.

Seriously, I have signed my last contract. It’s going to be all T-Mobile or AIO from now on, as soon as I’m left to my own devices (SEE WHAT I DID THERE).  But that brings up another interesting conundrum.  Observe:

 

New Nexus 7 (2013) with cellular data, 32 GB – $349

New iPad Mini with cellular data, 32 GB – $559

New iPad retina with cellular data, 32 GB – $729

 

New iPhone 5C, white, 32 GB, unlocked – $649

New Moto X developer edition, 32 GB, unlocked – $649

New iPhone 5S, gold, 32 GB, unlocked – $749

 

There you go.  Across the board, a new smartphone is more expensive than a tablet of similar make and capacity.  Yet because of years of contract subsidies, we’re conditioned to think that a tablet costs more than a phone.  Nevertheless, if you buy that white 5C unlocked and put it on AIO, your savings over two years? Five hundred dollars. That’s after paying full price up front for the phone.  In fact, at $40 a month, you’ve made up the upfront out-of-pocket cost in a year.  On top of that, you’re free to change between AIO and T-Mobile every other month if you like.  Hell, you could be on AIO, then switch to T-Mobile for a month when going abroad so as to have the same number and free international data roaming, then switch back to AT&T’s network on AIO when you return.  That’s an entirely realistic and feasible scenario.

But the thing is, you have to change your thinking.  It didn’t occur to me that I should be looking to replace my iPad next March. I’ve had it a year and a half, it’s running just fine – there’s no contract coming up. More importantly, there’s no monthly nut to make that won’t get any lower just because the contract’s run out.  With a contract, keeping your existing phone doesn’t gain you anything; you’re paying the subsidy rate every month whether you’re paying the phone off or not.  So the impulse is to jump on the upgrade as soon as the new phone comes out, because you may as well have the benefit of the subsidy.

By contrast – the wife will have the iPhone 5, and the iPhone 4S she still has will be left over.  If I had to give up my work phone, for whatever reason, that 4S will run iOS 7 pretty good.  Replacing the battery yourself is feasible for not much money.  And boom, there’s an entirely viable phone, running for $55 a month on AIO.  You can replace the phone whenever you need to replace the phone, not on a 2-year cycle. But for this to work long-term, people have to start thinking in terms of the full value of the phone, and wrapping your head around the prospect that a phone costs $650 – more than a tablet – is going to be a heavy lift for a lot of folks.

So over the last week or so, battery performance on the phone has deteriorated to what it was before, complete with random loss of 10% battery or dying with 7 or 9 or 11 (!) percent remaining on the meter.  So I took the phone back into the Apple Store today, they ran the diagnostics, and sure enough, the battery is now below the red line for warranty replacement.  And so they popped a new battery in there, which is a twist; in the past they just replaced an entire handset for battery issues.  I suspect that’s gone by the boards, and I’m just as pleased it has; I suspect that the 4S replacement I got once had battery issues of its own thanks to being refurb, but anyway.

So the new battery had 50% on it when I got it.  It was at 40% after I forcibly rebooted, and I hit the sleep switch and stuck it in my pocket at 1:05.  When I pulled it out next, at 1:30, it was at 32%.  In other words, it bled 8% of battery in 25 minutes of idle time in my pocket.

I said before that if Apple’s allowing real true multitasking now, then they’d better have some way to strap an arc reactor to the back of the phone or else expect mayfly-style battery life.  I strongly suspect that’s the case; apps that are not properly written to work with iOS 7 may well be strangling the thing.  Or maybe it really is down to Verizon; some of those huge battery leaks are associated with times when I’m on cellular only and in poor signal areas.  In any event, to borrow the words of Richard Hammond, “it’s pretty poor, mate.”

Obviously I’m going to run through a full charge/discharge/charge cycle with the new battery before I commit to much, and that will probably be the weekend.  By Monday, I hope to be able to test normally and see how the new battery holds up; assuming it really is new and fully capable, I ought to see a theoretical capacity improvement of around 25%.  Which means that I should be seeing close to nine hours’ battery life on mixed use, about what I had when the phone was new (and before iOS 7 came down the pike).

Key word: should.

Other things left to try: whittle down some of the iOS 7 features that are sucking down battery (which I left in their default state after getting the phone clean-reset at the Apple Store before, just for the sake of clean test conditions).  Frequent Locations has yet to do anything for me anyway and I can live without parallax.  After that, the next step is to activate the T-Mobile SIM and see if GSM without LTE is any kinder to the battery (such a step is not practical with Verizon, as the next step down is shitty-speed EV-DO which is as much a battery suck as LTE).  If that actually makes things better, then we have some negotiating to do at work.  But if neither turning off things nor using a different network has a material impact on the phone…I don’t know what comes after that.

For what it’s worth, the first rumblings from the Great Mentioner about a notional iPhone 6 suggest a 4.8″ display, which would basically be 1366×768 at the same DPI.  Which is a 44% increase in the square-footage of the display, which (to my mind at least) suggests a 44% increase in available battery volume at the same depth/thickness.  If I got an extra 44% of what I’m supposed to be getting, that would be 13 hours or more of actual use – close to 15 based on the purported stats of the iPhone 5S or 5C.  And that gets close to the battery of the Moto X, which also has a 4.7″ display in an enclosure not that much bigger than an iPhone 5…

Long story short (too late): if for some reason I have to give this iPhone 5 up, there are worse things I could do than replace the battery in my (technically now my wife’s) out-of-warranty iPhone 4S and wait out next year.