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.