So Rene Ritchie of iMore has come to the defense of the thinner, lighter, less battery equipped iPhone. He argues that lightness is critical to usability, and that an iPhone 6 or 6Plus that was as thick as, say, an iPhone 4 would be too heavy to use in the same way, to wit:
[It] would be too heavy for many people to read iBooks or watch movies for long periods of time, for example, while in bed or while on a flight. It would also be harder to balance and use one handed while walking around.
Here’s the thing: who watches an entire movie in bed or on a plane holding the phone up? It inevitably winds up on the pillow or the cafeteria tray. Holding the phone up is only partially a function of the weight of the phone; it’s as much trying to keep your arm upright in that position. Try it. Nothing in your hand, just hold your arm up like there’s a phone in it, and see how long you can sustain it.
He goes on to say:
With Apple’s current generation of thin-as-in-light phones, you can add a thicker, heavier battery case for those times when you want or need extra power. If Apple made a thick-as-in-heavy phone, you couldn’t tear half of it off for the times when you really didn’t need the extra boost.
This way, usability is the standard and bulk is the option, not bulk as the standard at the expense of usability.
This argument falls flat for one simple reason: Apple didn’t choose to make an external battery case for the 6 Plus. It’s big enough – and consequently so is the battery – that for most people, you can get through the day without needing another battery attached. Indeed, that seems to be one of the principal use cases for people choosing the Plus. Battery life is usability, and there have been external battery cases from other manufacturers since the time of the iPhone 4 if not earlier. But only now, with the advent of an iPhone 6S that has a less capacious battery than the iPhone 6, did Apple feel the need to provide such a case themselves.
Chipsets and the processes used to fabricate them will improve, screen technology will evolve, and radios will get more efficient. Add even better race-to-sleep and other power-management techniques and, over time, Apple will end up with a light, usable phone that also has extended battery life.
The iPhone 6 Plus, with its day-and-a-half of charge capacity, shows that strategy already at work.
And the iPhone 6 and 6S show how that strategy isn’t working now. The “strategy” of the iPhone 6 Plus is the exact same strategy that Android phone makers relied on for years: make the phone bigger so you can cram a bigger battery in it. If anything, this just hammers home the point I was making in my last post; Apple’s principal source of innovation in phones in the last two years has been “make it bigger and thinner and plug in an extra battery when it goes flat.”
For reference:
iPhone 6S: 143 g, 1715 mAh battery
iPhone 6: 129 g, 1810 mAh battery
iPhone 5S: 112 g, 1560 mAh battery
iPhone 5: 112 g, 1440 mAh battery
So in the body of the iPhone 5, Apple managed to add NFC and TouchID support, keep the weight the same, and still bump the battery capacity up by 8%. Yet for all the hue and cry of “lightness”, the iPhone 6S increased the weight of the phone by over 10% yet sliced a good 5% off the battery capability, all for the sake of 3DTouch. If more weight for more battery is supposedly such a bad tradeoff, how much worse is more weight for less battery?
You want somebody to defend Apple’s bad decisions at all costs, look somewhere else. Rene can probably help you out. From here, though, there’s no getting around the fact that Apple is admitting they botched – and hopefully it means better decision making in next year’s model.