Here’s the thing: screens are getting bigger. Apple alone is holding the line for 4.7” (4-inch phones are right out; I don’t expect to ever see the iPhone SE2) and the “cheap phone” size is 5 inches (the new Moto G5 is 5.0” and the G5 Plus, the only model for the US market, is 5.2″). So that ship has sailed; unfortunately, most mainstream manufacturers are trying to compensate for acreage with thin (especially the clowns in IL2 over in Cupertino). So you can’t count on batteries getting that much bigger.
Now add to that the presumption of streaming. Spotify. Netflix. Apple Music. The zero-rating of their own TV products by AT&T and Verizon, and T-Mobile’s “Music Choice” program. It doesn’t matter if they aren’t going to charge you for that data, using it is still going to eat battery life. Now add to that a presumption of wireless headphones – or worse, wireless earbuds, where two separate things have to have battery AND wireless built in AND enough logic to play the same thing simultaneously without lag or latency. No wonder the $160 Apple EarPods come with a charging case. Now add to THAT the prospect of a continual wireless connection to your watch. Or your Fitbit. Or your jacket. Or your random Internet of Shit devices.
Fast charging seems to have officially displaced battery life. A handful of people tried for a while to mock one competitor or another for having to stay close to a wall outlet, but now everyone is all about “turbo charging” and how five minutes on the charger will give your headset two hours of playback, or fifteen minutes will get you close to 50% on your phone or something like that. And that’s as may be, but now something has changed. You now have to add a charger to your loadout. It’s not enough to have the phone any longer; you must have a charging cable and a power source at the other end, whether it’s an outlet plug or an actual battery.
Time was, this was only a problem if you were an obsessive power user. And I had a charge cable at my desk all the time, still do, and have two in the car so we can both top up as needed. But it’s getting tougher to go very long away from the power, for all the reasons enumerated above – and when I of all people can get by with an iPhone SE but not a larger, hungrier device, something’s clearly gone wrong. And to make matters worse, when you put all your chips on expediting charging, that’s when you’re most likely to get things bursting into flames. Which is a problem.
In the days of horses for courses, this was less of a problem. The pager would go weeks on a single AA battery, the iPod would certainly last all day on a full charge, the phone – hell, my trusty little change-pocket SonyEricsson Z520 would go four days between charging. But when you get down to having only one device for everything, that device has only one battery which is being drained for everything. I was rather hoping that the Apple Watch would mean less time checking the phone itself, but given that it took until watchOS 3 for the thing to be faster than just pulling out the phone and having done with it? That’s not happening.
Again: the Moto X. Put that screen and that battery with the iPhone SE internals, if such a thing can be done, and I think it reasonably could. That was a 2200 mAh battery, which means you basically just gave the iPhone a 50% larger battery gratis. I don’t know if the 4.7” AMOLED would draw appreciably more than the 4” LCD, but I’d be willing to leave my wallpaper black to find out. Although the closest I’ve come to running my iPhone dead in recent months was going out on St Patrick’s Day and staying constantly engaged in Slack and Instagram and taking pics and video and making sure I’d checked in everywhere, in a space where there was barely signal (none at all in the second pub), not to mention constantly trying to stay on top of the NCAA tournament and this Twitter or that Twitter and – it’s not surprising that 7 hours of hitting it hard almost finished off the SE.
But that SE holds up. Because I don’t stream my music, and I went back to a nice pair of Harman-Kardon wired headphones, and to be honest I’d just as soon not be subject to the tyranny of the watch telling me to stand up and breathe and go for a walk, but the watch doesn’t appear to hit the phone hard enough to hurt. And if I put the phone in low-power mode, I usually get through the day at 50%. Which is why Apple’s really going to have to show me something in September to pull me off the SE before 2018…and I might just be willing to ride this phone into the ground first, including an internal battery replacement, before I give in to the inevitable 5-inch display future.