On paper, it looks pretty reasonable. \u00a0The 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\u2019t be simpler: connect it to your phone and at that point it\u2019s automatic – plug in your Lightning cable and use normally, and the phone will draw off the external battery seamlessly before switching to the internal. \u00a0Functionally it\u2019s the same as increasing the size of the internal battery.<\/p>\n
And there\u2019s the rub: this is a $99 fee to make your phone do something it should have been capable of all along. It\u2019s 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\u2019s industrial design ran out ahead of usability.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s not the first time, either. \u00a0More than one website is showing pictures of the updated Magic Mouse, which is rechargeable with a Lightning cable\u2026by flipping it over and plugging the cable into the bottom, rendering the mouse unusable. \u00a0The Apple Pencil, for use with the iPad Pro, charges straight from the iPad\u2019s own Lightning port\u2026where it juts directly out like some kind of wack-ass antenna, just asking to be broken off. Don\u2019t even get me started on the MacBook\u2019s 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\u2019t run out of power on the aforementioned Magic Mouse and keyboard.<\/p>\n
Yes, I hear the MacMacs argue, but these are horses for courses and the MacBook isn\u2019t meant to be a desktop replacement and you don\u2019t have to charge the mouse every day and\u2026this is not going to wash with Ed Earl Brown. The whole point of Apple\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019re relying on Bluetooth for headphones?<\/p>\n
At the risk of sounding like the other sort of MacMac: none of this would be happening if Steve were alive.<\/em> 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\u2019s whizzy features are worth a damn when it\u2019s 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\u2019s not someone who can tell Jony Ive to reel it in and come back tomorrow with something that doesn\u2019t sacrifice usability in the name of ooh shiny.<\/em><\/p>\n It\u2019s chilling but it\u2019s 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<\/em> – 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.<\/p>\n At this point, I\u2019m 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\u2019s what it\u2019s for, and it\u2019ll do just as good a job of getting me through the day without a power cable as this iPhone 6 does currently. And that\u2019s not an endorsement for Apple.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" On paper, it looks pretty reasonable. \u00a0The 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\u2019t be simpler: connect it to your phone and at that point it\u2019s automatic – plug in your Lightning cable and use normally, and … <\/p>\n