Battery Life vs. Phone Thinness

Christopher Mims, writing for the WSJ:

Survey after survey reveals there is one thing consumers wish manufacturers would change about their gadgets. And year after year, gadget makers make only tepid gestures toward giving it to us.

It’s better battery life. […]

It doesn’t have to be this way. There’s a simple enough solution. It requires a company brave enough to persuade users that one of the things we’ve come to expect from phones and other gadgets — that every year, they become thinner and lighter — is a trend that has outlived its usefulness.

It’ll happen soon. Consider laptops — for years, battery life on a laptop was somewhere around 4 or 5 hours, at best. It was a struggle to use one throughout a cross-country flight. Today, you could probably fly coast to coast roundtrip with a MacBook Air on a single charge. But laptops got thinner and lighter before they got better battery life.

★ Monday, 23 February 2015