Apple’s new iPhone finally

sacrifices thinness for battery life

64

Function over form

Apple’s new iPhone 11 Pro and 11 Pro Max are oddities in a way for
the technology company: they’re bigger, heavier, and thicker than
last year’s models, bucking the usual trend where Apple tries to
release increasingly thinner and lighter phones. Not coincidentally,
the new heftier iPhones also promise markedly better battery life than
the iPhone XS and XS Max: four hours better on the smaller phone,
and five hours better on the larger one.

For years, people have asked why companies won’t just make
phones a little bigger and heavier in order to offer better battery life.
And with the iPhone 11 Pro lineup, it looks like Apple is finally taking
note.

BIGGER, HEAVIER, AND BETTER BATTERY LIFE

To put the jump in battery in perspective, the last few upgrades for
Apple were the iPhone 7 (two hours better battery life than the 6S),
the iPhone X (two hours better than the iPhone 7), and the XS and
the XS Max (30 minutes and one hour and 30 minutes longer than
the X, respectively, due to software and hardware improvements in
power efficiency). Instead of making another pitiful attempt at
bumping battery life like the XS, Apple is offering twice its best
battery life update in a form factor that’s nearly the same size as the
XS line.

It’s a move we’ve seen before, though: last year’s XS phones paled
in comparison to the iPhone XR, which might be the longest-lasting
phone Apple’s ever made. How? Because Apple made the decision
to sell a bigger and heavier phone — with a bigger battery — that
combined the same efficiency improvements that Apple made on the
XS phones.

Improved efficiency plus a bigger battery is apparently a winning

formula for great battery life, and with the iPhone 11 Pro models, it
looks like Apple is applying that lesson in reverse. The new 11 Pro
phones are nearly as thick and heavy as the standard 11 — the
smaller iPhone 11 Pro is 6.67 percent thicker and nearly half an
ounce heavier than the XS — presumably due to Apple adding
beefier batteries in the new models.

We likely won’t know for sure how big the batteries in the new
iPhones are until someone tears one apart, and, presumably, the
numbers still won’t compare to something like Samsung’s Galaxy
S10 and Note phones, which top out at 4,500mAh batteries that are
almost guaranteed to be vastly larger than whatever Apple is offering.
And that’s to say nothing of the (sadly unfunded) 18,000mAh monster
that Energizer wanted to make. But any improvement here is a
welcome one, especially if the battery claims hold up.

THE BATTERY IS JUST PART OF THE STORY

Apple says that improving the batteries themselves is only part of the
story: the company also highlights that the new displays in the 11 Pro
are “up to 15 percent more power efficient,” and that iOS 13 itself is
designed to more efficiently run on the new phones. There’s also a
new custom-designed power management unit (PMU) that Apple
says is key to offering the improved battery life. But as we saw last
year with the XS phones, that kind of upgrade can only get things so
far. At a certain point, it does come down to how big the battery is.

Apple has historically pursued thinness with an aggressive mindset

over the past decade. Its phones have gotten slimmer at the expense
of battery life and protruding camera modules, and its laptops are
thinner at the price of ports and a problematic keyboard. With the
iPhone 11 Pro and Pro Max, it looks like that trend is finally reversing
by prioritizing function over form.

Correction: The iPhone 11 Pro is 0.02 inches thicker than the

iPhone XS, not a quarter-inch as this post originally wrote.