Well, if someone has got 5+ device and your saying they're fragile (as a generality), it deserves to be challenged.
You're case doesn't demonstrate it being fragile any more than mine demonstrates sturdiness.
Well, yes and no. If I take a rock and a glass jar and store them safely, they'll still be unchanged in 100 years. If I throw them on the ground, the glass jar will break, and the rock won't. The existence of something in 100 years tells you very little about whether something is fragile, but the ease of breaking it in a shorter time tells you a lot. So large numbers of anecdotes about early failures are a much better indicator of fragility than large numbers of anecdotes about 5+-year-old cables that still work.
If you plug and unplug the cable from your phone by pulling on the plastic piece of the connector instead of the cord it will not become damaged. I used to have this issue all the time and then someone told me about this and I haven't had a damaged lightning connector since. When you pull on the actual cable itself it stretches the material and causes it to break over time.
One problem with Lightning is that Apple's lightning connectors are so physically small that it is hard to get a good grip on them. This causes people to eventually give up and start yanking the cables out by the wire, and because the wire is so small, it breaks easily when you do that. This is why I buy Amazon's lightning cables—the connector is larger, and thus easier to grip, and the cable is also thicker and (at least in my experience) more robust.
Backward thinking! I'M GLAD Jony Ive does not have the same sentiment.
There are other ways to improve battery life, not just by size blowing the thing.
Things are large due to technology limitation. They will slim down to the minimum as technology advances. The smartphones we will use.... say, 10 or 20 years from now will look nothing like the ones we are using now and the way we use them will likely change too. This so called "enough thin" today's iPhone will look not any less ridiculous then say Motorola DynaTAC! It's called evolution.
The problem is, battery capacity is the main limiting factor on CPU speed even now. As battery capacity increases, we'll just see faster CPUs that take advantage of the increased density to provide a faster, smoother user experience.
And although ostensibly if the software stays the same, a faster CPU improves battery life by letting the CPU go to sleep more quickly/often, in practice, CPU performance is a limiting factor on what you can do in software, so the software won't stay the same.
In my experience, without explicit intervention, at no point in the evolution of technology does the actual number of usable hours increase in any meaningful way, and it never has. My PowerBook Pismo (2000), with its dual battery bays, gave me up to 10 hours of battery life (without switching in a third battery), with a real-world life expectancy of 6 hours while running Finale (music notation software). My 2014 MacBook Pro while running current versions of Finale gives me up to 10 hours of battery life, with a real-world life expectancy of just over 3 hours while running the current version of Finale. Admittedly, the sound is more realistic, but that doesn't change the fact that I pretty much have to stay plugged into a wall whenever I'm composing music. Neither of those numbers is acceptable. Even more problematic is the realization that the numbers have gotten so much worse over time, rather than getting better.
The core problem is that faster CPUs rely much more heavily on CPU power management tricks to keep their battery life numbers up. And because the devices have gotten lighter and thinner, the battery capacity itself is 14% lower in the Retina MBP than the capacity in a PowerBook Pismo (with two OEM Apple batteries installed). If you used third-party batteries on the Pismo, the current Retina MBPs have less than half the battery capacity of those older models. And although it is amazing that a 14% reduction in capacity resulted in no loss of battery life while doing simple things like web browsing, the whopping 50% reduction in usable hours under load is a big problem for many people.
And cell phones are getting just as bad—so much so that external battery sales are a booming business, and many airports have kiosks where you can trade external battery packs for fully charged batteries. The fact that this industry even exists is almost undeniable proof that battery capacity isn't sufficient, has gotten worse over time, and isn't likely to improve on its own without drastic changes in the way Apple and other companies design their products.
Those comments are correct. There's one particular thing that everyone seems to do (including me) that speeds up the process hugely: Charges aren't designed so that you can use your phone whilst it's plugged in. That puts stresses on the cable and the more you do it, the worse it gets. Plug, unplug. That's it. It makes your cables last.
That makes no sense whatsoever. From the charger's perspective, it is still putting out the same amount of power whether 100% of that power is being used to charge the battery or some of it is getting siphoned off to power the CPU in the device.
...unless you're saying that the physical act of moving the device around while it is plugged in stresses the cable because Apple's cables are too thin, in which case I would agree....
I have 2 year old cables that work just fine and look fine. Users fault is the best explanation.
I've seen cables that look like they're broken internally after just a few uses while being carried around in a backpack (with other cords, not with books). I've seen other cables that still work fine after years of daily use. IMO, poor/inconsistent quality control is the best explanation.
I completely disagree.
I wish my iPhone 6S+ was much thinner, and I frequently go to sleep with more than 50% charge left.
The only people I've heard saying this are people who use a case and carry the phones in their pockets. However, if you're carrying it around in a case, even Apple got the actual device down to 0mm, it would still only make the cases slightly thinner, because you'd still need the cases to be thick enough to not let the phone bend in your pocket. By contrast, if they made the phones
thicker, with nearly flat side faces and a rubberized exterior, you might not even need to use a case, because they wouldn't be so easy to drop. Food for thought.
Yes you can. I have been doing that for years without using the headphone jack not even once. And I won't be missing that a bit. Just as I don't miss the removable battery or the SD slot, DVD drive and other stuff people used to cry for.
That's a bit like saying that you're happy that a car manufacturer stopped selling tow packages, because they were used by only about 1% of car owners, and now you think that they should also stop selling back seats, because 5% of car owners never use them, and the 90% who only sometimes use them can always tow a trailer with extra seats for their passengers or tie them to the roof....
In any case, I do not understand the physics of this - surely there is going to be a very nonlinear and dramatic drop in the ability to extract power from the source as the distance increases.
If you assume an omnidirectional radiator and an omnidirectional antenna, sure. I would assume that any wireless charging system would use something similar to beamforming. Much as 802.11ac creates a dramatic increase in signal-to-noise by using multiple antennas to create an approximation of a more directional antenna, you could presumably do something similar to direct most of the power source's output towards the device, and then you don't get nearly as much falloff with distance.
Nope. Wired power will always be faster and more efficient for the forseable future.
Short of the laws of physics changing, I think you can drop the "for the foreseeable future" part. Well, I suppose Apple could remove the ability to charge by wire, or could deliberately cripple it in some way, but short of that....