- Good (33/36 hours) = iPhone 17 Pro/Max
- Average (30 hours) = iPhone 17
- Bad (27 hours) = iPhone Air
Again, you still don’t get it. Of course everyone is comparing it to the 17 lineup. What else should they compare it to? Why should they move the goalposts and compare to old tech?
Don't trust Apple's numbers. Nobody uses their phone for constant uninterrupted video playback, so this measurement is both artificial and severely lacking. Apple has moved the goalposts several times in how they "measure" batteries and I find it dishonest.
Here's some more realistic numbers. Just keep in mind this was tested with 26.0, so hopefully some battery optimizations in the last few months have improved these numbers across the board:
The base 17 to the Pro have pretty small differences (and the Pro actually performed worse for battery in gaming, though it probably got better gaming performance as a result). So I wouldn't rate the Pro's battery as good and the base 17 as average. They are roughly the same. They are both pretty average phones and will get 80% of users through 80% of the day without thinking about their battery.
However, the Air is almost 2 hours less usage across the board in every metric, so no matter what your usage, you are going to be plugging in your phone a couple hours earlier. That might be fine if you work a retail job where your phone has to stay in your pocket 8 hours a day or if you mostly use your phone during the day and then switch to an iPad when you get home. Lots of use cases where an Air is good enough. But it is behind and that will only get more noticeable when the battery ages and the OS updates get more taxing over the years.
Now an iPhone Air mini would compromise that further. Expect another 2 hours less or more. Heat becomes an issue at smaller sizes, which makes the battery cook and degrades it faster. How many use cases are there for a phone with a 10 hour battery? How about an 8 hour battery? The cutoff will vary with your needs, but every impact you make to the battery makes the potential audience for the device that much smaller. Seems destined to be a failure and probably wouldn't make it as far as even prototyping.
So everyone asks: Why not just move to Silicon Carbide batteries? SiC are denser, so they can be made thinner and vendors can stack multiple cells to deliver big 6000+ mAh batteries. However, there is real downside to SiC too. They lose battery health much more rapidly, so they only have an expected lifespan of 500-ish cycles. They also expand more as they age, so they may damage other interior components or, worse, rupture under the stress and start a battery fire. An Air is already a very thin phone, so that expansion would be catastrophic.
On an infinite timescale, maybe some solid state battery tech makes a thin, mini phone an easy thing to produce. But by that point we also might have moved past slab phones as a concept altogether.
