this post was submitted on 09 Jul 2024
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So on one hand, I agree with you. On the other hand, I think lightness is a thing people care about. I recently needed to get some photos backed up off an old phone of mine, and I didn’t realize how heavy my current one is until I picked up my old one. Thinness is irrelevant, but a 50% weight difference is not. Other than that, I don’t think most people get much utility out of more than a day of battery life, so 1.5 days new degrading down to 1 seems reasonable and in line with what most people want.
I agree for first impressions that heavier is perceived as more premium, but after months of actually using a device I can’t fathom that a reasonable person would actually prefer a heavier phone given an equivalent, lighter phone. Even Apple, king of making devices with mass appeal, decided last year that shedding weight was a priority when moving some iPhones from aluminum to titanium.
I mean nobody had to convince me. I just picked up an old phone and was immediately “why am I carrying around this brick when clearly this exists”
Harder to drop a heavier thing to a concrete floor, if it's only held in your palm.
Well, cheap or not, but in terms of fitting into my pocket a fat rubber-covered dumbphone is better than a modern thin and light one. That plate is just inconvenient. It's too big. I don't care how thin it is. A newspaper is thin too.
Ask them about the lack of a headphone jack 😉.
Totally agree! I picked up an old iPhone 6s yesterday and I just couldn’t believe how much lighter and thinner it is than the latest models.
I have a Samsung A71. It permanently lives in its protective case which gives it good bumpers around the easily-breakable edge-to-edge screen. It's now 4 years old and has survived numerous tumbles and drops over the years.
Occasionally I have to swap the SD card in it and I am always astonished at how thin and light and fragile it is when not in the case.
I would quite happily have an actual similar size phone to what "I have now" if the battery size was bumped up another 50 percent.
You're blaming the wrong thing again. Newer phones have higher capacity batteries than the old bricks by far. The issue is the screen, SoC, and modem power consumption has gone up too.
In the phone world, the jump in capacity that modern phones have from my 4370mAh battery in my A71 is negligible. They haven't increased power density much because that way leads to fires and lawsuits when users bend or otherwise damage their ridiculously fragile phones
My point was, if modern phones had the physical space that my phone + case has, they could have a bigger battery, and that bigger battery would then power all the hungry, hungry electronics.
Yeah, my Galaxy S3 is half as heavy as my current phone. It couldn't do less but had superior battery life. Smartphones and their OS all have grown bloated.