[HN Gopher] The Decline of Battery Life
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The Decline of Battery Life
Author : akyuu
Score : 11 points
Date : 2025-05-28 16:45 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (brainbaking.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (brainbaking.com)
| os2warpman wrote:
| >Power for battery life--a fair trade-off? I'm not so sure.
|
| A GameBoy from 1989 is highly likely to still function.
|
| If you do not like the battery life of new products, continue to
| use the old ones.
|
| There is no tradeoff.
| anonzzzies wrote:
| We can write modern products like this. It is a lot fun and it
| feels really good afterwards.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Will people buy them?
|
| In the 80s you had to get long battery life because you were
| generally throwing the batteries away and shoving in new
| ones. Now with rechargeables you just plug in the cord and
| you can both play and recharge at the same time. It's not a
| big expensive hassle.
|
| Do customers want more features/graphics or more battery
| life?
| JohnFen wrote:
| Probably depends on the customers and the products. I'm not
| into gaming handhelds, but for my other battery-powered
| electronics, battery life is probably the most important
| characteristic. Charging things is a real hassle, and the
| less I have to do it, the better. Particularly when so many
| of these things don't have user-replaceable batteries.
|
| But I know there are others who prioritize other aspects
| over battery life.
| cosmic_cheese wrote:
| It's all about diminishing returns.
|
| I'd argue that we're deep into that territory with graphics
| and have been for at least a decade now. Yes newer games
| look better, but the different isn't radical like it is
| when comparing ~2005 games to their ~2015 counterparts, and
| outside of high settings junkies most people would be
| perfectly happy with 2015-2020 graphics for the foreseeable
| future.
|
| Battery life on the other hand is nowhere near the point of
| diminishing returns for many devices. If Apple released an
| iPhone that got a week of real world battery life for
| example, it'd be an instant hit. I'd personally love for
| gaming handhelds to have that kind of just so they never
| need to be plugged in while used and I rarely have to think
| about recharging.
| asdff wrote:
| If its been used its pretty clapped out at this point. The glue
| on my gameboy lcd panel failed which required frequent regluing
| whenever that old dab of superglue would also eventually fail.
| I bet if I took it out of the drawer right now it would be
| loose again and need another dust off and glue job. The buttons
| also go. My gameboy color is sadly basically unplayable because
| the buttons aren't very responsive anymore. I'm sure that is
| coming for my ds as well. My switch joycons are already shot.
| None of my original game cube controllers really work anymore
| and the system itself has stopped reading disks (thankfully new
| oem controllers are still built for that for the japan
| competitive smash market at least).
| andrewstuart wrote:
| It takes real effort to write code that is mindful of power draw.
| kingstnap wrote:
| Writing code that is mindful of power draw is the same as
| writing fast code.
|
| Race to yield to the os as soon as you can.
|
| Minimize data movement. Use efficient algorithms. Be mindful of
| abstraction overhead, etc.
| cosmic_cheese wrote:
| And if the platform you're working with gives you the means
| to easily offload appropriate tasks to increasingly-
| ubiquitous efficiency cores, it's probably a good idea to do
| so. Your app will feel more responsive as a side effect since
| the main thread and P-cores won't be as busy.
| JohnBooty wrote:
| In my experience, it can be quite a struggle to achieve this
| at one's day job, who often does not like to allocate time
| for such things.
| Lammy wrote:
| > a 4:3 LCD screen (the same as a PSP)
|
| I assume this is a typo for 4.3", because PSP is definitely 16:9
| and photos of the Evercade look to be as well.
| flacebo wrote:
| I wish the graph was sorted by release date.
| flacebo wrote:
| ChatGPT to the rescue
|
| https://imgur.com/SzbwCEb
| valbaca wrote:
| > But as a gamer, or even as an end user of any embedded piece of
| hardware, the trend towards shorter battery lives of devices is
| definitely visible.
|
| No it isn't.
|
| Also, apples to apples isn't even close. Even just the gameboy vs
| gameboy color ignores that they used different batteries. Also
| rechargable vs not.
|
| I had a Gameboy and the move to rechargable batteries is a GOD
| send. I don't need battery-life as much as I needed to not be
| spending $$$ to play my games.
| patwolf wrote:
| The Game Gear, Atari Lynx, and TurboExpress all got around 4
| hours of battery life and burned through 6 AA batteries.
| garciansmith wrote:
| And missing plenty of others too (e.g., WonderSwan, Neo Geo
| Pocket). And the site's graph even shows improvements during
| the DS era versus the decade earlier. And it also ignores the
| more hybrid nature of certain more recent consoles like the
| Switch versus handheld-only ones.
| _--__--__ wrote:
| I believe the PS Vita only got about 6~7 hours of gaming time per
| charge, but it held charge while sleeping/powered off better than
| any portable electronic I've ever owned (which to me is a more
| valuable quality than total battery life).
| asdff wrote:
| OTOH I remember my DS Lite being surprisingly terrible about
| preserving the battery with the lid closed on "sleep." It
| wasn't much of a sleep state as it were, you got maybe a day in
| that state which wasn't all that much different than its active
| battery life in general. At least the games would boot very
| fast so there wasn't all that much friction unless it was the
| sort of game that wouldn't let you save. A chip like an r4 was
| a huge boon in that regard as you could "save" state at any
| point and have that write to the microsd and then fully power
| down and reboot right back in where you left it.
| scblock wrote:
| Well, first this should be marked as (2021).
|
| The rest is just a bunch of BS anecdata that definitely does not
| tell the story the author wants it to tell. The chart is sorted
| by battery life rather than date which really muddies the
| picture. Looking at the dates I don't see "the decline of battery
| life" but rather "battery life is highly variable but devices are
| getting more efficient as they get more powerful".
|
| Progress in the last 4 years (through mid-2025) shows this post
| has aged poorly even if the premise had been supported by the
| data. Many handhelds gaming devices get over 6 hours continuous
| play, and several like the Odin 2 have larger batteries and can
| get 10-12 hours easily. And they can be recharged from typical
| USB chargers.
| dgunay wrote:
| There was definitely a period of (at least subjective) declining
| battery life in the 2010s but IMO things are shifting the other
| way. Some devices these days have much improved battery life over
| what came before, like Apple silicon, the Steam Deck, and most
| flagship phones. They're not always an order of magnitude better
| than the past, but better enough to unluck many use cases (doing
| a long work session away from a charger, being able to game for
| several hours anywhere, and not worrying about having to charge
| my phone until I get home, respectively).
|
| If I had to describe it loosely, we've had 3 "eras" of battery-
| powered computing: - Relatively simple devices
| (like the Gameboy) that lasted forever, because they just didn't
| do much - Full-featured personal computing finally becoming
| "viable" on mobile devices, but with a clear cost (I remember <1
| hour battery life laptops) - More power-efficient HW and
| kinda-sorta-maybe-starting-to-be optimized SW that makes full-fat
| mobile computing much more bearable
| asdff wrote:
| They really can't game for several hours though. I have an m
| series. If you actually are hitting the cpu the battery life is
| basically the same as a laptop from 10 years ago in that
| situation where you are bound to your charger or its dead in 2
| hours. The efficiencies of this stack come from it being able
| to throw things onto the e cores. Most (all?) games are not
| written in a way to benefit from that paradigm, they might
| still be hammering a single cpu.
| dgunay wrote:
| To be clear, I meant on the Steam Deck (and of course it
| depends on the game).
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