Same with Linux/Windows versus Macs. It is only recently that Linux/Windows laptops have begun to approach Macs in terms of battery life, and their battery efficiency is still far behind, especially with Apple Silicon being a thing.
If Apples battery efficiency is so good they should release a phone with a 5000mah battery /as well as/ said efficiency and market their battery life that beats all their competitors by multiple days, I'm sure a lot of people would buy that in a heartbeat.
The downsides of larger batteries are increased weight, volume, and cost. Being more efficient gets the same battery life for less of those three, allowing them to either be reduced or the budget to go to other components.
Platform Model Life Size Efficiency
iOS Apple iPhone 13 Pro Max 21.7 4352 4.98
iOS Apple iPhone 13 16.8 3227 5.21
iOS Apple iPhone 13 Pro 16.6 3095 5.37
Android ASUS ROG Phone 5 16.6 6000 2.77
Android ASUS ROG Phone III 16.5 6000 2.75
Android ASUS ROG Phone II 16.2 6000 2.7
Android Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra (S888) 15.9 5000 3.18
iOS Apple iPhone 11 Pro Max 15.6 3969 3.93
It's almost as if they deliberately added this seemingly bad option so people would choose the most expensive option iPhone 13 Pro Max. Because it would seem like the best deal out of three. I mean the Pro Max is just $100 more expensive than Pro, right?
But remove this decoy option, and most people would just buy the iPhone 13.
The point was that it's reasonable to expect the battery life of plasma OS and friends to be comparable to Android, similar to how Linux on a laptop is comparable to Windows.
> On the iPhone 13 series, there’s a few complex behaviours to consider: First off, the iPhone 13 Pro and its LTPO panel noticeable decreases the minimum baseline power consumption of the phone by around a massive 100mW… While 100mW doesn’t sound much, when using the phones at lower screen brightness, this can represent a large percentage of the overall device power consumption, and vastly increase battery life for the new iPhone 13 Pro models.
> Comparing the 13 to the 13 Pro, the phones have quite different curves – while the 13 Pro uses less power to display full white up until 140 nits, the regular 13 becomes more efficient afterwards. We’re also seeing different curve shapes, meaning the phones are driven differently in regards to their PWM and emitter voltages.
The Pro phones are more battery efficient than the regular ones, and probably use the extra space gained with a slightly smaller battery for some other featureful hardware (cameras?).
The trade offs made seem to be reasonable for a Pro that’s between the regular and the Pro Max. It doesn’t seem to me like just a decoy.
The $100 is irrelevant to the target market of the Pro line, it's basically pocket change. You buy the phone that's most comfortable for your hand because that matters way more than the $100.
Sadly I cannot confirm this for my 6+ different laptops I owned. And I tried all the crazy settings, grub, tlp, .. and even compiling the kernel myself.
It is hard to beat loads of dedicated engineers, who are paid regular and well and have access to all the proprietary device information and even manufacturing.
edit: maybe there was one time, when a linux stock install performed maybe equally than a stock windows install. But that was only because of the windows bloat, which linux does not ship. But I can easily remove most of the bloat, but I cannot just write a better gpu driver. But if windows continues its bloat path, it will be soon inferior despite way better drivers.
I remember being able to run Ubuntu in the background on an unrooted Android phone while browsing the Internet. You can’t do that with iPhone.
That said, I rather have battery predictability over features, but I always thought that if Android dropped background apps, they would have the same battery usage as an iPhone.
Android has great battery life, spyware doesn't ;-).
I get two days of intensive use from my old Huawei P30 Pro.
I absolutely love Calyx, and wouldn't move from it. However, the battery life even compared to my old iPhone 6S is pretty bad. I'm not even a heavy phone user, I don't use social media or have many apps sending me notifications (only Signal) and I feel like my phone can't even last two days of light usage. My iPhone I could use similary and I could usually get 3 days of usage.
Google also invested a lot of time into optimizing battery consumption (which hackers and people like the guy from Commonsware derogatory call "War against background processing"). If you look up through history of Android releases, there isn't a single release where there would't be a pretty major change in how Android puts device to sleep and how it wakes it up again.
That stuff is really hard since a single bad service can drain your battery in matter of hours and needs seriously tight coordination between all software makers on your device to avoid problematic edge cases.
Unfortunately trusting developers to use those allowances wisely did not pan out.
Specifically: While iPhones are noticeably more power efficient than Android phones the latter have been sufficient for my usecases especially given that there are typically options with larger batteries.
As for Xiaomi being comically large, I found the mid-range Samsung and Motorola models to have larger bezels and to generally be larger for similar specs when I bought my Xiaomi Redmi Note 7 a couple years ago. The reality is that the majority of phones from Motorola, Xiaomi, LG and Nokia are designed and manufactured by 3 Chinese ODMs (Wingtech, Huaquin and Longcheer), and even 20% of Samsung's phones come from these 3 ODMs. See: https://amosbbatto.wordpress.com/2021/12/10/comparing-l5-and...
I mean...without any metrics (from you or the parent) the statement is pretty hollow and doesn't mean anything.
In absence of that, even an anecdotal comparison seems more relevant than a statement that only considers one of the two items being compared.
Update: Because I was curious whether my subjective experience was backed by real numbers, I looked up the top few Android and iPhones with the greatest battery life as per the first website I found [1] and calculated their efficiency based on their battery capacity. Various iPhone 13 models used 3.1 to 3.6 mAh per minute whereas the Android phones used 4.0 mAh/min (Moto G9 Power), 4.2 mAh/min (Samsung Galaxy A03s, Realme 9 Pro), 4.3 mAh/min (Nokia G21).
[1] https://www.techrankup.com/en/smartphones-battery-life-ranki...
One of the things I want to do on my Librem5 is monitor my servers, so that will involve polling things every few minutes. PowerTop says that I can save power by changing the polling for USB, but that changes Wifi ping times from ~1ms to ~350ms. Eventually I'll probably try experimenting with that to get an option with a 10ms ping time that still saves some power.
It would be nice to be able to reliably run background apps on Android.
Also as an aside Android doesn't appear to reliably kill background processes, it kills them if it thinks that something else needs the resources. Running the Facebook app is one way of triggering Android to kill a bunch of background apps.
The Purism CSO has been running a Librem 5 as his primary desktop PC for over a year.
When Plasma was first released I was probably running hardware slower than a Librem 5.
(To be fair, I ran LineageOS without Google Play Services installed, which makes a huge difference, so it's not exactly apples to apples.)