Battery life--much improved for cars, but not for phones and laptops. Why?

A couple of reasons.

An electric car from 2008 would drive 75mphish on a highway, an electric car today will also drive… 75mphish on a highway. The power demands are roughly the same because our requirements are the same so more energy means more range.

OTOH, a phone from 2008 might have drawn 3 - 5 W but phones these days are drawing 10 - 15W at peak because we want our phones to be much better. Given more energy, phones and laptops would rather aim for a battery target and use the extra power for more performance.

Also, for regulatory reasons, pretty much every laptop will top out at 99.5 WhH since any device over 100 WhH can’t be carried onto a plane.

Even despite this, battery life figures have improved over the last decade. Previously, a 3 - 4 hour battery life was considered good for laptops but now recent macbooks are pushing 10 - 20 hours. Phones used to barely limp to the end of the day but now two day phones are not hard to buy.

The TL;DR is that cars are mainly using their energy to fight basic physics and physics doesn’t change so cars basically all use the same power draw to accomplish the same tasks. Computers are converting their power into computation and there’s a lot more room to both make computation more efficient and use more computation to achieve the same tasks better so computers can target a specific battery/performance level.

Mrs. L uses her iPhone a lot. She’s forever plugging it in because her apps drain it pretty quickly. At bedtime, she plugs it in and it achieves full charge in about 8 hours.

I have an android. I specifically chose it because it will charge completely in about 90 minutes with the special charger (or you can slow charge with USBC). They say that the battery will last about 2 days. I’m sure I can get that out of it, but I don’t use my phone nearly as much as my wife uses hers.

Another thing I like about my Androids: you can replace the batteries. In other phones I had, after about a year the battery didn’t want to take a charge so I’d get a new battery to put in. I suppose for hardcore users, every year or two it’s time for a new phone because technology has advanced so much?

My phone was only about $100; it’s a Tracfone, though, so I have to use them as the carrier.