How to: Write a battery review

John Gruber on the iPhone 12 mini/max battery:

“Battery life is a bit hard to quantify, and in my opinion difficult to peg to a single number. Milliamp-hours or watt-hours don’t tell you the story. What you want to know is, in practical real-world use, how long the device lasts on a charge. An ideal test would involve, say, an iPhone 12 Mini and iPhone 12 used side-by-side, doing the same things in the same apps at the same time in the same places.”

When thinking about a job-to-be-done, numbers often get in the way.

This is not the first time Gruber has faced this conundrum, here talking with Ben Thompson about temperature.

Gruber) “I staunchly believe that Fahrenheit is the better scale for weather because it’s based on the human condition. Who gives a crap about what the boiling point of water is, it’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard in my life.”

(Thompson) “The other thing is that Celsius is not precise enough. In the car it adjusts it by point-five because a single degree of celsius is too much for the car. Fahrenheit is more finely grained in a positive way.”

Insiders suffer the most because it’s efficient to use shorthand, yet it abstracts what the customers want. To serve customers, forget the numbers and get to the really why. For instance, it’s often not about the acidity of the grapes but the story of the label.