[khedoros]

People put up with all kinds of crap when it's the best option available. They're OK with it until something better comes along. In this case, a smartphone with a day of battery life trumps a flip phone with a week of battery life just because it can do so much more. You know what trumps a smartphone with X battery life? One with X+1 battery life, as long as it still fits comfortably in a trouser pocket. With the behemoth-screened phablets that are common these days, I think it's reasonable to make them a little thicker and a little more useful.

My phone's about 3 years old now. Even when it was new, I couldn't use it indiscriminately and expect a full day of charge. If I want to have it available for critical purposes like emergency calls, it's literally not usable in the way that I'd like to use it. I don't think that it's even remotely unreasonable to advocate for better battery life, and I think it's only a slight exaggeration to call current phone battery life "unusable".

[niftich]

Considering that only Apple phones run iOS, and there's only one Apple phone per physical device size bracket a generation, people don't really have a choice.

At least in the iPhone ecosystem it's not so much best option available, it's the only option available.

There's no immediate danger of people not buying iPhones because they want better battery life, so Apple doesn't even have to try harder than an average show of effort.