Today I made a test: I took both of the smart phones off of their chargers when I started work this morning, and placed them beside my workplace like this:
These are, from left to right: the Apple iPhone SE (2020 model) which belongs to my employer, and the Google Pixel 4a phone which I “bought for one shilling” from my wife.
The test was: I wanted to see how much battery power was left after a full day of work, without using both devices. My expectation was that the Apple device with its A13 chip would win by quite some degree against the Google device with its Snapdragon chip.
And of course, “not using them” wasn’t exactly true – while the Apple device was silent, I heard the Pixel phone’s “Pling!” sound several times when someone sent me an email via GMX – don’t know if the display went on because I haven’t seen it, but I guess so (usually it does). The GMX app is also installed and configured on the iPhone, but notifications weren’t allowed on it. Another (unfair) advantage for Apple? I have no idea…
So after work – and I shut down my notebook after a bit more than nine and a half hours uptime including lunch break – I looked at both. Result: 93% battery left on the Apple, 99% on the Google phone.
Interesting. Obviously, Google has learnt how to let its Pixel phones doze (can hardly say ‘sleep’ when all of the time they’re in fact waiting for something to happen). Power management seems to be perfect on these. Would be interesting to compare it with Apple’s new A14 chip in the newer iPhone 12 – that one is the first 5nm CPU just like the M1 chip in Apple’s new “Silicon” machines… but as you can see, it’s not all just hardware…
As always, thanks for reading.