You are aware that every iPhone form factor before the 6 existed, right?

Yes, and both the battery lives of phones and the demands of the OS exploded after the 6.

I can't wait to get my hands on a Mini, but there's no doubt in my mind that the battery life will be a step backward. That's the trade-off.

The original SE actually had fantastic battery life. If I recall correctly, better than the larger flagship 6s at the time.

Yeah folks are definitely forgetting that battery life != phone screen size. It's much more complicated than that.

I had a 6S and I couldn't stand the battery life (or size). "Down"graded to a 2016 SE and the battery life was leaps and bounds better -- plus, it didn't shut itself off outside on cold days.

Based on Apple's spec page, it does look like the Mini has worse battery life than the 12. The real question is:

- how is standby battery life?

and

- what kind of impact does 5G have?

The number's on Apple's site are a great deal better than the 2020 SE's battery life, so I think we might have a good balance here. Hopefully.

As Apple makes their chips faster and more efficient and as phone batteries get bigger and bigger, app developers rise to meet the challenge by producing increasingly sloppy software that can afford to be incredibly wasteful because raw speed of the hardware is masking its cracks.

Try to run Instagram today on an iPhone 6, you won't be able to even scroll a feed of static images smoothly without hitching. Imagine what it is doing to the battery.

I'm pretty sure lots of people will accept their phone to be 5mm thicker to allow more room for a bigger battery.

Exactly. These thin phones are just too thin for my taste anyway.