There was definitely a period of (at least subjective) declining battery life in the 2010s but IMO things are shifting the other way. Some devices these days have much improved battery life over what came before, like Apple silicon, the Steam Deck, and most flagship phones. They're not always an order of magnitude better than the past, but better enough to unluck many use cases (doing a long work session away from a charger, being able to game for several hours anywhere, and not worrying about having to charge my phone until I get home, respectively).
If I had to describe it loosely, we've had 3 "eras" of battery-powered computing:
- Relatively simple devices (like the Gameboy) that lasted forever, because they just didn't do much
- Full-featured personal computing finally becoming "viable" on mobile devices, but with a clear cost (I remember <1 hour battery life laptops)
- More power-efficient HW and kinda-sorta-maybe-starting-to-be optimized SW that makes full-fat mobile computing much more bearable
They really can't game for several hours though. I have an m series. If you actually are hitting the cpu the battery life is basically the same as a laptop from 10 years ago in that situation where you are bound to your charger or its dead in 2 hours. The efficiencies of this stack come from it being able to throw things onto the e cores. Most (all?) games are not written in a way to benefit from that paradigm, they might still be hammering a single cpu.
Gaming is a special case imo, and more affected by the additional power drawn for the GPU.
For CPU bound apps, there's still a night and day difference between new apple silicon vs the previous generation of x64 processors.
I've used a laptop to DJ shows for several years, always requiring AC power for anything longer than an hour. With my m1 macbook, I've DJ'd 6+ hours with no power adapter, also powering hardware over USB. It's literally a 4x improvement over my previous i5 setup.
> But as a gamer, or even as an end user of any embedded piece of hardware, the trend towards shorter battery lives of devices is definitely visible.
No it isn't.
Also, apples to apples isn't even close. Even just the gameboy vs gameboy color ignores that they used different batteries. Also rechargable vs not.
I had a Gameboy and the move to rechargable batteries is a GOD send. I don't need battery-life as much as I needed to not be spending $$$ to play my games.
And missing plenty of others too (e.g., WonderSwan, Neo Geo Pocket). And the site's graph even shows improvements during the DS era versus the decade earlier. And it also ignores the more hybrid nature of certain more recent consoles like the Switch versus handheld-only ones.
4 hours on TurboExpress may be pushing it. I think it's more like 3hrs+. There is no disappointment though as any kid should be amazed that getting that kind of graphics (one and only full current gen console -- none of the 2 older gens made it) into a 2 gameboy sized system for 3+ hrs is quite impressive.
The rest is just a bunch of BS anecdata that definitely does not tell the story the author wants it to tell. The chart is sorted by battery life rather than date which really muddies the picture. Looking at the dates I don't see "the decline of battery life" but rather "battery life is highly variable but devices are getting more efficient as they get more powerful".
Progress in the last 4 years (through mid-2025) shows this post has aged poorly even if the premise had been supported by the data. Many handhelds gaming devices get over 6 hours continuous play, and several like the Odin 2 have larger batteries and can get 10-12 hours easily. And they can be recharged from typical USB chargers.
Honestly I feel like a lot of the “battery life is worse now” talk kind of misses something important. The way we use our devices has completely changed.
Back then we used them in short focused bursts. Now we want our phones and laptops to stay connected all the time, keep background apps running, drive high refresh screens, and even run AI features locally. That’s a big shift in expectations.
So maybe battery life didn’t actually get worse. Maybe we’re just expecting way more from our devices than we used to, and we don’t always think about what that really costs.
I believe the PS Vita only got about 6~7 hours of gaming time per charge, but it held charge while sleeping/powered off better than any portable electronic I've ever owned (which to me is a more valuable quality than total battery life).
OTOH I remember my DS Lite being surprisingly terrible about preserving the battery with the lid closed on "sleep." It wasn't much of a sleep state as it were, you got maybe a day in that state which wasn't all that much different than its active battery life in general. At least the games would boot very fast so there wasn't all that much friction unless it was the sort of game that wouldn't let you save. A chip like an r4 was a huge boon in that regard as you could "save" state at any point and have that write to the microsd and then fully power down and reboot right back in where you left it.
As an aside, I do not remember Game Boy lasting 25 hours on 4 AA batteries. They were 4-6 hours AT BEST for me, and I played on it quite a lot. But maybe my memory is hazy.
Did you always play with a light? 4-6 hours is closer to GameGear territory.
The Gameboy Pocket certainly had the shortest battery life of the GB/Pocket/Color trio due to using 2 AAA batteries. My experience with the original is that the batteries last a long time.
Readit News
If I had to describe it loosely, we've had 3 "eras" of battery-powered computing:
No it isn't.
Also, apples to apples isn't even close. Even just the gameboy vs gameboy color ignores that they used different batteries. Also rechargable vs not.
I had a Gameboy and the move to rechargable batteries is a GOD send. I don't need battery-life as much as I needed to not be spending $$$ to play my games.
The rest is just a bunch of BS anecdata that definitely does not tell the story the author wants it to tell. The chart is sorted by battery life rather than date which really muddies the picture. Looking at the dates I don't see "the decline of battery life" but rather "battery life is highly variable but devices are getting more efficient as they get more powerful".
Progress in the last 4 years (through mid-2025) shows this post has aged poorly even if the premise had been supported by the data. Many handhelds gaming devices get over 6 hours continuous play, and several like the Odin 2 have larger batteries and can get 10-12 hours easily. And they can be recharged from typical USB chargers.
I assume this is a typo for 4.3", because PSP is definitely 16:9 and photos of the Evercade look to be as well.
The Gameboy Pocket certainly had the shortest battery life of the GB/Pocket/Color trio due to using 2 AAA batteries. My experience with the original is that the batteries last a long time.