> We haven't got more battery life

15 years ago even the high end smartphones could barely make it half the day before dying. Now all-day battery life is the norm, and the Chinese phones with the latest battery tech can easily last 2 days (Samsung, Google, Apple are very behind here).

Laptop battery life isn't even comparable to what it was 20 years ago.

And software getting slower doesn't change the fact that our material goods (pixels, bytes, flops) have improved orders of magnitude while getting cheaper.

Back in the Nokia brick days you could easily go a full week between charges.

Of course it's an apples to oranges comparison since a modern smartphone has infinitely more functionality, but in this one thing modern phones remain objectively worse.

You have to compare the old Nokia phone with the new Nokia dump phone. I doubt that the old phone's battery lasts longer than that of a new Nokia 2720 Flip:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_2720_Flip

The new dump phone likely has more functionality and uses a much more robust wireless network.

Does it, though? Unless you go back so far you're talking about fixed–layout b&w LCD screens, the next era after that had games and the internet — what's actually new since that time? Multitasking yes, what else?

You can still go a week on a modern phone if you restrict your usage to what you would do on a Nokia brick phone.

I got a new phone but didn't set it up immediately. The battery lasted about two weeks. Once I installed my apps and SIM card it dropped to about one day. Once my old phone had no SIM card and was sitting permanently in flight mode with no apps running, its battery life rose from about one day to about two weeks.

Every time we get faster computers we get much much slower software. We get larger hard drives, so software bloats until it takes GBs