> just make it slightly thicker and you could add hours to the battery life.
Well, they have been making iPhones thicker. Apple's obsession with thinness apparently isn't as obsessive as purported.
Of course there's a design tradeoff: how thick to make it and what to use the available space for. We can argue about specific tradeoff decisions all day, but we can't argue that the decisions have to be made -- and whatever the decisions are, they won't satisfy everyone.
Anyway, if you want to trade thickness for battery capacity, you can get a battery case.
I suspect Apple's iPhone thinness requirements include "device is comfortable to hold and use in a thick case". The camera bump has gotten gradually larger partially because they can be a cut out section of such a case, without taking up additional thickness and making the cased device less comfortable to hold and use for long periods.
The most obvious subtraction to preserve device size and simplify internals to allow for other features was the headphone jack. Thus the "courage" remark - the teams (all the way up to the executives) were willing to have a device change that may people would be upset about because they felt it was the right tradeoff to make long-term.
Well, they have been making iPhones thicker. Apple's obsession with thinness apparently isn't as obsessive as purported.
Of course there's a design tradeoff: how thick to make it and what to use the available space for. We can argue about specific tradeoff decisions all day, but we can't argue that the decisions have to be made -- and whatever the decisions are, they won't satisfy everyone.
Anyway, if you want to trade thickness for battery capacity, you can get a battery case.