Re: just plug in an external battery
The opposite of this.
I hate the very idea of it, always have-- this is nothing personal, just the occasion on which I bitch about it. The typical external battery runs down a 4.2V lithium cell to power a 5V boost converter (draining it faster and faster as its voltage falls) just so the Lightning or USB connector sees the voltage it requires, just so it can step it back down to ~4.2V, with every discrete component just pissing away energy. Damn! Wouldn't it be nice if there was just some way to physically move the energy goo out of a full battery and into the dead one? Maybe some kind of hot-swappable modular goo container that the battery can quickly tap into?
P.S. There's a guy who plays a game (which I don't believe runs on iOS) and who occasionally says "bbl, need to charge my iPhone". Failing to imagine how charging an iPhone would require one to disconnect from an online multiplayer session for a short time, I had just decided that "charge my iPhone" is a euphemism for "sit on the toilet". Then, this article...
Biting the hand that feeds IT
