My laptop can take 1000 charge before dropping below 80% original capacity. In the past my previous laptops would be lucky to reach 300 charge cycles before dropping to 80% original capacity. Every aspect of technology has gotten more advanced. More power dense batteries, safer batteries, batteries that can have more charge cycles, batteries that can hold a charge longer while not in use, faster chips, more power efficient chips, smaller chips, lower power displays, wide viewing angle displays, thinner displays, more power efficient cellular radios, better antenna design, smaller antennas.
What it all comes down to is a balance of these technologies. How thin do people want their phone? How heavy? How much battery life, or, how often do you need to charge? If most people are happy charging once per day rather than every other day, batteries can be a half the size. Batteries are the heaviest and largest components of phones, which means a battery that is half the size directly means much smaller and lighter phones.
As for external battery packs, what has really given rise to these is the standardization on USB as the charging port for low power items. My phone, wireless headphones, vita, dualshock 4, mouse, wireless keyboard runs out of power, all of these things have a USB charger. If I'm on the go and need to charge one of them all I need is a battery pack and a usb cable. At the most I'll need a USB cable with a weird connector for things like the iPhone, but those exceptions are few. This means a battery pack needs at minimum one USB port to support a very wide range of devices. Before USB you would use DC coaxial power connectors, and there were a ton of versions of those. It was an exercise in frustration finding the right one, seemingly every device called for a different size.
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