Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by tajen 3464 days ago
It's natural that Apple designs a battery target for one usage. It's totally ok to tell '10hrs watching a movie', with actual figures being lower when doing other activities. PC competitors never ever hit the target, even for movie-watching, so we were perfectly happy to have 10 actual hours for one usecase.

Of course I don't get what customers gain from .07 nineteenth of an inch less of thickness. Next version Apple will provide a thinner macbook, with no battery, and the power supply will come from an NFC table...
4 comments
herbst 3464 days ago
There are several non apple products for years with way better battery life. My 6yo T420 easily makes 12-14 hours on Wifi. More if i disable stuff.
link
kalleboo 3464 days ago
I just wish they'd show figures for a use case that matters to me. If you keep 10 hours of "wireless web" mostly by optimizing your web browser, that's great for people who spend their time browsing Facebook, but if that means I lose 2 hours of my usage, I wish they had some number that showed that as well. Of course, I get that if they show a "heavy productivity - 3 hours" then pundits will latch onto that and compare it to other makers' web browsing numbers... It's a crap situation.

You have a point that many PC manufacturers have fantasy numbers - I don't want Apple to venture into that realm. ("10 hours... as long as literally the only process you have open is Safari")

Phrasing it another way... I hope Apple doesn't optimize their batteries for their own benchmark, to the detriment of real-world use cases.

link
JumpCrisscross 3464 days ago
> I don't get what customers gain from .07 nineteenth of an inch less of thickness

It is difficult to make thin, light and functional laptops. This results in fewer doing it, with those that do being able to command a margin for it.

It also amortises your product R&D. Minitiarisation continues, delivering not only more computing power but more in smaller form factors.

By focussing on thin and light, they can keep tweaking with decisions they had to make when putting a computer in a phone and then a watch and will need to face putting it into a contact lens, et cetera.

link
mynewtb 3464 days ago
> PC competitors never ever hit the target

Start looking at proper business models maybe.

link
mastax 3464 days ago
For example: https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/Revie...
link