MBP-quality trackpads and MBP-equivalent battery life. I can't understand why battery life isn't higher on the list of "must haves" for people who want a nice linux laptop.
I've had that all-day battery for years on various Thinkpad X1 Carbon's that I've owned. Linux doesn't do as well as advertised but I can still go 6-8 hours of active use (it will last all day and all night if the screen is off (like when I forget to close it before I go to bed).
Some laptops have a built in battery along with a swappable battery. The battery life people could get one of these and get enough spare batteries to smoke the mac several times over.
For me battery only needs to be about 2-3 hours. Otherwise I am moving from plug in to plug in (I leave chargers in many places like work, office, living room). Long enough to take a short flight without plugins.
I suspect that as more and more workplaces move to open-layout plans and have an increasingly mobile workforce, max unplugged work time is becoming more and more valuable as a feature.
At previous jobs we were just very generous with the chargers. Everyone having a single charger connector (MBP) is super valuable . This is good because then you dont bring a charger with you, because you know each meeting room has one or more chargers. Each seat in the office has a charger etc.
Companies sometimes say "Yeah but $90* X is too much" ... But it costs a lot to have people wiring/unwiring chargers all the time. 3 minutes at $1 a minute adds up to $90 really fast.
We do that at work. Things get complicated with the latest-generation MBP of course - now we have the old MagSafe charger, ThinkPad chargers, USB C chargers, as well as HDMI, DP, and USB-C Thunderbolt video connectors.
Our first few USBC MBP users in our office are having a ton of "fun" with that. Also the "which monitors do and don't work with this thing? Which adapter(s) do I need for this one again? Damnit that didn't work, lemme try this other one..." game. TONS of fun.
Do you ever have to do any laptopping for more than 2-3 hours in a place where there is no opportunity to plug in to a power source? My experience simply says that's really unlikely for me, and my couch and desk at work are 99.999% of the use cases. So battery allows me to meet these vendors halfway.
Traveling folks often deal with this, which is why I'm seeing a lot more of us switch to iPad Pros or Surface Pros instead of MacBooks. Portability and battery life are often the only concerns when you're in airports and hotels and conference rooms and coffee shops all day. Airports and airplanes are getting better at putting power outlets in handy locations, but there still are not nearly enough to guarantee you'll be able to work.
Nearly every time I travel I'm working on a PowerPoint or some kind of documentation for an hour or two in the airport, then two hours on the plane, finishing it up at a coffee shop when I meet up with my coworkers, then presenting it for several hours at the client. None of those places are guaranteed to have power available to me.
Sure a lot of people have laptops that sit at their desk always plugged into an outlet, only running on battery when they pop into a meeting for an hour or two, but plenty more people actually need portable devices. That's the entire reason the MacBook Air was such a smash hit, you see them everywhere with both traveling businessmen and college kids, both of whom need something light and portable with amazing battery life. Both of whom are willing to forego an octo-core i7 and 32gb of RAM in exchange for 10 hours of battery life in a device that weighs less than 3 lbs.
Luckily difference devices exist for the different use cases that different people have.
> Do you ever have to do any laptopping for more than 2-3 hours in a place where there is no opportunity to plug in to a power source?
Yes, almost literally every day.
My typical schedule is to show up for standup at 9, then be at a diner by 9:30. I work from there until noon, then back to the office until 2 to charge my laptop. At 2 I leave and work from a hammock in a park or something similar.
That's ~6 hours every day of working where there isn't a power outlet nearby.
It appears you're contradicting an ancestor's lived experience :) Is it really so ridiculous to suggest that sometimes, people who use Linux (let's call them technical) travel a lot? Is the idea of a programmer who flies around the world to present their work at conferences really so ridiculous? (There are lots of other archetypes, like consultants, SME owners that are still very technical themselves, et cetera.)
A lot of Apple's battery life success seems to be due to the software—both iOS and MacOS. Android's only just now starting to kind of catch up with iOS on power management, and MacOS doesn't beat other laptops because they use giant batteries or something. I'd expect it to take 7-8 figures of focused investment in the Linux kernel and probably some significant mountain-moving to get peripheral projects (windowing system, init maybe, various driver vendors) coordinated and going in the the right direction to improve Linux's power management much.
Hell, even the Apple browser is more respectful of battery life than its competitors. Power draw seems to be considered carefully at every level at Apple, and it shows in their results.
This. I've always been a Linux and OpenBSD user, but I'm buying a MBP 13" next week mostly for portability and battery life, planning to run macOS instead of Linux just because of this.
As an example, the Xiaomi Air 13 is smaller and lighter than an MBP 13, with an equivalent trackpad, albeit slightly smaller battery (8h web browsing), for ~750$. Also aluminium unibody but easily serviceable (even has a second SSD slot).
There are many laptops on the market that have MBP-equivalent battery life. Trackpad is another matter, but for example Thinkpad's have a better keyboard.
> I can't understand why battery life isn't higher on the list of "must haves" for people who want a nice linux laptop.
My laptop is plugged in almost 100% of the time. If it needed to be plugged in a full 100% of the time, that would be at most an extremely minor hit to usability. I need a laptop that I can move, not a laptop that I can use while it's being moved.
Interesting how many people here are asking for trackpad quality.
I always use my laptops with a mouse plugged in, and disable the trackpad (and pointless touchscreen on my work computer) as one of the first things I do.
I would love to have a laptop with no trackpad at all (or maybe just one of those tiny nubs), leaving more space for a better keyboard.
(For reference: I push mine WAY too hard. This is tab 406... I do use The Great Suspender, but, um. It does great (genuinely does hold up) with <15 tabs though, and the GM965 handles 1080p through mplayer and 720p in Chrome really nicely.)
I'd say these two aspects are equally split between software development and hardware design. Now I don't know how System76 fares on the software side, but are they really up to the challenge? I'll be watching closely, but am not expecting much.