[themodelplumber]

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.

[freehunter]

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.

[LyndsySimon]

> 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.

[kazagistar]

Airplanes?

[bmuppireddy]

A person who travels frequently doesnt need a *nix laptop.

[lvh]

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.)

[auganov]

Funny story: I was on a long-haul flight. The person next to me noticed all 3 of us were using linux and we had a laugh :)

[gh02t]

I'm an engineer that travels a lot for conferences and I use Linux almost exclusively... I'd love a svelte laptop with long battery life.

[ashark]

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.

[apetresc]

I can't even tell what stereotype you're trying to riff on here...

[IntelMiner]

And why is that?