[freehunter]

There is a market (not sure how big, but there is one) for modern-day luggables. They're more often called "desktop replacements", and "working without a power source" is really far down the list of requirements for them.

The common use case for these machines: a developer who needs a fast CPU and lots of RAM (and often a dedicated video card) coupled to a 15" or better yet a 17" screen and a ton of hard drive space. You may unplug to go to a meeting for an hour or two, but you'll be back to your desk (and docking station) pretty quickly. You're not working from a coffee shop or a couch because you need a real mouse and a real desk. You occasionally take your work computer home when you're the on-call resource that week.

In that case you don't need a big battery (or rather you need a big battery but not a lot of battery life). Five hours is more than good enough, but you can't trade that performance for anything you don't need.

I know because I have one sitting unused beside me (Thinkpad W530) from back in the days before I started traveling for work.

[segmondy]

I have two of these workstations, a dell and a lenovo w520. My lenovo is from 6 yrs ago. 8 cores, 20gbs of ram. It's a beast. I figured I needed the power. The truth is that they both have been sitting in the same spot now unmoved for a year. One at work and another at home. Last time I traveled with one, I hated myself. I carry around a chromebook or a lightweight lenovo carbon if I need to carry things around. With 24/7 cheap internet. If I need power I can VPN to work/home/cloud.

[w0m]

> Five hours is more than good enough

Was only a few years ago where any decently performant machine didn't get more than 3 or 4 hours anyway. Everyone has a different use case.

[Retric]

Five hours new does not stay five hours for long. Really what people want is to have ~3 hours 2+ years from now.

[lallysingh]

Who's got 5 hour meetings?

[carlmr]

Poor shmucks in big corporations. I've had a few 8h meetings in the past year. We did have a power source though.

[DoofusOfDeath]

For me, it's 5-hour flights on planes that sometimes don't have working power plugs.

[Willson50]

In my experience, it is usually 5 1-hour meetings.

[freehunter]

All day "strategy meeting".

[icegreentea2]

Another great use case is something like a mobile CAD/PCB/whatever design software. This is useful for contractor/consulting shops. It's super useful for them to be able to bring to client sites and be able work on "the real thing" right there. In that case they're still plugging in on the other side, but the portability is nice.

[ghaff]

Yeah, I don't know how common this is but when I decided to do something about the couple of old DIY and not really working properly Windows PCs I had under my desk, I decided that the cleanest route to go was just to get a big 17" Alienware laptop. It's not really portable though I could take it downstairs in my house if I wanted to. It's mostly for sometimes gaming or other Windows-specific tasks and I just didn't want a lot more random clutter in my office.