[faeriechangling]

When I owned a Mac laptop a decade ago, I always had my laptop positioned near a power outlet.

When I got laptops with more battery life, the charger is now used to charge the laptop overnight so I can use it throughout the next day.

If you never use your battery, why own a laptop at all? Why not buy a Mac mini or an iMac?

[LeifCarrotson]

I have a laptop not because I want to use my computer on my lap or while unplugged, but because I want to be able to carry my computer between different workplaces.

As an industrial controls engineer, I'm constantly bouncing from my desk to my rolling cart in the shop, to putting it in my toolbag and driving to a local customer's site, to putting it in my carryon and flying to a remote customer's site, to my home office. At each location, I have power available. At some locations, I have external monitors and a keyboard/mouse, so I could easily plug in a Mac Mini or luggable mATX desktop, at others the laptop is often perched on some convenient stack of pallets and peripherals like monitor stands would be highly inconvenient. A 10x15x1.5" slab with a power brick (and a spare power brick can be left at frequently used locations) is just a really nice form factor to carry around, it's superior to separate parts like even a small Mac Mini, SFF, or mATX desktop, an external monitor that probably needs a box of some sort to keep it from being damaged, and a keyboard and mouse.

I use too much Windows-only proprietary software to make the iMac sensible, but I like the idea of the power and legibility of a large display, desktop-grade CPUs, and the larger thermal envelope available by ditching the battery and requiring wall power. Does anyone make an all-in-one or a carrying case for all-in-ones (with probably a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse) that would make jumping between different work locations make sense?

I'm aware that's sort of what a gaming laptop is, and it's pretty similar to the Lenovo Thinkpad, Dell Precision, and HP Elitebooks that I've used in the past...Especially after a couple years of 24/7 charger connections while baking the battery with a Quadro GPU running Solidworks, you barely have enough battery capacity to carry the laptop from one desk to another. Unfortunately, all those workstation laptops make concessions to try to pretend they're a Macbook Air where you can do...something? apparently some people do some kind of work with the laptop running on a battery and balanced on their knees. It's just a foreign concept to me. I'd rather they were 2" thick with a 120V socket, no battery, and 400W of CPU+GPU.

[pmontra]

A battery is nice as an integrated UPS, to be able to move the machine between rooms, put it into a bag for hours and resume from suspend in a different place without having to restart every single application, same thing over a night.

About Macs, in my case I never liked their GUI since the very first Mac (the top bar, the menu, etc) and that's an instantaneous show stopper.

[csdvrx]

> About Macs, in my case I never liked their GUI since the very first Mac (the top bar, the menu, etc) and that's an instantaneous show stopper.

I'm a huge fan of the modern UI seen in Windows and Gnome where the "wasted" space of the title bar can show open tabs in Windows Terminal or Edge: with a minimized taskbar, the browser and the terminal can be used in fullscreen with 0 vertical space lost.

[plafl]

> If you never use your battery, why own a laptop at all? Why not buy a Mac mini or an iMac?

Sometimes I need to move, for example while travelling, otherwise I would use a desktop computer.

[dialogbox]

> This is a usually cited concern for so many people and I'm curious to know why because I rarely unplug my laptop, like most people I know.

> Sometimes I need to move, for example while travelling, otherwise I would use a desktop computer.

People travels often. I do everyday.

I have one corp laptop and I don't have charger in my home. I don't want to have one more power brick for my 16 inch M1 macbook so I usually borrow a line from my wife's M1 Macbook Air but that rarely happens like only during weekend.

After switching to M1, I feel very safe to be unplugged. Even if I need to charge it, some 20W level of phone chargers can charge my mac while I'm using it. This guy only uses around 15~20W even with tons of chrome tabs + zoom meeting. It is using 9W ATM.

This is really a game changer for me.