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by daneel_w 1317 days ago
Do 10 hours of battery life "while surfing the web with Wi-Fi" really strike anyone as a strong argument these days? I'm a bit uncertain. I got 9 hours of the same out of my 2017 MacBook Air's measly battery when it was new 5 years ago. I know for a fact I don't need 14 CPU cores to get my browsing habits satisified. This laptop is trying to be a "premium business workstation" by packing a CPU that's crazy powerful for laptop standards, but with only 10 hours of battery life "while surfing the web with Wi-Fi" - due to said workstation CPU choice - it's not gonna last even 3 hours doing the workstation type of stuff they're trying to market it for. What a gadget...
1 comments

FWIW, 10 hours of battery life with a discrete GPU enabled is fairly unprecedented. Even the 16" Macbooks that shipped with discrete GPUs would struggle to sustain the CPU and GPU for 5 hours of parallel use.
Why would anyone, these days, need a discrete GPU for surfing the web? This detail, too, just like the CPU, falls short on the fact that making actual use of its power cuts battery time down to nothing. They should just market it for what it really is: a workstation laptop with 3 hours of battery life.
They also offer a version of this laptop without the discrete GPU if you need better battery life. There are still workloads that require local discrete GPU hardware though.
Offer this offer that, we are not seeing any technology improvement here. Only marketing words.
Did those not have automatic graphics switching? I tapped out of Intel MBPs around 2017, but AGS made using them pretty decent for the time.
They did, and technically the underpinnings exist for you to do the same thing on Linux (Nvidia PRIME render offloading). Generally though, if you're a 3D creator or ML researcher I could definitely see this machine making a case for itself.
I can't imagine why a professional would train on a laptop. These days a lot of models need a minimum of 20GB vram to get reasonable speeds. Not to mention GPU prices have crashed. A lot of consumer motherboards can run 4 x 3090 for $800 each.