[bitwize]

I'm running a thinkpad with an 8 hour (theoretical) maximum battery life. Actually it's like 5 or 6. But the model from a year or two years before that would have only gotten 1-2 hours battery life.

So improvements are being made and we're seeing them. It's just slow going.

[pvarangot]

A lo of that improvement must also be from chips consuming less and more RAM resulting in no need for paging.

[frankus]

That's what really separates consumer electronics from cars: processing data requires (from a theoretical physics standpoint) a minuscule amount of energy, and there's a lot of room for improvement even with current technology.

Moving heavy things up hills or through air at high speeds requires a respectable amount of energy, and current technology is already within an order of magnitude or so to the theoretical peak efficiency.