| > The rave reviews alone would be free marketing worth well above the money invested in the software engineers. Whether it's worth it depends on how much it costs to improve efficiency, and how many more laptops they need to sell at a higher price to recoup those costs. For background, the AMD Framework 13's 61Wh battery supposedly gets ~9 hours[1] (~6.8Wh per hour), the System 76 14" Lemur Pro's 73Wh battery claims up to 14h [2] (~5.2Wh per hour), the MacBook Pro M4s 72Wh battery claims up to 22h [3] (~3.3Wh per hour). I am skeptical anyone can get close to Macbook levels of efficiency without soldering components, designing new chips, and spending close to their ~$31 billion in R&D. But let's say we shoot for 4Wh per hour to get us in the 15-18 hour range. If you could achieve such an improvement with a couple software folks and you can amortize it over a million laptops that might add less than ten bucks per laptop. That'd be great! Personally I am skeptical it's anywhere close to that easy, and I'm skeptical that these niche manufacturers are selling a million laptops a year. I think it's much more likely that meaningfully improving efficiency would require making each laptop significantly more expensive. > would pay an extra money per month for Apple level battery life ... I would gladly pay much more above and beyond a macbook pro But would you pay an extra several hundred dollars for a Framework or System 76 laptop if other Linux laptops received the same efficiency benefits without needing to increase their costs to cover developer salaries? Apple can afford to spend billions improving efficiency because they can amortize that across many more laptops and because they can capture most of the benefit of their research. (And because for several decades they had loyal customers who paid an extra couple hundred bucks per laptop even when they didn't have better efficiency.) > Something like this would be myself and many other peoples literal dream computers and withing a year or two's time almost any Linux user would be on System76 laptops, guaranteed If we're dreaming, why stop there? If System 76 produced a $10 laptop that can be powered by nothing but sunshine they'd take over the world! But realistically, I think the best we're going to get in the foreseeable future is slow, incremental efficiency improvements that lag a generation or two behind Apple. (A simpler way Framework or S76 could increase battery life to the ~15-19h range would be to bump up to a 99Wh battery which probably costs on the order of a hundred bucks for the larger battery and chassis, though it would also make the laptop thicker and heavier.) [1] https://www.tomshardware.com/laptops/ultrabooks-ultraportabl... (I don't see a manufacturer claimed range)
[2] https://system76.com/laptops/lemp13/configure
[3] https://support.apple.com/en-us/121553 |
Whats involved in improving the power consumption?
Im not an OS engineer so I have no idea, I was simply going by another commenters estimate which was a few OS developers.
And judging by the amount of times you said you were skeptical instead of giving any sort of meaningful information... you clearly arent an OS engineer either.
And idealist and a skeptic walk into a bar. The bartender says two shots of disappointment coming up.