[asoneth]

> you clearly arent an OS engineer either.

Correct, though I do regularly deal with the same class of assumption, where folks suggest that if I just hired a couple people to work on X, Y, or Z that would be well worth the money. The statement seems to come from a place of hope, a belief that there is a simple solution just waiting for someone to point it out, as opposed to something that is very hard or simply impractical.

But it's just not realistic to believe that the only thing preventing a niche laptop manufacturer from matching the battery efficiency of a vertically-integrated product backed by $30+ billion a year in R&D is a couple OS developers. Such a belief can also be demoralizing if every hard-won incremental improvement to Linux power efficiency is judged against such unrealistic expectations.

(I believe that someday we will have lightweight Linux laptops with 22+ hour batteries, but I also believe that by that point Apple will have shifted the goalposts again and people will continue to be dissatisfied.)