> a few years ago battery life was maybe 7 hours and now it’s 18
At what point do battery improvements become completely unnecessary? Who's out here using their laptops for 18 hours continuously? It's like an electric car that can go 2,000 miles on a single charge; YAGNI. The vast majority of people would be perfectly well-served by a smaller, lighter, less expensive laptop that cuts down the battery to just 10 hours.
18 hours advertised is usually running a locally stored video file on loop at medium to low screen brightness and some light web browsing.
My 18-hour laptop is more like 8-10 hours of real work usage, which is still fantastic compared to the 2-3 hours I would get at similar tasks 6-7 years ago.
Another big change is improvements to sleep and standby time. I can use half the battery, close the lid, and be reasonably confident that the other half will be ready and waiting the next time I need it.
EVs may actually be an apt comparison, where an EPA rating of 300 miles is more likely to give you 240 miles at highway speeds, or 150-200mi between charging stops since the optimal charge speeds fall off above a 70% charge.
I recall the same - the first and second gen airs were to me the epitome of what a laptop should be. Solid feature delivery in a portable light package that was still humming after a flight from LA to DFW.
This is a straw man. The argument is not against improving batteries. It's about engineering products for what people actually need, and not over-engineering them for the fantasies that we construct regarding what their needs are. To continue the EV example, the majority of trips by car in the US are less than 3 miles. You could comfortably reduce an EV's range from 300 miles to 30 and sell a car that still suffices for the majority of people, and what you gain from that is decreased costs and increased efficiency, which disproportionately benefits both overall power consumption and charge time (remember the tyranny of the rocket fuel equation). Most people don't need a car that charges once a month, they need a car that lasts just long enough for the time between when it's convenient to charge.
The truth is that almost nobody actually needs a computer that can last more than a single eight-hour workday on a single charge. In fact, most people need even less than that; if you're working somewhere with wifi, you're working somewhere with electricity. It's rare that I need my laptop to last more than two hours, let alone eight.
> if you're working somewhere with wifi, you're working somewhere with electricity
I agree with most of what you said, but I think this isn't necessarily true. Many people who want to work from a cafe have access to wifi but not electricity. Sometimes those outlets are in high demand and most people don't get one.
Or maybe you're on a plane, and your laptop is trying to draw too much current than the plane's crappy socket will give you (this just happened to me on a flight a week ago), so it only intermittently charges, but not enough to keep the charge percentage from steadily dropping.
Not wifi, but you might be tethering to your phone, away from electricity entirely.
Or maybe you just are offline entirely, without wifi or electricity.
Granted, I do agree with your overall point: the vast majority of the time my laptop is plugged in, and when it isn't, I expect I'll be near an outlet again within 2-3 hours at the most. Though I wonder how much of that is inherent to my usage patterns, and how much of that is me modifying my behavior because my laptop gets pretty bad battery life.
Most people don't need a lot of things that they have.
Most people don't need laptops, or nice monitors, or ergonomic desks and chairs.
The issue with arguing about need in this way is deciding who is the arbiter of what people need versus letting them buy things that they find useful or convenient or just nice.
> My 18-hour laptop is more like 8-10 hours of real work usage, which is still fantastic compared to the 2-3 hours I would get at similar tasks 6-7 years ago.
I’m not sure if you’re using an M1/2 MacBook but if you’re using windows laptops - 2 to 3 hours is pretty poor even for an old laptop (assuming it didn’t have an H series processor which is a whole another story).
My (dad’s) HP Probook with its 6th gen i5 processor could get between 6-10 hours of battery life when I got it around 2020, after some years of use. Sure, old batteries degrade, but 2-3 hours for a laptop less than 3-4 years old (or older, but with a new battery) is kinda poor to start with.
I have a fairly recent Dell XPS, maybe 2 years old. i9 and mobile RTX 3070. Realistically I get about 3-4 hours on it before it's dead. Pretty similar battery life if I'm on my linux partition too.
> 2 to 3 hours is pretty poor even for an old laptop
i get this on my macbook pro m1, but it happens when i have some webpages that suck battery life (google docs, jira etc) and/or xcode/android studio open (just sitting there) oh and corporate mandated ant-virus...
i think it might be highly dependent on work patters/environments
Never had a windows laptop that would last more than three hours...brand new or remanufactured. And I have used a LOT of windows laptops in my time, both used and new.
Except for the Lenovo Thinkpad X, or whatever they called it. I think I got ~8 solid hours of use out of them.
My 2022 MacBook Pro easily goes all day and into the evening under heavy use.
> My 18-hour laptop is more like 8-10 hours of real work usage,
Ans in which context do you find yourself needing to be even 8 hours in a row on your computer without being close to a power plug? You can even charge your computer in planes now!
> which context do you find yourself needing to be even 8 hours in a row on your computer without being close to a power plug?
It's summer. I was writing a paper in an outdoor pub. No plug available, unless I wanted to go indoors (I didn't). I used the entire battery. Granted, it was mostly VS Code being a power hog.
> You can even charge your computer in planes now!
Part of the appeal is the convenience. Not having to pull out the brick and charging cable, sit next to an outlet, and then pack it all back up is nice.
Longer battery life also means that for trips, you don't necessarily need to bring a full size laptop brick at all and instead can charge overnight off of a tiny phone charger.
> Not having to pull out the brick and charging cable, sit next to an outlet, and then pack it all back up is nice.
But then even 18h isn't enough, and at some point you end up running to the plug in the middle of a meeting, because of course in the end you need to charge it (this is happening to a different co-worker almost every week in remotr, and I dont even spend that much time in meetings).
> Longer battery life also means that for trips, you don't necessarily need to bring a full size laptop brick at all and instead can charge overnight off of a tiny phone charger.
Given that a small charger is already enough to give you 30W, I'm not sure it's going to make too much of a difference: if you keep tour computer plugged while working, the battery will slowly discharge, but under most load I suspect it will still survive the day without issues.
This is asking for a battery with hundreds of times more capacity, which, regardless of any future advancements in battery tech, would result in laptops with batteries which are hundreds of times heavier, hundreds of times more expensive, and using hundreds of times more materials than they could otherwise be (to say nothing of being hundreds of times more dangerous in the event of a battery failure).
When I first got my 2020 MacBook Air, could use it from getting up in the morning until going to bed at night...close to 18 hours on a weekend. Some of that was sleep time, but most was browsing, writing, watching video.
Now, almost three years later, I get noticeably shorter time, but I can still open my laptop at 7 in the morning, unplug it, and use it until mid evening without plugging it in. I've never had a laptop that lasted 18 hours, or even 12-14 hours as it does now.
When I got my MBA, my goal was to use it like an iPad...don't plug it in unless required to. I still don't have to worry much about it, even with battery wear.
>Who's out here using their laptops for 18 hours continuously?
"We should stop battery improvements because no one I know uses it" (to put it with a bit exaggeration) is certainly a novel take. Sometimes I put my laptop on the kitchen counter after doing stuff and not have to worry it'll be dead next afternoon when I need it for something.
You're forgetting one important take. Batteries degrade. In 3 years your "10 hour battery" will be more like 3 hours.
At what point do battery improvements become completely unnecessary? Who's out here using their laptops for 18 hours continuously? It's like an electric car that can go 2,000 miles on a single charge; YAGNI. The vast majority of people would be perfectly well-served by a smaller, lighter, less expensive laptop that cuts down the battery to just 10 hours.