I agree! Ten years ago, we had netbooks with adequate performance for many tasks, and battery life of 10+ hours. Given the advances in CPUs since then, we should be able to pack similar performance onto much smaller CPUs, using much less power. Screens have also advanced since then.
Where are the super thin and light laptops that allow me to write emails, do light coding and browsing and SSH into other devices with 50 hours of battery life?
> Where are the super thin and light laptops that allow me to write emails, do light coding and browsing and SSH into other devices with 50 hours of battery life?
They got eaten by tablets. We used to have netbooks and subnotebooks, but they were too weak for mainline Windows after XP (perfectly adequate with Linux, tho), and there wasn't a clear path forward for them.
These days, iPads and Android convertibles with keyboard covers are reasonably okay for the use case, if you don't need full lap-top ergonomics (they definitely benefit from a proper table).
ARM-based laptops (Apple and otherwise) are slooowly closing that gap again, but you're "only" looking at ~20 hours battery life, last I checked. Which is still better than the last batch of subnotebooks ca. 2010, which needed like 3lbs of batteries to reach that same endurance with a dual-core 1GHz Core Duo and less RAM than your average modern tablet.
You don't need 50hr of battery life. If you're on a network, you're near power of some kind. Laptops these days use less than 10W in light usage and will run off anything with a USB power port.
This is a "solved problem" by the mainstream retail PC manufacturers...
> If you're on a network, you're near power of some kind.
Unless you're not, because you're using an LTE modem, or inflight wifi on an aircraft without in-seat power, or any of a number of other real world scenarios.
Where are the super thin and light laptops that allow me to write emails, do light coding and browsing and SSH into other devices with 50 hours of battery life?