Just saying, if you had spent as much on a laptop as you did on a MacBook, you would get a full work days of battery.
It’s the same failure point apple fans have about Android. Yeah there are cheap androids. They suck, but also they cost$100-$200 new. What’s apples offering in that price range?
Realistically with the new apple M-series stuff this is just not the case. The battery life is absolutely nuts. Especially compared to high end Linux laptops.
Source: forced to use apple for work
The new Snapdragon laptops are getting 15h+ of battery life, which is a couple of hours less than the new Macs (macs have bigger batteries) in the same benchmarks. The next gen Ryzen AI 300 Omnibook is said to have 20h+… but why do people want so much out of their battery? I’ve only used laptops for work and I can’t remember being more than a couple of hours at a time outside a dock.
Do any of the Snapdragon laptops not suck? I haven’t used any of them, but I’m looking for:
- high quality keyboard - I love my ThinkPad E495’s keyboard (which is a bit worse than my old T440), but everything seems to use really short travel keys these days (and my 2019 Macbook Pro for work absolutely sucks in the keyboard dept)
- physical mouse buttons - I love my ThinkPad’s TrackPoint + middle mouse combo, it’s great for scrolling through documents
- comfortable keyboard layout - I like the position of page up/down, home, end, etc on my ThinkPad, but most laptops suck with key placement
I’m excited to get a new Macbook Pro next year (our company has a 4-year replacement cycle), mostly for better CPU performance (my coworker’s M1 runs our tests in 1/4 the time vs my Intel Macbook Pro) and battery life (mine frequently dies in meetings), but there’s no way I’m buying one for myself. So I’m looking for an alternative.
I’d really like a Framework, but it doesn’t have physical mouse buttons (very strong preference) or a TrackPoint (I can budge here), and the keyboard layout looks kind of crappy. The best so far seems to be the ThinkPad T14s Gen 6, but I’m really trying to get away from ThinkPad due to their horrendous Motorola bootloader unlock policy (i.e. you agree to never resell your device, and your warranty is void), and if that’s the direction their company is going, I would prefer to avoid them, and it’s kind of expensive (starts at $1275). The rest that I’ve seen seem to have crappy keyboards and no mouse buttons.
It’s insane. I really want one for that reason, but ThinkPad with a ugreen 145 Watt battery bank gives me 16 hours of use. That’s all waking hours.
It’s hard to justify spending 3x as much on a single laptop just for that kind of battery life.
the battery life of machines with hot swapable batteries is arguably better considering you can hot swap them forever. And with more modern hardware, they’re a lot more power efficient so you could get a ton of work done on a handful of batts
source: i understand how hardware works.
Yeah, but you have to carry batteries around.
I’m not a fan of Apple either, but you have to admit they’ve got the ultra portable laptop figured out.
Lol, nope, you are deluding yourself.
Look at its main competitor the dell xps,
https://www.reddit.com/r/DellXPS/comments/12kk5to/xps_15_9520_6_month_review_issues/
I have done a full 8 hours of work on my Dell Latitude 5440 before on battery. I put it in bat saver and it lasted me the whole work day.
But I re cognize something: why would I need to do that?
I sat a desk or my couch all day both of which had a convenient outlet. There was no point in doing that all on bat. Yeah it’s impressive to have a crazy long battery life and is why I wanta MacBook for coffee shop coding days, but again, there’s almost guaranteed to be convenient outlets and I own a 145Watt battery bank if needed. Thus my $150 ThinkPad E495 has been reaching 16+ hours of use without needing a wall wart.
Maybe your use case is different but mine where I’m certainly going to be stationary enough to use a plug or a battery bank means I can’t justify the apple tax. Plenty of people have done this calculation hence why Apple still doesn’t have an appreciable enterprise market share let alone a competitive one.