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.
I wouldn’t pay the premium to be a beta tester for Qualcomm for the new Snapdragons. They’ll be cheaper, have better drivers and more laptops to choose from in a couple of years.
What terminals don’t have power outlets easily available? I think even many planes do, although I haven’t paid attention to that because I’ve never needed it.
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.
well i mean aside from the part where the intel laptops were engineered like shit and didn’t work because they couldn’t cool themselves, yeah. And the part where they tried to make the butterfly keyboard, and the part where the accidentally made the display cable too short, and still haven’t put out a repair tab for that one yet.
And the part where they accidentally put the gnd next to 51v causing it to immediately short and kill the entire device if even so much as a little bit of water showed up. The part where they only put USB C on their laptops and never put USB C on their phones, even though the whole point of using USB C was that it’s “one cable”
or the part where the release the ipad pro as a laptop replacement and it’s still not a laptop replacement because they refuse to make the OS anything more usable than a tablet, or the part where the new macbooks are shipped with 8GB of ram at all, for some reason. I don’t what the point of that is. Just ship with 16 minimum.
And the part where the also fucked up hardware crypto so bad they had to disable it permanently killing their crypto speeds, but hey, they’re new to the game, they havent been making their own hardware since… Oh about 2010. Or like that one iphone 6 release they did, where it was a little bendy.
but yeah no it seems like they finally figured out how to make a laptop. I can certainly give them that.
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.