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Comment by jakobegger | Hacker News Reader

MagSafe is a product from a different era. It was invented at a time when you needed to be connected to power all the time because batteries didn't last long enough, laptops where mostly made from plastic, heavy, fragile, had spinning hard drives, and would immediately break when dropped.

Today, I only charge my Macbook Pro at my desk, where there's no danger of accidental cable-yanking. A full charge easily lasts all day, so when I'm out it's never actually connected to anything.

The aluminium unibody construction and solid state drives also make it a lot more sturdy. So when it does drop, chances are good it wont actually break.

For these reasons, I don't think that Magsafe chargers are necessary anymore. And considering how expensive replacement Apple chargers are, I'm happy they're moving to an open standard!

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Laptops are still fragile. I dropped my work MacBook pro about two months ago from a height of three feet, maybe less. It was onto a hard tile floor with the lid closed.

It killed it. The screen didn't break, not a scratch in sight, but it went dead all the same. The screen would not cut on. Plugging in an external monitor worked with heavy artifacts; I suspect some GPU damage.

I could not log in (it locked up after the fall when logging in with the external screen) and my work replaced it.

Freak accident but falls still kill MacBooks.

EDIT:

Also, without a charger, IntelliJ slurps up enough power I can't last more than a couple hours of dev time. Even that is generous.

I can last maybe 3 - 4 hours on my 2014 MBPr in low power mode at least when writing Scala, longer potentially if it's just Java for some reason. You may also want to try resetting your SMC and see if that helps battery life in general, I know it works for me often enough.

As for reliability, I've dropped this same laptop from about 4 feet off the ground on the corner pretty much flattening the rounded edge and it's been fine.

Doesn't help that MacBooks are so slippery. It's the single reason that I bought a Dell instead. Too easy to drop or slide off my lap, and it's not really feasible to put it in a rubber case like I do with my phone.

It also misses the point that laptops throttle more when on battery. I plug mine in at home to get less throttling when doing something intensive.

Yet another way that Apple don't care about people that use their stuff, and why i'm buying a Chromebook to replace my Macbook Pro where i'll SSH to servers instead of compiling locally.

I'm curious about the comment that Apple doesn't care about people that use their stuff. Isn't it possible that they do care deeply, and that they have carefully designed a laptop that is optimum for most users? Of course, that means some users don't fit this profile, but it doesn't mean that Apple doesn't care.

Good point - so Apple care about some users, but not others. Even my partner, not a geek at all, keeps hers charged to support her 30+ tab Chrome habit. The collateral damage is all over, and won't be apparent until the next generation where the 'normal' users find out.

"Today, I only charge my Macbook at my desk, where there's no danger of accidental cable-yanking. A full charge easily lasts all day, so when I'm out it's never actually connected to anything."

This is a good take. I hadn't thought of this argument before. It makes sense.

I know I'm in the habit of keeping my laptop plugged in as much as possible for those times when I do need to rely on the battery. I generally get only half a day with my MBA (13" early 2015) running multiple JVMs, Mail, and Safari with lots of tabs. I do find I get better performance when I turn off WiFi and dim the screen.

According to the tech specs, my laptop should get "Up to 12 hours wireless web". The 13" MacBook Pro with Touch Bar specs at "Up to 10 hours wireless web". I wonder if this means I'll get less unplugged time with the MBP.

> I know I'm in the habit of keeping my laptop plugged in as much as possible for those times when I do need to rely on the battery.

I do this too. But also for another reason, I try to reduce battery usage to increase the lifetime of the battery. I should probably research whether this is something I should actually be concerned about (anyone any ideas?)

I've heard rumors that keeping the battery topped off (plugged in) also decreases battery life :) If someone would like to google that for me, much appreciated!

I've killed my battery in a year by repeatedly running it down more or less completely every day

Which kinda sucks if you have glued in batteries...

Apple's power management is smart enough that when you reach 100%, it will let the battery drain a bit before charging again:

https://www.quora.com/Is-it-recommended-to-unplug-a-MacBook-...

I'm surprised about people who get so much mileage out of their MacBooks. Is the 13'' that much better, or are people just doing a lot of light work?

I usually work from a café these days, and I go from 100% to 0% in about 4 hours (15'' Retina, Mid 2015). I mostly run VSCode, Vagrant, Safari, Slack, Spotify and Terminal. Of these, Spotify, Terminal, Slack and Safari are easily the most energy-sucking apps.

That sounds like poor battery performance to me. I have a mid-2012 MacBook Pro 13" non-Retina (bought new in 2015) and I get 7 hours battery in cafes, though I don't usually run Spotify and it will dip to maybe 5.5 if I run Parallels Desktop. Usually I do 4 hours with 50% left before heading home.

I mostly use Safari, Postbox, Sublime Text, Coda, Cathode, Tower, Parallels (rarely on battery) and Xojo. I wonder if Sublime is more power efficient than VS Code.

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