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Comment by camdenlock | Hacker News Reader

When I bring my 2016 MBP into the office, it runs out of battery near the end of the day, and I have to plug it in for those final 2 or 3 hours. Very satisfied.

My colleague with a new Surface Book has been shaking his fist at me, wishing he hadn't listened to the FUD and left the Applesphere. Apparently he gets frustratingly bad battery life on his SB. (To be fair, though, the SB's display ejection hardware is just plain cool...)

We're programmers, BTW, writing server-side software mainly using Go, running several ancillary services locally on our dev machines using Docker to ease the development process. I'm thoroughly pleased with my 2016 MBP's battery life considering these workloads.

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Seriously, why would battery life even matter if you are sitting in the office all day??

With that said, SB can easily do 10-12 hours once you turn off the always-on camera:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Surface/comments/3qxjrk/fix_battery...

> Seriously, why would battery life even matter if you are sitting in the office all day??

Do you people chain yourselves to your desk the entire day? My office has a the "open-office" trend, which pretty much prompts me to leave and to go various parts of the office during the day, or maybe even the library, and only come back in for meetings.

I don't know what's worse for a dev, being chained to a desk all day or the constant movings and chatter in an open office when you're trying to concentrate.

> My office has a the "open-office" trend, which pretty much prompts me to leave and to go various parts of the office during the day, or maybe even the library, and only come back in for meetings.

To me this sounds as you don't really have proper working offices. Maybe that is the problem you need to solve, instead of trying to maximize the battery life of your laptop?

I can change the battery life of my laptop by buying a different laptop.

I can't change my office layout without switching jobs.

I'm wondering, why don't you run your MBP plugged in all the time? I assume you just sit with it somewhere.

Also I'm wondering why you use Mac or Surface to programm server side stuff? Wouldn't a Linux on a cheaper/more powerful laptop be better for such work?

Aldo, doesn't docker on mac and Windows use an expensive linux virtualization layer?

I think OP would get much better battery time if he used a proper Linux machine.

What do you mean by "considering these workloads"? It sounds like a fairly light workload.

Compiling codebases, bringing services up/down in Docker containers, testing client-server workflows, etc.

These activities, especially when repeated throughout the day, can be quite computationally-expensive, taking a significant toll on the machine's resources. These aren't light workloads, they are fairly heavy.

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