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Comment by smacktoward | Hacker News Reader

Seeing all that empty internal space makes me wonder if they couldn't increase the device's appeal by fitting it with a bigger battery. 8-10 hours of charge time is good, but a $200 laptop that could go for (say) 20 or 30 hours on a charge would really turn heads.

I suppose it's possible that would require some kind of custom battery, and this is just the most appropriate battery for this enclosure they could get off-the-shelf, though.

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I'm sure a bigger battery would increase the cost of the laptop. At $200 the margin has to be pretty thin already.

True, but starting from $200 there's still room for improvement. I would purchase in no time a $350 model with double the battery plus high power LoRa RTX module with external antenna connector, and GPS receiver.

I've used a few different small ARM SBCs which were a lot less powerful than this laptop, and the software availability is astounding: Codeblocks, Boa Constructor, Anjuta, Lazarus, Geany, Notepadqq, most languages and libraries, and many other non development related software. As an example, Libreoffice on Debian Stable is available ready to install (no build required) on i386, amd64, armel, armhf, arm64, mips, mipsel, mips64el, ppc64el, s390x. Same for example for lua (the language) while the sid (unstable) version adds another bunch of unofficial ports (alpha, hppa, m68k, powerpcspe, ppc64, ppc64el, riscv64, sh4, sparc64, x32). In many contexts one could move from x86 to ARM and never feel there is something missing because really there is almost nothing missing, save maybe for the horsepower.

Sure. So charge $250 or $300 for the one that goes 30 hours.

They specifically don't want to have too many SKUs to manage. Adding an option for an extended battery would double their SKUs. The management side of Pine64 is pretty barebones.

This is an opportunity for an aftermarket.

I’d snap that up immediately. A 24 hour hacker machine would be killer! A modern Tandy 100

Both of those positions are valid. Bigger batt for $50 more would be great, vs meeting a price point and fewest possible skus.

I would yoink one with the biggest battery possible too.

But I would aslo do the same for several other upgrades that I particularly value. I would take as much ram as they want to offer. I would take as much ssd space as they want to offer. I would take as much ssd speed, cpu, pixels, as they can deliver. I would pay whatever it takes to make it weigh less and be smaller while still doing all that. And don't forget to put at least 2 full speed usbc/thunderbolt/hdmi ports so I can have external portable monitor without drivers.... Then again I don't want touch, or any form of face or fingerprint, or any more than the minimum gpu to run a traditional non-compositor desktop and display video at 30fps.

But now I have completely obliterated the entire concept of meeting a target intersection of functionality and price. I've thrown price right out the window.

And, that's just my personal individual set of priorities. You don't care about half the stuff I would pay anything for, and you probably do care at least a little about stuff I actively don't want. (gaming gpu, touch, face id, hell webcam at all)

So, back to the beginning, they came up with a reasonable set of functionality to target, and a reasonable price to target, and really, even though I too would like a big battery, it makes no sense to talk about $250 version that has a bigger battery.

I loved my TRS-80 100. My first laptop.

The other way to go about it is to shrink the screen from 14" to 12". I would prefer this configuration.

Or 13" and a slightly bigger battery. Oh yeah :)

If I’m not mistaken, 10,000 mWh is the maximum that can be brought on an airliner.

EDIT: As the commenter below pointed out, the limit is 100,000 mWh and not 10,000 mWh. I stand corrected.

According to [0] the limit in the US is 100Wh, so you could fit a battery that is three times bigger (assuming 3.3V). I don't know what the relevant numbers are elsewhere.

[0] https://www.tsa.gov/travel/security-screening/whatcanibring/...

Actually it doesn't ban them, it just says that you don't need any special approval if you have less than two 100Wh batteries. Which is odd, because most people have more than two batteries if your counting batteries contained in devices like laptops/cellphones/etc. This regulation seems to apply only to standalone batteries.

For context 100Wh is only about 2x most normal laptops. A few systems with secondary batteries (Thinkpads for example) come within 10-15Wh of the limit when configured into their max battery configurations (although in my case that is two batteries).

I'm betting that is something you could actually walk through security with. I can't imagine the guys running the scanner are making estimates of battery capacity. For sure I've carried more than 200Wh worth of batteries before, considering for a while I was regularly traveling with two fairly high capacity laptops, a tablet, charging battery and cellphone. I'm also not the only odd ball with more than one laptop. Now that i've slimmed it back down to one, I regularly notice other people dragging out more than one.

The link says that only batteries above 100Wh count against the 2 battery limit. There doesn't seem to be any limit to smaller batteries.

Your right, back to elementary school to work on my reading comprehension.

The 16 inch MacBook Pro has 99.8Wh battery...

High end 15+” laptops tend to go right up to the limit. The XPS 15 and MBP 16 both have ~100Wh.

Thanks, I stand corrected. Apologies for the mistake.

From the technical specs it looks like it is powered via a 5V port: "Barrel Power (5V 3A) Port"

That would mean that you could plug in a battery powered portable USB charger (power bank) to increase its capacity perhaps. If 10000mAh at 5V gets you 8 hours then you you could easily extend the capacity with a couple power banks.

Right but you can do that for many other notebooks as well.

I didn't know that. What kind of power bank would you need for a Macbook or PC laptop?

USB c power banks can do it. I use one for my gpd micropc. Just make sure to get a quality one that can do USB c pd.

Ones that do USB-PD which allows other voltages than 5V

Actually 5V also works on my 2016 MacBook Pro. I used an older iPad charger with a USB-A-to-C cable to prolong battery life, or to charge overnight.

I don't think there is as much empty space as you think. If you look at https://youtu.be/TsNR2lECd2s?t=121 it has a Macbook air design where its wedge shaped with no vertical space in the front.

Yes, yes, and yes. I would pay a lot of money for a _small_ laptop with 30 hours of battery life. Something like a MacBook Air 11 inch would be ideal. Hopefully someone tries and cram a huge battery in this unit someday.

It's an 10,000 mAh battery, though. That's huge, isn't it? I don't know any other laptop that has a battery that big. Looking online, Macbooks seem to have around 6,000 mAh.

Amps is a bad measure because it only measures size and not voltage. What you really want is Watt/Hours, this is a 38Wh Battery, in context, a 13 inch Chromebook Pixel (a pro linux laptop, sort of) was ~70Wh, a Macbook Pro 16 is 99Wh.

You're right. I see now that the high mAh is due to the low voltage.

nit: It's Watt * Hours, not Watt/Hours.

You'd want to compare watt-hours for an equal comparison of energy for batteries of different voltages.

38Wh is fairly small for a laptop battery.

Laptop batteries are powering Intel/AMD x86 processors which are much more power hungry than an ARM proc I imagine. Also, Macbooks and other premium laptops have 2k or 4k screens, while this one should be more energy efficient at 1080p.

You're right. I see now that the high mAh is due to the low voltage.

I like how we all commented at the same time. poor OP...

Happens often. What's the etiquette ? Answer to each replies ? One single reply that address everyone's point(s) ?

I wonder how much cost saving they are finding in using like a standard, mass produced common laptop battery vs a larger or custom battery.

Increasing a single cell battery system over 10Ah is not trivial. First, the RK3399 and it's companion PMIC is designed with single cell applications primarily.

Second, I don't know the exact reason why, but commonly available lithium cells top out at 10Ah. Even many fuel gauge ICs don't support cells larger than that.

Adding another cell requires substantial development (design/source the pack, balancing and charging circuit) and extra BOM cost, whereas single cell involves copying reference design (which I know because I'm designing hardware product around RK3399 and ~70Wh battery pack)

TL;DR; Can be done, but developers probably wanted to reduce the risk and stay on commonly walked path.

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