Hacker News Reader

Comment by dylan604 | Hacker News Reader

I would love the same comment to be true about the MBP. Add a couple of mm to the thickness. This would allow for useful ports be added to the body, and then fill the remaining space with battery.

View on HN

I think there’s a max size battery you can put in laptops before you’re not allowed to bring your laptop on a plane. It’s either 80Wh or 100Wh.

So manufacturers can only stuff so much battery into that space.

In practice, external batteries are so cheap these days and easier than ever to charge your laptop from with usb-c, it's less of an issue than it used to be. It certainly holds up with phones and smaller devices, though.

I'd think the best argument for a thicker MBP would be greater cooling potential anyway.

100Wh.

This is also what the 16-inch MacBook Pro has, so even if they find some empty space inside it after Apple Siliconing it, there's really no going up battery-wise anymore.

> This would allow for useful ports be added to the body, and then fill the remaining space with battery.

More ports would be nice (I'm hoping but doubting that we can get some more ports on the pros once the cooling system can be smaller) but the 16" is already pretty maxed out on the battery front so don't expect any changes there.

I never expect anything other than to be disappointed in Apple hardware. I'm a different animal than their target demo. Small is not cute to me. Smaller means I'm sacrificing something. I can sympathize with the move from USB-A to USB-C. We had to learn the same with the transition from ADB->USB and/or SCSI->USB. The one thing I feel is inexcusable was the removal of the SD card reader.

What does "maxed out" on the battery front mean to you? Every laptop/iDevice comes with a different battery design/shape. Laptop batteries should be like water looking to fill every crack and cranny with more space to store electrons.

The 16" MBP has the biggest lithium battery you can have and still fly on US planes:

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

You can have a 100Wh main battery and a 300Wh spare battery, but not a 150Wh main battery? What is the reasoning for that?

I suppose it's less likely to go off like a Note 7 if it's not attached to the computer and in use. Otherwise, no idea.

The 16" MacBook Pro has a 100 W*hr battery. This is the limit of what the FAA considers a "consumer sized battery" [1], so going larger would restrict the ability to take them on commercial airplanes...

[1] https://www.faa.gov/hazmat/packsafe/more_info/?hazmat=7

The one thing I feel is inexcusable was the removal of the SD card reader.

What do you need an SD card reader for? For the average person, whose primary camera is their phone, I can’t think of a reason they’d need a built in SD card reader.

I'm delighted to no longer have an SD card reader I've never once in my life used jammed into every laptop.

Different strokes for different folks.

> The one thing I feel is inexcusable was the removal of the SD card reader.

I suspect the number of USB ports and removal of SD has a lot to do with the capability of the M1 CPU which was designed around the lower end of Apple's lineup.

With a limit on how many channels they have for USB devices, having an additional USB port is more flexible than having an SD reader.

> The one thing I feel is inexcusable was the removal of the SD card reader.

A SD card reader seems super-niche. I'm sure it's important to you.... but everyone probably has some random port they'd appreciate and they can't add one for everyone. I think a dongle and USB-C is a much much better solution, for everyone on average.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com