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Comment by rollcat | Hacker News Reader

Yes, these are more niche than a laptop. I explicitly chose an M1 Mac Mini however (as opposed to a Macbook) for several reasons that have less to do with price/specs:

- I do not like the laptop form factor for doing actual work at my desk; I strongly prefer a bigger and better positioned screen, an ergonomic keyboard, etc

- 10Gig ethernet

- HDMI (wasn't available on Macbooks at the time, also couldn't plug in two external displays)

- If your computer is docked close to 24x7 (as was the case with most of my previous laptops), the battery becomes a liability

- Better cooling (I know these barely ever get hot... until you actually try to push them)

Plus also any kind of headless application, like a server rack where you also want the box to be a bit more more rugged.

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I always imagined a 24x7 docked laptop was a good setup for a couple reasons: 1. built in UPS due to the battery. 2. easy to grab and go in an emergency situation.

Could you tell me more about the liability it creates? Is it a fire hazard? Decaying battery performance?

The battery will be useless in 8-12 months if you keep it plugged in nearly 24/7.

I haven't found this to be the case. The OS is fairly intelligent about charging so this doesn't happen. Probably not ideal, but the flexibility is more than worth it IMO

Depends on the actual usage patterns, whether you keep it charged at say 100%, 80%, 40%, etc; its temperature (hot=bad), age, number of charge cycles, technology, how often you actually unplug it, etc - but yes, if you mistreat it, it can get dangerous.

My old 2017 MBP met that fate after mere couple of years, these machines tend to run annoyingly hot (I can hear it right now from the other room - partner is still using it). When it was mine, I kept using it with the lid closed (because the internal screen+keyboard were useless to me). I totally wasn't expecting the battery to suddenly become a spicy pillow! The Apple tech was a little bit scared to touch it, said it's gonna take a while to repair, I guess they can't open this sort of thing on site.

Of course some things changed with M1 (less hot) and later macOS updates (smarter/delayed charging), but the general advice applies to literally any device with a battery.

Some relevant links for Macbook and Thinkpad owners: https://github.com/davidwernhart/AlDente-Charge-Limiter https://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/tp_smapi

What is the mechanism by which you think that'd happen? My understanding is that if you did that, the macbook would stay 80% charged and would use the power supply directly to power itself.

So the battery stays about 80% charged and gets topped up to 80% intermittently when it naturally discharges. Is that not basically they optimum case for battery longevity?

I have never heard of this functionality. Is this some magic setting somewhere? When I plug in my MacBook it charges to 100% and stays there. This isn't a Tesla: this is a laptop. When the pandemic started and I stopped traveling the battery in my MacBook very rapidly nearly fully died.

Regardless, all of my MacBooks eventually have battery problems whether they were plugged in all the time or not: it is extremely common for MacBook batteries to eventually get so damaged they start to swell and either need to be replaced or crack the case (and that's ignoring the fire hazard).

Its described here https://support.apple.com/en-md/HT212049

I'm pretty sure that article is talking about the feature where, if MacOS realizes that you always plug in your laptop at night, and unplug it every day at 7 am, it will pause charging at 80% until like 5:30 or whatever time it needs to, such that it will reach 100% exactly at 7 am.

Right, it tries to guess and it's not very good at it. But IME if you do pretty much always use it plugged in as was being discussed above, it will just stay at 80%.

This hasn't been true for a very long time. You lose 15% capacity per year just like with any other lithium ion battery that you store at close to 100% charge.

For UPS applications you can use 3rd party software to force the battery to stay at 80% charge and lose less capacity per year.

That's not my experience for almost any recent (last decade) laptop I've owned (or used for work). They pretty much live tied to a charger, but I occasionally move them. Some battery degradation but all had decent battery for 5+ years. Note: all of them were Macs.

I don’t know about the current M1 CPU, but my last work computer was a 2015 MBP and the fan was always on. Plugging a monitor enabled the dedicated GPU. So I had to keep it plugged so it does not crawl to a stop due to throttling. Being in tropical weather did not help either. The battery bulged within one year. And the one I replaced it was deteriorating fast. My current mac mini has much better thermal and I bought an MBA for light and mobile uses.

The mba doesn't have a fan or any moving parts, which was one of the reasons I chose it over the mbp

The M1 Macbook Air was a revelation. Finally, a fanless laptop fast enough for most everyone.

> Plugging a monitor enabled the dedicated GPU.

There's the problem.

Dedicated NVidia and AMD GPUs are the cause of a solid 50% of issues or instability with laptops. Including for Apple.

I get that some people really need them, but having one built-in to your laptop is just begging to have way more problems than if you left it out. If you want/need a high-reliability machine and can afford not to have a dedicated GPU, leaving it out is a really great way to instantly improve your odds a ton. Integrated GPUs used to be so bad they were a liability even if you weren't a gamer, but that hasn't been true in a long time. Hell, my base-model-with-a-little-extra-memory 2014 MBP could play Minecraft at high settings and Kerbal Space Program just fine on the integrated Intel GPU, plus a bunch of other Unity games. I know those games don't exactly represent the cutting edge of graphics (and didn't back then, either) but it was surprisingly capable.

Actually, now that I think about it, at least for me personally, GPUs are probably the cause of about half my problems on desktops, too.

> Plugging a monitor enabled the dedicated GPU

Is this still true if the lid is closed?

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