Comment by its_so_on | Hacker News Reader

Comment by its_so_on | Hacker News Reader

I don't need years of battery life: I need 32-36 hours (of use, not standby). Then I can go from charging daily, like in the nineteenth century where you have to wind your watch up every night, and Sherlock Homes can tell a watch belonged to a drunkard by scratches around where you insert the winding key; how different is it to fumble with the power adapter jack? - ahem, to charging whenever it is CONVENIENT for me. It still wouldn't quite last through a long weekend at a lodge with just one inconvenient power outlet if you use it a lot EVERY day, but most people don't and if you do, you still only have to find a quiet period to charge it ONCE during the long weekend, like whenever the social activity dies down.

How many people keep multiple chargers at the different places (home/office) they are, or even take one with them ALL the time, just so they don't get left stranded. All this is fixed if the machine has a longer cycle than you do, over a typical 1-2 day cycle. Then you can pick the most convenient time to charge up from 20 or 40 or 60 percent or wherever it's at by then, you can work on it it at a cafe without plugging it in after working somewhere else you couldn't plug it in the night before, or go away for the weekend with it without any charger at all, if you know you're back in the ofice Monday and are sure to use it less than that.

In the meantime you don't worry, you aren't inconvenienced.

This is not about being able to go for long periods without bothering to charge, but about energy usage, and being able to get a long period of actual usage from a machine without having to charge it from a reliable mains supply.

You do need years of battery life. Not by improving the capacity of batteries, but by improving the rate at which energy is drawn from them.

As the article quotes: "Every developed nation country has a graph showing electricity demand is going to outstrip supply at some point in the next 20 years unless we do something different,"

You are inconvenienced, just not in the manner you highlight.

I need years of battery life. Recharging means not being late for a charge cycle for 50+ years lest I suffer ventricular synchronization failure, and replacement means cutting a hole in my shoulder - both of which rather inconvenience me.

These chips are not going to be used in phones.

I was talking about my laptops -- terrible sorry this wasn't clear! I thought the cafe/home/office example made it clear. Who works all day on their phone?

They aren't for laptops either.

Think about something more like a toaster or a temperature sensor.

Or a pacemaker - something drawing power for a very long time, and where recharging/replacing is literally painful and power failure is deadly.

They might be used in phones, just not as the CPU/GPU. Think, flash memory controller etc.

But it's not because you don't need years that nobody else would. And it's not because you immediately link ARM to smartphones and music players that that's the only use for a power-efficient CPU. Think a little harder :-)

I was talking about my laptop. Terribly sorry I didn't make this clear, too late to edit! I mean that nobody even thinks of making a laptop with the battery life mentioned. For office tasks, who cares if it's an arm?

I'm not sure it'd be possible given how much power would be drawn by the peripherals: screen, wifi, hard disks / SSDs, USB ports if used... although I do wonder if there are computers with netbook processing power and laptop batteries/form factor.

Right, but my point was that nobody even bothers to serve this laptop market. If there are laptops with netbook processing power (in both sense of the words: power usage and processing power), an ssd, and a massive battery that will push that sucker close to 20 hours (on email, word processing, office tasks), then I don't know about it. I just think nobody even considers taht a priority. Instead, they focus on "a full day's charge" -- like a wind-up watch in the 19th century.

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