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Comment by dmitrygr | Hacker News Reader

I tried to find a laptop with the specification you just mentioned that could last 20 hours on battery. Didn’t.

I'm personally always near a wall socket. My laptop is mostly a desktop. When I'm out and need to use the battery, it's only for a few hours. Do people really need >8h battery life?

I’ve never taken my charger to work with me. It was an odd experience the first week. I’ll never go back to plugs.

I never either but that's cause I have USB-C docks at work.

A Thunderbolt dock for a one-cable setup for everything is amazing. Power, video, peripherals, network, etc all with one little cable.

I never wanna go back. I know some PCs can do it too. It’s just so much nicer than having to plug in two or five or eight cables. It doesn’t seem like a big thing if you only plug-in and unplugg once a day but it is.

Long battery life isn’t strictly necessary no, but it’s nice. A lot nicer than one might expect. It can make the difference between needing to bring a charger or not, plus it’s one less mental background daemon to keep running (thinking about how much life is left, where the nearest outlet is, etc).

Arguably the bigger impact of long battery life is how it’s no longer necessary to throttle the system when it’s unplugged to not burn through battery in an instant. The performance of plugged and unplugged is identical.

There are a lot of things people don’t need on average. But when you do need it, or you have a particular use case, well, then you need it.

These comparisons are always based on raw performance numbers or price. Which isn’t useful.

It’s a huge nice-to-have. Moving from a decently beefy laptop to a MacBook has been night and day for me in terms of (a) not worrying about windows smart sleep (or whatever it’s called) waking my laptop so it’s warm and dead when I go to use it a few hours later and (b) not worrying about my laptop being dead when I open it after the weekend.

(a) should have been fixed years ago but still randomly happens on my partner’s laptop. (b) is a pain to deal with when you just want to get in to work. No longer having wall wort proximity anxiety every time I go to use my MacBook is really nice.

I’ll move back when laptops catch up though since I miss dual booting.

> (a) not worrying about windows smart sleep (or whatever it’s called) waking my laptop so it’s warm and dead when I go to use it a few hours later

MacBooks can run into the same problem if you have AirPods. I don't know WHAT the exact logic is, but the number of times I've used my AirPods at night, with the last pair being to my phone and the AirPods now connecting to my work laptop instead, causing a series of blares from MS Teams, Outlook and a ton of other notifications, people on Teams seeing me being "active" despite it being middle of the night... annoying as fuck.

I don't get why it seems to be impossible to tell the MacBook to not wake up from any kind of Bluetooth event. I get that this is the default because Apple wants trackpads, keyboards and mice to wake up a laptop... but I'd REALLY love to be able to turn that off because I don't use either of these three.

For years I am a happy user of Kill Bluetooth On Sleep (KBOS) https://github.com/alb12-la/KBOS

At work, I'm in meetings much of the time, and I was lucky to get 4 hours of my my old MBP, if I didn't charge it over lunch, it wouldn't last the day. (there are chargers in meeting rooms, but only a few, so can't always count on getting one).

At home, I work in a few different seats (one of them is a desk with a big monitor, but for emails/reading, I prefer to sit elsewhere, including on the back deck in nice weather), all but one does have an outlet, but it sure is nice to be able to get up and move around without constantly plugging/unplugging the laptop. Magsafe does make that easier though, only takes a second to plug in and no big deal if you stand up without unplugging, it doesn't pull the laptop out of your hands or the charger out of the wall.

I find the extra battery life his nice but it is really just a side effect of the machines not getting hot. That is an amazing feature if you ever have to actually use it on your lap. That also means that it stays silent the vast majority of the time.

I think this is a great advantage, regardless of battery life, like you said.

whats the point of having a laptop, even at home, if you can't be away from a wall socket without worrying about battery life

This is a desktop replacement due to no room for a desktop. It's always plugged in. I have a nice iPhone for writing and making music on the go.

With a 3070? Unless you have a backpack with a battery that’s completely unreasonable to expect. External battery packs that plug into USB-C are actually pretty small and affordable and easily 3x the battery capacity

Yep. But, me and everyone I know keeps their laptops plugged in most of the time at work or at home, so not everyone needs all day battery life.

I didn't care much about the battery life but not having to be tethered to the nearest wall wart is unexpectedly convenient even when working from home. I also appreciate the laptop not being a hot air blower.

I use laptop at my desk at home or my desk at the office where the power cable is within reach so it's always plugged in.

What use would be 20h of battery life for me?

I don't do the whole coding in the coffee shop or on the beach lifestyle, and even if I did, 8h of battery life is plenty for that since I can't spend 20h in the coffee shop.

There's probably a bunch of workers who are always on the road like contractors for whom this is a benefit.

I'm not on the road, I just tend to move around even when at home/in the office. Lower power consumption also means the laptop is silent and barely warm, and a tiny 30W charger is perfectly sufficient. Unrelated, but another thing about the Macbook Pro is how unexpectedly good its mics, speakers, and camera are. I used to have quite an AV setup but I can't complain about the built-ins nowadays.

>I'm not on the road, I just tend to move around even when at home/in the office.

I don't. I only work at my desk as that's where I have the best ergonomy from height adjustment desk, chair, keyboard, mouse and large monitor on adjustable arm that give me the healthy posture I want for long session of deep work and focus.

I can't understand how people can get work done hunched over their tiny laptop on the couch or kitchen table while getting a crooked neck/back, when that's what desks are meant to prevent. That's just not me, nor anyone I personally know.

What job do you have that requires you to work non stop for 20 hours away from a wall socket? I understand the need for autonomy but there are diminishing returns. It's ok to start looking at other decision factors past a certain point.

20 hours isn’t full CPu usage, of course. The last intel laptop I had lasted a couple hours. My M2 gets me through the workday.

People don't only use their laptops for work. People also don't all sit at a single desk throughout the day.

Not to mention that you can cut most laptops' rated battery lives in half or even worse if you're doing anything moderately demanding, and that those demanding workloads often cause them to throttle pretty badly when on battery power, so it's not a simple question of "X hour battery life".

A high-spec laptop that's actually autonomous for daily use (from weight to screen quality to battery life) and does not turn into a radiator or a turbine when it's being put through its paces should be a reasonable enough value proposition for anyone to understand even if they personally don't want it; I don't understand why people are always so eager to snidely bring up devices that don't meet those criteria whenever Macbooks are mentioned.

That's true, however I realized I personally don't actually need > 6hr battery life in a laptop, like, ever. There is always an outlet near me, and the charger & cable are small enough to easily carry around. If I am on a trip, well the same charger can be used to charge my phone and other devices, so I am not packing more than I would have otherwise. Why do I need to worry about battery life?

P.S. both you and I know that the 20 hour number is not real.

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