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Comment by gtirloni | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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