Laptops Powered by AA Batteries

Back when Mp3 players were a thing (before the iPod) Archos were making an MP3 player which took 4 AA, and the mail list for alternate runtime (rockbox) was full of discussions about NiMH trickle charging, approaches to maximising battery life, as were Apple Mouse conversations. People went wild for the most long lived, fastest recharge AA.

In some ways, I think it's a shame we didn't go to consumer goods run on Lithium batteries but in this form factor, with discrete charge management cards. So for instance, replacing the batteries in a Thinkpad could have been commoditised.

Bagged cells are damn good for small devices, but they do make it harder.

My Minidisc players were equally 'my battery, my form factor' as are most digital cameras. I guess some people (Dyson) cannot go past the opportunity to make accessories and replacements bound in them, at their price. After sales income is big.

AA batteries were insane back then.

Technically rechargeables existed. It was always cheaper right now to buy disposables, so of course, if you were a kid in a poor family, rechargeables probably did not exist.

Just complete madness buying disposable batteries on a monthly or weekly basis! I'm glad we don't have to do that anymore!

I had the Atari ST Book. Somewhat dreadful machine.

And I had the Amstrad PPC 512 portable which could also be powered by ten regular C-cells. It would eat NiCads by the hour.

And I also had the Sinclair Z88, which lasted about a week or two on a few AA batteries which I used all through college because laptops were new and bulky and the keyboards were noisy and so a number of professor's banned laptops, but the Z88 with its squishy dead-flesh keyboard was all but silent.

The great thing about the Z88 was everything was pre-loaded on to ROM, and your documents held in battery backed RAM for weeks at time, though you flash your files to the EEproms for safety. There was enough capacitance in the Z88 that if you pulled the batteries out to change them for fresh ones, you had about two or so minutes before the contents of RAM was lost.

A friend of mine, Ken, (who worked for Apple at the time) has a prototype Apple portable (pre-powerbook, IIc line I believe) that runs on C-cells. He keeps it on top of his fridge.

Modern AA NiMH is so superior to the crap we used to have, and cheaper too.

I get that Li-ion charges faster, but there is something about industry standard batteries.

Hmmmmm. Maybe it's not so much AA that I miss, but the standardization. If Li-ion were sold and designed for swappable 18650 form factor, then we wouldn't need as many. The problem is that different Li-ion can have different specs and/or safety features (protected cells have slightly less current and are slightly longer).

Still, modern AA NiMH remains a standard form factor and capable.

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The other set of standard batteries is Lead Acid (6V 4.5 Ahr is standardized for example).

When did we become incapable of standardizing parts btw? Why are all of our batteries across iPhones and Google Pixels and Samsung Galaxies different?

What computer-like devices still use AAs? The only ones I can think of are some of Garmin’s GPS units. (There the user-replaceable battery, in a standard format you can buy from any developing-world shop, is seen as a big plus by many users. But one dreads that such units will eventually no longer be offered, replaced only by USB-charged batteries, just because that’s how things go nowadays.)

I expected to see:

- The IBM WorkPad Z50 (could use, IIRC, 8 AA batteries)

- The HP Jornada 720/728 (there was an adapter to use two AA batteries IIRC).

I had the HP Jornada 728 and used to run JLime Linux and NetBSD on that. It was a nice toy for a 16-17 years old geek like me.

I had hopes for the Jornada 728 flashrom board... But it never materialized AFAIK.