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So let's take my kids as an example - they plug their laptops in like 1/week. They have the M1 Airs, and I've seen them on their beds, in the kitchen taking a video while they food prep or as they clean their room (time-lapse to share with friends) or on the couch or their desks.

Yes, some of this could be done on the family iPad or their iPhone (which neither of them have yet), but those don't have the games or schoolwork setup they need either.

Why sacrifice this kind of capability when the costs are about the same and quality is better?

Interesting. I guess it must be a generational difference maybe.

I'm a kid of the 90's so I grew up with desktop PCs exclusively, so using a computer meant sitting at the computer desk, rather than using it anywhere else. So I guess this habit stuck to me as I rarely undock my laptop to use it anywhere else like kids who grew up with laptops.

But to me I see only benefits to this habit, hear me out:

  - I get the best posture at the desk with ergonomic chair and external height adjustable monitor, versus in bed, couch or random table around the house where I need to hunch down at the small laptop screen. There's no way my neck can tolerate that posture for more than a couple of hours.

  - more easily to mentally detach from work and digital  entertainment, when the laptop is only at the desk and doesn't follow me around. As in, if I go to the park, or to the coffee shop, I go there to detach from "laptop usage" and unwind, like look out the window, read a book, chat up some people while enjoying the cappucino.

Due to these (personal) factors, I never understood the need for crazy battery life other than jobs that involve a lot of travelling, since most people I know seem to have similar computer usage habits to mine where they also leave their laptops at home.

Who knows, if I were to grow up with a laptop, I'd probably have different usage habits now.

Multiple reasons.

Most battery life is assuming low system load. Under high load, you can easily drain a battery in less than 8 hours.

When you are traveling, the battery life of your laptop becomes a limitation you have to deal with.

You may forget to charge your laptop.

For some trips, you can skip carrying a power brick and use a phone fast charger over night instead. Battery charge gets slower the closer it gets to full. If 60% will last 8 hours, you can easily get away with this.

It's really nice to not have to worry about charging so often. I have a MBA I use as a "work laptop", and it's very freeing being able to leave it in my backpack, charge every few days, and be able to work from wherever I want without even bringing the charger with. I never use it >8hrs unplugged in one sitting.

I also never worry about charging because whenever I put the laptop on my home desk or work desk, I also instinctively plug in the USB-C cable carrying power and display data to it.

So I can't imagine my life would improve in any meaningful way if I were spared the effort to plug in a cable once/twice a day, especially since I always use an external monitor at home and work anyway so power delivery and charging is never something I can forget about.

And the rare occasions I do use the laptop on a train, coffeeshop, balcony, or somewhere else that's not my home or office desk, I never do it so long that the 8h battery life becomes an issue since my posture can't stand being hunched down at a laptop for more than a couple of hours, instead of working from the proper ergonomics of a desk + monitor.

Every workplace I know gives you external monitor and dock, and for home use, everyone I know they has their laptops plugged in at their desks almost all the time.

So again, I can't see what my demographic is missing if we had even more battery life.

You don’t have a use for it. Plenty of other people do. :)

Sure, and that's why I was asking to learn what exactly do those people do that they need more than 8h+ of battery life.

Working out of cafes, anywhere not at home, short trips, airports, anywhere you don’t want to be looking for an outlet or bring a charger.

If it needs to be plugged in all the time, why do you need a laptop? Why not just a desktop?

Can't use my desktop in bed.

More importantly, I need to bring a computer when traveling but even then I'm not using it during the trip, I'm going from plug to plug.

>If it needs to be plugged in all the time, why do you need a laptop? Why not just a desktop?

I never said it needs to be plugged in all day, I said that's where it spends most of the time. Because desktops take up way too much space and because sometimes you leave the house with your computer for work or leisure. And when I do, I don't need more than a few hours of battery because I don't like doing work outside the ergonomics of a proper desk.

>short trips, airports

And do you do a full day's work in an airport?

And when you travel via airports, you probably don't air travel in just your shorts with nothing on you, other than your phone, keys and wallet, like you're going to the local pub, but I assume you also have a backpack/bag with you for your laptop and belongings, which can also fit a <100g charger you need for your phone anyway.

One should use a desktop for the desktop because of ergonomics.

You can also dock a laptop and use it as a desktop.