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Comment by dismalaf | Hacker News Reader

I mean, between the lacklustre GPU, compatibility issues, price and the fact that AMD and Intel have made huge strides on battery life I can't see the market for this.

Also Unix nerds who don't like Apple also won't buy these because Qualcomm is shit when it comes to driver and kernel support. Expensive too.

And realistically, no one needs 24hr battery life. 12 hours is plenty. Heck even 8 hours is enough, talking a full working day.

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The kind of battery life you get from these laptops is a step change, in that you go from constantly thinking about the charge on them to not really thinking about it at all. That's a pretty big improvement for most people.

(And it's not like your typical dell reliably lasts 12 or even 8 hours anyway, that's only the best case)

My 5 year old Surface pro gets 4-5 hours. I find 10th gen and later Intel to get about 8.

The latest Intel laptop chips are really good on that regard.

I mean, my 16" MSI with 11th Gen Intel and Nvidia GPU gets 6 hours on Linux (openSuse)... Any current gen laptop with APU should be getting 12 hours. But I don't know Windows, it could be that bad?

I travel for work sometimes. You often don't really know about charging. I need a lot more battery capacity than at home to be confident of doing my work.

“24hr” battery life is still usually <8h at significant load (IDE/video editing/etc.), also sometimes I want to use the display at full blast instead of 150 nits when I’m working in a park or cafe, sometimes the power outlet on a plane won’t hold my charger in and I wanna game on the plane, lots of legitimate use cases for “24hr” battery life

I think most normal people liked the M1 because of the battery life. A lot of people are lazy with charging in general, so its a huge benefit to just open the lid and it's working.

... and who knows why Qualcomm canceled their Snapdragon X Elite dev kit? Very suspicious. Can they not get enough yield for the highest spec Snapdragon CPU?

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