17 ms·

HP made a laptop slightly thicker to add 3 hours of battery life

237 points by slantyyz 10y ago

hackuser 10y ago
Why don't HP desktops and laptops get more attention in 'hacker' communities? I hardly ever see them discussed. IME with large numbers of HP corporate (not consumer) machines, they have by far the best quality of any Windows options. They run for so long that users get frustrated, wanting shiny new equipment but having no reason to replace their old ones. An EliteBook not far away from where I'm sitting even has a tool-less case - you can pop off the cover and service it by moving one lever, no screwdriver required - on a laptop! However, I don't have data on quality; that is hard to come by. (I have no relationship w/ HP.)
- mozumder 10y ago
  I have the Skylake HP x360 with the 4K screen. The 4K screen has awful color rendering that makes everything look like barf and the trackpad is even worse. My MacBook Pro is so much better.
  - derefr 10y ago
    Nobody ever said anything good about HP's consumer laptops. You can basically think of their consumer and enterprise lines as separate divisions, almost separate companies.
    - scott_karana 10y ago
      The Spectre x360 is both a halo "Premium" laptop and it's pitched as a Business model. [1] It might not be a traditional EliteBook, but it's supposed to duke it out with the ThinkPad X1 Carbon and the like. Not stacking up to an MBP is inexcusable in that context, if true. 1 http://store.hp.com/us/en/mdp/business-solutions/spectre-pro-x360#!&Tab=features http://store.hp.com/us/en/mdp/business-solutions/spectre-pro...
    - rayiner 10y ago
      HP's business laptops almost invariably have shit screens.
- derefr 10y ago
  I used a 2007 EliteBook for years before my current MacBook. They're great machines. Over the holidays, I found out that my mother's old (2012?) Dell had broken. I gave her the EliteBook; it was a dramatic upgrade from the newer Dell, along every dimension: build quality, keyboard and touchpad, CPU speed, memory upgradability. It was ridiculous.
- quantumhobbit 10y ago
  I don't know about their other lines but I had a Zbook for work that made me never want to own anything made by HP. Huge clunky piece of flimsy plastic with terrible battery life and a worse trackpad. The display had a habit of breaking, meaning I went through several replacements before they finally just gave me a MacBook.
  - BoorishBears 10y ago
    HP has tried to reform themselves with some new premium devices like the Spectre's line (x360), but they really did make some horrible hardware back in the day.
  - GordonS 10y ago
    Since my last HP work laptop died, I've just been 'upgraded' to a 1.5 year old 15" ZBook G2, after flat out refusing the 17" version (which weighs about as much as me, and is bloody massive). It is heavy, has a pretty big screen bezel, and generally feels clunky. The i7-4710MQ is also slightly slower the >3 year old i7 it replaces. Only slight positive is I now get ~3.5 hours of battery life instead of ~2.
- khedoros1 10y ago
  I have a Skylake Envy 15. In general, I like it as a Linux development machine, but there are a lot of things that I'd change about it if I could. The polish just isn't there...and somehow it manages (with an aluminum body) to feel more rickety than the plastic Lenovo that work issued me. I'd rather just use it without getting into a discussion about why I'm using an imperfect computer rather than [insert other guy's preferred brand]. edit: I suppose it's not really a business model, but it is supposed to be their premium consumer model, and to supposed be kind of an HP Macbook "replacement".
- flukus 10y ago
  Because HP is probably the worst offender when it comes to pre-installed crapware.
  - kobeya 10y ago
    Does that really matter with this crowd?
    - flukus 10y ago
      That depends, it's a diverse crowd. If you're going to install linux then it's not an issue. If your leaving the OEM version of windows then it is. IME a fresh install of windows is often hard/impossible to track down all the drivers you need. And those drivers often come with their own crapware.
      - kaishiro 10y ago
        Is finding drivers really still an issue with Windows 10?
        flukus 10y ago
        I don't know, I've never tried with windows 10.
        pirocks 10y ago
        I recently did a complete reinstall of windows 10. I hat to re-download some drivers from dell to get touchpad gestures working but otherwise everything was fine.
        bostand 10y ago
        Lenovo tried to adress this with driver list in bios and people accused them of doing superfish 2.0
        kagamine 10y ago
        Recently upgraded a zbook from 8.1 to 10 and the audio went awry, and the DTS audio stopped working and that took time to fix. There were some issues with win 10 switching between wi-fi and a cabled connection which should happen automatically but I had to fiddle around to make it work. ON the plus side: virtual desktops in Windows! Not the best implementation and still not as good as Linux's, but usable.
- nqzero 10y ago
  > Why don't HP desktops and laptops get more attention in 'hacker' communities? aspect ratio - 16:9 is good for media, and maybe some business use, but it's DOA for hacking
  - lj3 10y ago
    I'm not sure that's true anymore. 4k resolution means that you can now fit two 4:3 monitor's worth of pixels (1920x1440) width-wise side by side on a single 4k (3840x2160), 16:9 screen. It's almost 2 monitors in one.
- dv_dt 10y ago
  I think it's because of model fragmentation and short lifetimes - there aren't enough devices with a similar enough configuration available for long enough time that any community can really develop.
  - hackuser 10y ago
    Interesting. Generally the components in different manufacturers' laptops are subsets of the same set of options: Intel, AMD, NVidia, Broadwell, etc. Using the same components, I'd expect all manufacturers have similar ranges of variation and rates of change. There are corporate machines that promise platform stability for 1-5 years in order to give enterprise IT more standardized platforms to support, but I'd be surprised if many FOSS projects targeted those models.
    - dv_dt 10y ago
      There's a small community of Linux on Mac hardware hackers because they have the slowest rate of change and fewest models to support. In comparison all the PC makers are high rates of churn and configurability. If there were a Mac class hardware build that integrated out of the box with Linux that showed reasonable product-line stability, I'd be buying that in a heartbeat. The corporate machines may be more stable, but generally they're tied to corporate sales channels that aren't built to be accessed by individual buyers.
      - hackuser 10y ago
        > There's a small community of Linux on Mac hardware hackers because they have the slowest rate of change and fewest models to support. Interesting; I hadn't thought how Apple's culture of minimizing complexity for users would benefit even FOSS. > The corporate machines may be more stable, but generally they're tied to corporate sales channels that aren't built to be accessed by individual buyers. IME: You just have to look hard for those with platform stability; it's not prominently advertised and your non-corporate sales rep will have no idea what you are talking about. But once you find one, you can buy it online direct or through many channels, at least SMB channels (e.g., Connection.com); it's just not available from Best Buy or Staples. Come to think of it, I would think the FOSS operating system community would happily adopt them.
- mmanfrin 10y ago
  If I worked on Windows, I'd seriously consider it; but my workflow is mac/unix so Windows is relegated to Gaming PC territory.
- ColanR 10y ago
  I have an elitebook from 2012, and the build quality is pretty bad compared with my Lenovo (Thinkpad) computers. Everything except the motherboard has broken at least once. I use it for the i7 processor.
- mahyarm 10y ago
  They've had thermal throttling issues in some of their high end ones, so maybe there are reasons why they are ignored. For a person who is just going to use their laptop as a browser, email, WebEx & MS office machine, that doesn't matter as much.
  - X-Istence 10y ago
    I've got an EliteBook that has issues with this... at high load after about 10 - 15 minutes it throttles itself WAY back because it can't get rid of the heat.
  - shakna 10y ago
    I was happy with my HP till I moved north of Darwin: 99% humidity, 34C/93F 9 months of the year. It became impossible to use unless I wanted to cool my workspace to the point where stepping in and out of the workspace all day could shock my system. I switched to a Thinkpad. It worked. Humidity/dust killed it, like everything else, but it took 18 months.
- bsder 10y ago
  > Why don't HP desktops and laptops get more attention in 'hacker' communities? I hardly ever see them discussed. Because HP did a LOT of crappy things and produced a lot of crappy hardware and provided a really crappy customer experience. I know a lot of people who are in the "I will NEVER buy another HP" camp. That reputation takes time to undo, and you have to stick with it and not screw up during that time or you are back to square one.
  - lewisl9029 10y ago
    > Because HP did a LOT of crappy things and produced a lot of crappy hardware and provided a really crappy customer experience. In my experience, they still do. I have a Elite X2 1011 G1 2-in-1 business laptop that cost a fortune when I bought it. It has numerous serious, well-documented issues that HP has done nothing about since release. A few that I've personally experienced include: - Touchpad randomly stops working every few weeks until you remove and reinstall drivers - Severe power leakage during sleep, even with connected standby turned off (I'm talking about 100% to 0% if left unplugged overnight) - WiFi stops working after wake from sleep until disabled and re-enabled - Frequent intermittent audio crackling issues that requires a reboot to fix, and an audio "enhancement" suite that's seemingly impossible to disable, and makes anything coming out of the headphone output sound like absolute shit (and this is not just my snobby audiophile side speaking, even my parents can tell something's off with the headphone out on this laptop, and so can everybody else in this 14-page thread http://h30434.www3.hp.com/t5/Notebook-Audio/DTS-Audio-Control-Panel-Audio-Enhancements-dont-stay-off/td-p/5096413 http://h30434.www3.hp.com/t5/Notebook-Audio/DTS-Audio-Contro...), which severely hampers its use even as a media consumption device. All of which I would consider to be inexcusable issues even for the most basic machines, without factoring in the device's $2000+ price tag. The only redeeming factor was its WiGig chip and the accompanying WiGig Dock (separate purchase), which is seriously cool tech that I really hope catches on, along with wireless charging. Albeit it has limited utility on a machine with such debilitating defects. Needless to say I'm now firmly in the "I will _NEVER_ buy another HP" camp.
  - csours 10y ago
    I used to work for HP, and I'll never buy anything from them after they screwed me in the pay department: -5% pay adjustment on hire/transfer from EDS; also they did not pass on shift differentials of 15% for 3rd shift that they were payed for my work. Paying your workers may not motivate them (above a certain baseline), but screwing them certainly will!
- JoBrad 10y ago
  In my experience, HP does a lot of manipulation of their BIOS settings to make sure you only use their replacement parts.
- quasse 10y ago
  Personally, it's because my experience with their high end consumer laptops made me never trust their engineering again. Never have I had a laptop that was such a failure in terms of thermal engineering and also mechanical design. Constant thermal throttling, and both hinges cracking after a year from normal opening and closing of the screen.
  - hackuser 10y ago
    > my experience with their high end consumer laptops made me never trust their engineering again FWIW, the corporate products seem entirely different from the consumer ones, at least in my experience.
- walrus01 10y ago
  > Why don't HP laptops get more attention Because I've never seen one with the build quality of a Thinkpad T or X series. Which also have near perfect Linux kernel driver support.
  - hackuser 10y ago
    > Thinkpad T or X series. Which also have near perfect Linux kernel driver support. Isn't that because Linux (and other *nix) devs typically use Thinkpads? And does anyone know why that is? I'd guess that it's because when these projects started in the 1990s, IBM Thinkpads had a great reputation for quality.
    - walrus01 10y ago
      That, and the hardware used by thibkpads is usually very close to the Intel reference design for the northbridge chipset associated with the CPU, and things like Intel or broadcom Ethernet controllers and not shitty ones.
- douche 10y ago
  I have an older, refurbished elitebook that I picked up for about $140. It's fantastic. It has a removeable battery and the tool-less backplate. Every component inside can be serviced easily with plain old mini screwdrivers. The best feature is the hinges. I've had several other laptops over the years that I had to abandon because the hinges seized up and the attachment to the screen was so weak that eventually I opened the laptop and busted the screen. I don't see that ever happening with this elitebook.
- rtpg 10y ago
  I've had some issues getting several HP laptops to play nicely with Ubuntu. Some of this was the graphics chip, but there were some basic driver issues as well. Though, thinking about it now, the machines were not bad. No Macbook Pro in build quality but it worked well enough.
  - herbst 10y ago
    Can we stop using MBPs as quality standard please? I dont know how a such fragile case, mushy keyboard, heating issues, driver incompatiblity everywhere except OSX, ... Even qualifies as "quality". No question they are good laptops, but there are several out there with much higher build quality. Thinkpads, XPS, ... Edit:// Before i get more hate on this, think about it. If we make manufacturers think we want macbooks all we get are shiny slim cases, if we messure quality with Thinkpads we get a lot more
    - rtpg 10y ago
      Having gone through Dells, HPs, Toshibas, and Apple laptops... The reason I use MBPs as the reference is because it is still the laptop I enjoy using the most on almost all metrics. The thinness is nice, a touch thicker to get more battery life would be nice but I use my laptop for several hours unplugged heavily without issue. The aluminum case feels better than any other laptop I've held. XPSes feel nice, but not like my laptop feels. The trackpad is excellent. Smooth surface instead of that bumpy stuff on most laptops. Last-gen Macbook keyboards (pre-butterfly) feel very nice. I use MBPs as a reference because that's what I mostly want. If I could get a MBP with dedicated GPU and no driver issues for Linux, I'd be pretty happy. Thin things are nice.
    - bostand 10y ago
      Exactly! After multiple gpu heating issues I rank MBP quality somewhere between Toshiba and acer
      - herbst 10y ago
        At least someone that understands the problem. Kudos!
- herbst 10y ago
  Afaik mostly because Thinkpads have all that but are slightly better.
yani205 10y ago
I wish they start doing this with phones more often
- rm_-rf_slash 10y ago
  That's the "eat your vegetables" line of smartphone marketing. Good for you but a hard sell. Besides if battery life really matters to you then you would get much more utility from an external battery that can store far more than a single smartphone charge.
  - mulmen 10y ago
    Why is it hard to sell people vegetables? I agree with you but I don't actually know why. Is it just because there's no industry group running a "got carrots" campaign?
    - WildUtah 10y ago
      I sell people vegetables professionally. It's not difficult at all. People will pay a fair price for quality organically grown tomatoes, cucumbers, kale, chiles, peas and snow peas, and various Southern and Asian vegetables. There's too much hand work involved in root vegetables to pay easily for first world labor, but you can make it work. The problem being invoked is that the junk food market is much bigger.
  - civilian 10y ago
    I've got an external battery that has usb plugs, it's situationally awesome to have.
  - hocuspocus 10y ago
    Hu, no? There's only one phone maker that is getting to absolutely ridiculous levels of thinness, and that's Apple, while everyone else has understood that people enjoy 3000+ mAh batteries and care more about screen size, overall compactness and weight. I've never heard anyone say they wanted a <7mm thick phone (rather the opposite in fact).
combatentropy 10y ago
When batteries surpass 72 hours, then laptop bodies can shrink below 20 mm.
- shpx 10y ago
  You have to cap either battery life or weight/size. They capped battery life at ~10 hours and decrease size every year. Maybe one day laptops get light and thin enough and that changes. The 2016 13" macbook pro with 70 hours of battery life would weigh ~3kg [0]. Have you ever used a light laptop (new macbook, macbook airs or ms surface to some extent)? The (lack of) weight feels really nice. The macbook would imo be the best laptop if it weren't for the keyboard. In fairness I've never owned a laptop with day long battery life so can't compare. Actually if I could buy a 100gram laptop with 1hour battery life I'd do that, the battery is less than 20% of the weight of a laptop though. Portable 700gram 100Wh (the 13" pros are 55Wh and 50Wh) battery packs are less than $100 on amazon. Ultimately, if you _really_ believe in battery life, line the back of your laptop with 18650's (one cell is 10Wh for less than $10), all you need is like 2 circuit boards, some solder and a bunch of electric tape. You can theoretically fit 47 on the bottom of a 13" macbook pro (you need ~35 cells for 72 hours[1]). Or get someone to manufacture a portable laptop battery case, macbook pros vent through the hinge, so heat should be less of a problem. [0] https://www.apple.com/ca/macbook-pro/specs/ https://www.apple.com/ca/macbook-pro/specs/ and https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/MacBook+Pro+13-Inch+Touch+Bar+Teardown/73480#s148072 https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/MacBook+Pro+13-Inch+Touch+Ba... means 1370grams+235grams\6 [1] http://www.batteryspace.com/ProductImages/li-ion/specLI2400.gif http://www.batteryspace.com/ProductImages/li-ion/specLI2400.... and https://www.apple.com/ca/macbook/specs/ https://www.apple.com/ca/macbook/specs/ (281mm\197mm)/(65mm\*18mm) = 47
  - seanp2k2 10y ago
    Or spend $700 on a pair of Hypermac 100wh battery packs https://www.hypershop.com/products/hyperjuice-external-battery-pack-for-macbook?variant=11044791238 https://www.hypershop.com/products/hyperjuice-external-batte...
- randyrand 10y ago
  meh. I'd be happy if I actually got the 10 im promised.
MR4D 10y ago
TL:DR - 4K screen sucks regular batteries dry - needed bigger battery for same battery life. :( I got excited that this might be a good trend until I read this paragraph: "Unfortunately, the claimed three hours of additional battery life aren’t meant to make this laptop into some long-lasting wonder — they’re really just meant to normalize its battery life. HP will only be selling the 15.6-inch x360 with a 4K display this year, and that requires a lot more power."
- slantyyz 10y ago
  The paragraph following yours is quite important: "By increasing the laptop’s battery capacity, HP is able to push the machine’s battery life from the 9.5 hours it estimated for the 4K version of its 2016 model to about 12 hours and 45 minutes for this model. So it is adding three hours of battery life, but in doing so, it’s merely matching the battery life of last year’s 1080p model." It is still a net gain over the previous year's 4K model's battery life.
  - mulmen 10y ago
    I believe Apple is already making the argument but how much battery life do you really need? 8 hours seems like an easy figure to throw out because its a "work day" although most people can just plug in their laptops. What use case needs 12+? That seems "good enough" to me for most applications. Is it building in more life so that as the battery degrades there is still acceptable battery life? Are there more applications than I think where the laptop is actually not plugged in all day? When does that happen? Manufacturing? Some kind of in-the-field work? I have no experience with it so honestly curious how people use laptops as more than a mobile terminal in an office setting.
    - slantyyz 10y ago
      >> What use case needs 12+? Probably none, but knowing your laptop can go 12 on light use gives you a little more comfort when doing more CPU intensive work while on battery. I'd be surprised if I could get 12 hours on that HP Spectre with my bad habits (tens of Chrome tabs left open at the same time).
proee 10y ago
Wouldn't it be great if laptops had a "dewalt" powertool style bottom plate. You could decide if you want the "thin" or "thick" baseplate to balance between all-day battery life vs. ultra-thin portable 3-4 hour life. This would give the option to create a solid "3-inch thick" battery that lasts a week. It would weigh a ton, but for some situations like remote fieldwork it could be a really great solution.
- mciancia 10y ago
  Well, lenovo has something like that
- acomjean 10y ago
  As more laptops start charging from usb C, I expect we'll start seeing recharging bricks. Seems to be the way phones do it now that replaceable batteries are gone.
  - ghaff 10y ago
    And I'm actually not sure it's a bad thing. I used to be in the "just give a phone that's a bit fatter already" camp. But now, to be honest, I'm more inclined to think I want the thinner/lighter phone for the 80%+ of days when the thin battery has enough juice and just carry the recharging brick when I need something more.
    - jessriedel 10y ago
      A battery case seems more practical than a brick you dongle off the phone, especially if the phone is designed to compactly accommodate one.
      - ghaff 10y ago
        Depends how easy it is to slip on and off. Also, a battery case is more or less specific to a particular phone model. You basically toss it when you upgrade to a new phone.
  - 10y ago
RodericDay 10y ago
I have a 13' Air and a 13' Retina Pro. I do not care even a little bit for the Retina screen. Makes me sad that so much energy is wasted on it.
- CoolGuySteve 10y ago
  This was the biggest factor to my switching to Ubuntu when deciding to upgrade from my 2010 MacBook Pro. I can't stand glossy displays and I want battery life. High res displays tend to be glossy because at some point the grain on the matte coating is larger than the pixels. On the PC side, it's easy to pick a matte 1080p display on the XPS13 and Asus UX305 and it greatly increases battery life. The 1080p XPS13 gets 14 hours! And it's matte! Win-win. Whereas it's Tough Shit For You on a MacBook. Don't know why though, my old MacBook Pro has a matte display as a configurable option.
  - WildUtah 10y ago
    1080p? Why not just go back to individual blinking LEDs? A non-retina screen is a throwback to previous centuries and should be tolerated only by the visually impaired.
- stuckagain 10y ago
  Do you have to check it on airplanes?
  - RodericDay 10y ago
    Not sure I follow. I usually carry both as part of my carry-on.
    - stuckagain 10y ago
      Sorry I was just joking about your use of the abbreviation of feet instead of inches.
thoughtsimple 10y ago
Who cares how thick it is, what matters it what does it weigh? Not seeing that information.
- cwbrandsma 10y ago
  As an alternative point of view (as to say, I'm not calling you wrong at all, just that there are other opinions on the matter): I don't care about weight at all, or how thin the thing is. I want battery life, bigger screen size, and horse power. (Apple about lost me when they killed the 17 MBP). I call my laptops "luggable".
  - thoughtsimple 10y ago
    The good thing about bringing back the 17" MBP would be all the objections over battery life and low power GPUs would be moot. Even a thin 17" is going to be huge. The last one looked like 4 cafeteria trays stacked up. I'm just not sure that there is much of a market for it. It's fun to imagine though. Mobile Xeon, ECC memory, 32 or 64 GB DDR4-2400 RAM, RAID NVMe SSDs. Priced like a Mac Pro :)
    - lj3 10y ago
      > The last one looked like 4 cafeteria trays stacked up. It's funny you mention that. The nickname for the 17" MBP was 'the lunch tray'.
      - seanp2k2 10y ago
        The 17" allow me to fit a dinner plate, side dish, and drink on top of it (closed), then carry it back to my desk or to the next meeting. The 15" won't fit the side dish anymore. I miss my Silicon Valley Lunch Tray.
    - ComputerGuru 10y ago
      My Zbook Studio G3 is the size of my old rMBP and has a Xeon 1545m, 32GB of ECC RAM, a 950 NVMe SSD, and space for another (but m.2, not NVMe, unfortunately).
rayiner 10y ago
To put that into context, it will be 18 mm and 4.4 pounds, versus 15.5 mm and 4 pounds for the new 15" MBP. Apparently the new battery is 79 watt-hours (the old one was 64 watt-hours), versus the 76 watt-hours on the 2016 rMBP. With the power-guzzling 4K screen, it'll almost certainly get less battery life than the new MBP. Which confirms the consternation over the 2016 rMBP. It's a huge regression compared to the 99 watt-hour battery in the 2015 rMBP 15", but with few exceptions PC manufacturers were shipping 50-60 watt batteries in similar configurations. And going with power-guzzling 4K displays instead of the much more efficient 3K model in the MBP.
- vacri 10y ago
  > 18 mm ... versus 15.5 mm On a tangent, weight I can understand, as folks physically haul around a laptop, but I've never understood shaving a millimeter or two from the thickness of a laptop. I've heard genuine complaints about heavy laptops, or too-large form-factor (big screen or overly large bezel), but thinness seems to be just bragging rights. I've known people who bought a laptop to fit in a leather bag they already liked (rather than the other way around!), but I've never heard anyone complain that laptops are just too thick. Am I missing something here?
  - rayiner 10y ago
    Thickness matters when you're carrying without a case. E.g. Walking down to a meeting. Also means you can fit more papers in a bag with your laptop.
  - lobster_johnson 10y ago
    Pure marketing ploy, same as with phones, which nobody wanted thinner versions of ever since we got thin-enough smartphones. It's hard to market an intangible quality like "increased battery life", but a thinner laptop has an immediate visual, futuristic, visceral appeal. The new MacBook Pro looks sleek, and immediately makes the 2015 model — once the slickest laptop around — look dumpy and old hat. On the other hand, there is such a thing as a laptop that is too thick and heavy, obviously. Many PC models still are.
walrus01 10y ago
I want something that's identical in size/weight to a 2009/2010 Macbook Pro 17" (huge in comparison to today's stuff), but with all of the internal volume that was occupied by the DVD-RW drive full of battery... I bet you could fit 100Wh of battery.
- stuckagain 10y ago
  I used to use (and still own) one of those PowerBook G3 laptops where you could swap the media bay for a CD-RW, a floppy, or a Zip drive, or just more batteries. With modern Li-ion battery technology in both the main battery and the media bay, that thing ran for 20+ hours. It was amazing.
  - seanp2k2 10y ago
    Many Dell Latitudes can also accommodate a media bay battery. I had a D830 with a 1920x1200 screen and loved having the 9-cell + LiPo combo.
- rayiner 10y ago
  The 15" rMBP has a 100 watt hour battery and is a lot smaller than that.
- rsfinn 10y ago
  I strongly suspect that the weight of the battery that fills the volume of the DVD-RW drive is much greater than the weight of the drive, which would violate your initial condition. So which constraint do you break to satisfy your requirements?
  - walrus01 10y ago
    Neither, I did not literally mean use the dvdrw drive space only, but keep the same chassis thickness and dimensions, much smaller motherboard, no 2.5" drive space (m.2 SSD only), fill the rest of the volume with battery. It would probably get a 12 hour low CPU load battery life even with the big screen.
21 10y ago
I see a parallel trend for big laptops. Like this ridiculous one (which I would love if not the price): https://gizmodo.com/acers-absurd-curved-display-laptop-has-a-predictably-hu-1790521279 https://gizmodo.com/acers-absurd-curved-display-laptop-has-a...
Animats 10y ago
Panasonic makes a rugged laptop with 27 hours of battery life.[1] [1] http://business.panasonic.com/toughbook/fully-rugged-laptop-toughbook-31.html http://business.panasonic.com/toughbook/fully-rugged-laptop-...
- noonespecial 10y ago
  8.2 lbs. with optional media bay 2nd battery I'm not sure it counts when it weighs so much you could just bring a second laptop along!
  - StRoy 10y ago
    Most of the weight is due to the toughened design, not the battery, actually. We are talking about laptops you can use as a weapon to bludgeon someone, then take with you to swim, and they'd still be in a working state. Actually you can run over them with an SUV and they still work! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41lXVKSTOGQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41lXVKSTOGQ Of course, unlike common laptops, they don't need a case or anything. Just carry them as is with their built-in handle. If they didn't cost so much I would consider buying one. The added weight may make them slightly less comfortable in one way, but in another way, if you think about it, they're not flimsy pieces of denting aluminum you always have to treat with care, put in protective bags during transport and the like. Using a laptop like this must feel.. liberating.
randyrand 10y ago
It's annoying that most manufactures are only giving you 1080p or 4k options. WHY NOT SOMETHING IN BETWEEN! Apple has the right approach IMO, 2880-by-1800 15", 2560-by-1600 13". ~48 - 67% more than 1080p.
- seanp2k2 10y ago
  Windows and Linux have issues with HiDPI when scaling is not just 2x. 1080p is conveniently ~1/4 of 4K, so 2X scaling for H and W makes it look normal. Also, panel manufacturers want to pitch 4K, not 2.5k or whatever would make sense. It's the same reason we have 16:9 instead of 16:10 which many people (including me) liked much more: panel manufacturers and companies selling these to consumers care more about marketing (and selling) than how good they are to use. 100% srgb coverage is easier to sell than e.g. Backlight uniformity or low backlight bleed.
jaxn 10y ago
This is the same thing Microsoft did with the Surface Book a couple of months ago. I bought one and love the battery.
mcculley 10y ago
How much more work would it be to put in more RAM that could only be used when plugged into AC power? My understanding of the MacBook Pro design constraint is that they had to hit <100 watt-hours while using LPDDR3. Could a laptop easily have another 16 or 32 GB of RAM that consumes more power but is only available when plugged into AC power? I would be happy to have such a constraint. I love my MacBook Pro. I love being able to carry it around and deal with things like email when on battery. When I'm doing serious development work, I'm sitting down somewhere plugged in anyhow. The OS could gracefully page out to swap and power down the less efficient memory when switched to battery.
- cududa 10y ago
  Seems like a lot of engineering work for something that'll be solved around the end of the year
  - mcculley 10y ago
    I agree with that in this particular case. I would imagine the next rev of the MacBook Pro will use some Intel chipset that can support LPDDR4 or something. But I'm wondering about this in the general case. For some definitions of "power user", it would make sense for the system to behave differently when running on battery. Pushing these design decisions down into hardware is something Apple does better than others, as they control the whole stack.
- pimlottc 10y ago
  Are there any existing operating systems that can handle a dynamically-changing amount of RAM? > The OS could gracefully page out to swap and power down the less efficient memory when switched to battery. According to benchmarks, the SSD on the latest MacBook Pro hit 1.4GB/s. Even at this speed, it would take at least 10 seconds to flush 16GB of RAM to disk. I doubt your computer could do much while that was happening. I wouldn't call that very graceful.
  - mcculley 10y ago
    > Are there any existing operating systems that can handle a dynamically-changing amount of RAM? Some implementations of Linux do this on exotic hardware (NUMA). > Even at this speed, it would take at least 10 seconds to flush 16GB of RAM to disk. It needn't happen atomically.
bencollier49 10y ago
I misread that as "He made a laptop slightly thicker to add 3 hours of battery life". I was waiting for the subtitle "Apple hates him" or something.
sullyj3 10y ago
On a side note, why is it that I see battery capacity measured in both mAh and wH? One is charge, the other is energy. Which is more relevant?

237 points by slantyyz 10y ago

Why don't HP desktops and laptops get more attention in 'hacker' communities? I hardly ever see them discussed. IME with large numbers of HP corporate (not consumer) machines, they have by far the best quality of any Windows options. They run for so long that users get frustrated, wanting shiny new equipment but having no reason to replace their old ones. An EliteBook not far away from where I'm sitting even has a tool-less case - you can pop off the cover and service it by moving one lever, no screwdriver required - on a laptop! However, I don't have data on quality; that is hard to come by. (I have no relationship w/ HP.)

mozumder 10y ago
I have the Skylake HP x360 with the 4K screen. The 4K screen has awful color rendering that makes everything look like barf and the trackpad is even worse. My MacBook Pro is so much better.
- derefr 10y ago
  Nobody ever said anything good about HP's consumer laptops. You can basically think of their consumer and enterprise lines as separate divisions, almost separate companies.
  - scott_karana 10y ago
    The Spectre x360 is both a halo "Premium" laptop and it's pitched as a Business model. [1] It might not be a traditional EliteBook, but it's supposed to duke it out with the ThinkPad X1 Carbon and the like. Not stacking up to an MBP is inexcusable in that context, if true. 1 http://store.hp.com/us/en/mdp/business-solutions/spectre-pro-x360#!&Tab=features http://store.hp.com/us/en/mdp/business-solutions/spectre-pro...
  - rayiner 10y ago
    HP's business laptops almost invariably have shit screens.
derefr 10y ago
I used a 2007 EliteBook for years before my current MacBook. They're great machines. Over the holidays, I found out that my mother's old (2012?) Dell had broken. I gave her the EliteBook; it was a dramatic upgrade from the newer Dell, along every dimension: build quality, keyboard and touchpad, CPU speed, memory upgradability. It was ridiculous.
quantumhobbit 10y ago
I don't know about their other lines but I had a Zbook for work that made me never want to own anything made by HP. Huge clunky piece of flimsy plastic with terrible battery life and a worse trackpad. The display had a habit of breaking, meaning I went through several replacements before they finally just gave me a MacBook.
- BoorishBears 10y ago
  HP has tried to reform themselves with some new premium devices like the Spectre's line (x360), but they really did make some horrible hardware back in the day.
- GordonS 10y ago
  Since my last HP work laptop died, I've just been 'upgraded' to a 1.5 year old 15" ZBook G2, after flat out refusing the 17" version (which weighs about as much as me, and is bloody massive). It is heavy, has a pretty big screen bezel, and generally feels clunky. The i7-4710MQ is also slightly slower the >3 year old i7 it replaces. Only slight positive is I now get ~3.5 hours of battery life instead of ~2.
khedoros1 10y ago
I have a Skylake Envy 15. In general, I like it as a Linux development machine, but there are a lot of things that I'd change about it if I could. The polish just isn't there...and somehow it manages (with an aluminum body) to feel more rickety than the plastic Lenovo that work issued me. I'd rather just use it without getting into a discussion about why I'm using an imperfect computer rather than [insert other guy's preferred brand]. edit: I suppose it's not really a business model, but it is supposed to be their premium consumer model, and to supposed be kind of an HP Macbook "replacement".
flukus 10y ago
Because HP is probably the worst offender when it comes to pre-installed crapware.
- kobeya 10y ago
  Does that really matter with this crowd?
  - flukus 10y ago
    That depends, it's a diverse crowd. If you're going to install linux then it's not an issue. If your leaving the OEM version of windows then it is. IME a fresh install of windows is often hard/impossible to track down all the drivers you need. And those drivers often come with their own crapware.
    - kaishiro 10y ago
      Is finding drivers really still an issue with Windows 10?
      - flukus 10y ago
        I don't know, I've never tried with windows 10.
      - pirocks 10y ago
        I recently did a complete reinstall of windows 10. I hat to re-download some drivers from dell to get touchpad gestures working but otherwise everything was fine.
        bostand 10y ago
        Lenovo tried to adress this with driver list in bios and people accused them of doing superfish 2.0
      - kagamine 10y ago
        Recently upgraded a zbook from 8.1 to 10 and the audio went awry, and the DTS audio stopped working and that took time to fix. There were some issues with win 10 switching between wi-fi and a cabled connection which should happen automatically but I had to fiddle around to make it work. ON the plus side: virtual desktops in Windows! Not the best implementation and still not as good as Linux's, but usable.
nqzero 10y ago
> Why don't HP desktops and laptops get more attention in 'hacker' communities? aspect ratio - 16:9 is good for media, and maybe some business use, but it's DOA for hacking
- lj3 10y ago
  I'm not sure that's true anymore. 4k resolution means that you can now fit two 4:3 monitor's worth of pixels (1920x1440) width-wise side by side on a single 4k (3840x2160), 16:9 screen. It's almost 2 monitors in one.
dv_dt 10y ago
I think it's because of model fragmentation and short lifetimes - there aren't enough devices with a similar enough configuration available for long enough time that any community can really develop.
- hackuser 10y ago
  Interesting. Generally the components in different manufacturers' laptops are subsets of the same set of options: Intel, AMD, NVidia, Broadwell, etc. Using the same components, I'd expect all manufacturers have similar ranges of variation and rates of change. There are corporate machines that promise platform stability for 1-5 years in order to give enterprise IT more standardized platforms to support, but I'd be surprised if many FOSS projects targeted those models.
  - dv_dt 10y ago
    There's a small community of Linux on Mac hardware hackers because they have the slowest rate of change and fewest models to support. In comparison all the PC makers are high rates of churn and configurability. If there were a Mac class hardware build that integrated out of the box with Linux that showed reasonable product-line stability, I'd be buying that in a heartbeat. The corporate machines may be more stable, but generally they're tied to corporate sales channels that aren't built to be accessed by individual buyers.
    - hackuser 10y ago
      > There's a small community of Linux on Mac hardware hackers because they have the slowest rate of change and fewest models to support. Interesting; I hadn't thought how Apple's culture of minimizing complexity for users would benefit even FOSS. > The corporate machines may be more stable, but generally they're tied to corporate sales channels that aren't built to be accessed by individual buyers. IME: You just have to look hard for those with platform stability; it's not prominently advertised and your non-corporate sales rep will have no idea what you are talking about. But once you find one, you can buy it online direct or through many channels, at least SMB channels (e.g., Connection.com); it's just not available from Best Buy or Staples. Come to think of it, I would think the FOSS operating system community would happily adopt them.
mmanfrin 10y ago
If I worked on Windows, I'd seriously consider it; but my workflow is mac/unix so Windows is relegated to Gaming PC territory.
ColanR 10y ago
I have an elitebook from 2012, and the build quality is pretty bad compared with my Lenovo (Thinkpad) computers. Everything except the motherboard has broken at least once. I use it for the i7 processor.
mahyarm 10y ago
They've had thermal throttling issues in some of their high end ones, so maybe there are reasons why they are ignored. For a person who is just going to use their laptop as a browser, email, WebEx & MS office machine, that doesn't matter as much.
- X-Istence 10y ago
  I've got an EliteBook that has issues with this... at high load after about 10 - 15 minutes it throttles itself WAY back because it can't get rid of the heat.
- shakna 10y ago
  I was happy with my HP till I moved north of Darwin: 99% humidity, 34C/93F 9 months of the year. It became impossible to use unless I wanted to cool my workspace to the point where stepping in and out of the workspace all day could shock my system. I switched to a Thinkpad. It worked. Humidity/dust killed it, like everything else, but it took 18 months.
bsder 10y ago
> Why don't HP desktops and laptops get more attention in 'hacker' communities? I hardly ever see them discussed. Because HP did a LOT of crappy things and produced a lot of crappy hardware and provided a really crappy customer experience. I know a lot of people who are in the "I will NEVER buy another HP" camp. That reputation takes time to undo, and you have to stick with it and not screw up during that time or you are back to square one.
- lewisl9029 10y ago
  > Because HP did a LOT of crappy things and produced a lot of crappy hardware and provided a really crappy customer experience. In my experience, they still do. I have a Elite X2 1011 G1 2-in-1 business laptop that cost a fortune when I bought it. It has numerous serious, well-documented issues that HP has done nothing about since release. A few that I've personally experienced include: - Touchpad randomly stops working every few weeks until you remove and reinstall drivers - Severe power leakage during sleep, even with connected standby turned off (I'm talking about 100% to 0% if left unplugged overnight) - WiFi stops working after wake from sleep until disabled and re-enabled - Frequent intermittent audio crackling issues that requires a reboot to fix, and an audio "enhancement" suite that's seemingly impossible to disable, and makes anything coming out of the headphone output sound like absolute shit (and this is not just my snobby audiophile side speaking, even my parents can tell something's off with the headphone out on this laptop, and so can everybody else in this 14-page thread http://h30434.www3.hp.com/t5/Notebook-Audio/DTS-Audio-Control-Panel-Audio-Enhancements-dont-stay-off/td-p/5096413 http://h30434.www3.hp.com/t5/Notebook-Audio/DTS-Audio-Contro...), which severely hampers its use even as a media consumption device. All of which I would consider to be inexcusable issues even for the most basic machines, without factoring in the device's $2000+ price tag. The only redeeming factor was its WiGig chip and the accompanying WiGig Dock (separate purchase), which is seriously cool tech that I really hope catches on, along with wireless charging. Albeit it has limited utility on a machine with such debilitating defects. Needless to say I'm now firmly in the "I will _NEVER_ buy another HP" camp.
- csours 10y ago
  I used to work for HP, and I'll never buy anything from them after they screwed me in the pay department: -5% pay adjustment on hire/transfer from EDS; also they did not pass on shift differentials of 15% for 3rd shift that they were payed for my work. Paying your workers may not motivate them (above a certain baseline), but screwing them certainly will!
JoBrad 10y ago
In my experience, HP does a lot of manipulation of their BIOS settings to make sure you only use their replacement parts.
quasse 10y ago
Personally, it's because my experience with their high end consumer laptops made me never trust their engineering again. Never have I had a laptop that was such a failure in terms of thermal engineering and also mechanical design. Constant thermal throttling, and both hinges cracking after a year from normal opening and closing of the screen.
- hackuser 10y ago
  > my experience with their high end consumer laptops made me never trust their engineering again FWIW, the corporate products seem entirely different from the consumer ones, at least in my experience.
walrus01 10y ago
> Why don't HP laptops get more attention Because I've never seen one with the build quality of a Thinkpad T or X series. Which also have near perfect Linux kernel driver support.
- hackuser 10y ago
  > Thinkpad T or X series. Which also have near perfect Linux kernel driver support. Isn't that because Linux (and other *nix) devs typically use Thinkpads? And does anyone know why that is? I'd guess that it's because when these projects started in the 1990s, IBM Thinkpads had a great reputation for quality.
  - walrus01 10y ago
    That, and the hardware used by thibkpads is usually very close to the Intel reference design for the northbridge chipset associated with the CPU, and things like Intel or broadcom Ethernet controllers and not shitty ones.
douche 10y ago
I have an older, refurbished elitebook that I picked up for about $140. It's fantastic. It has a removeable battery and the tool-less backplate. Every component inside can be serviced easily with plain old mini screwdrivers. The best feature is the hinges. I've had several other laptops over the years that I had to abandon because the hinges seized up and the attachment to the screen was so weak that eventually I opened the laptop and busted the screen. I don't see that ever happening with this elitebook.
rtpg 10y ago
I've had some issues getting several HP laptops to play nicely with Ubuntu. Some of this was the graphics chip, but there were some basic driver issues as well. Though, thinking about it now, the machines were not bad. No Macbook Pro in build quality but it worked well enough.
- herbst 10y ago
  Can we stop using MBPs as quality standard please? I dont know how a such fragile case, mushy keyboard, heating issues, driver incompatiblity everywhere except OSX, ... Even qualifies as "quality". No question they are good laptops, but there are several out there with much higher build quality. Thinkpads, XPS, ... Edit:// Before i get more hate on this, think about it. If we make manufacturers think we want macbooks all we get are shiny slim cases, if we messure quality with Thinkpads we get a lot more
  - rtpg 10y ago
    Having gone through Dells, HPs, Toshibas, and Apple laptops... The reason I use MBPs as the reference is because it is still the laptop I enjoy using the most on almost all metrics. The thinness is nice, a touch thicker to get more battery life would be nice but I use my laptop for several hours unplugged heavily without issue. The aluminum case feels better than any other laptop I've held. XPSes feel nice, but not like my laptop feels. The trackpad is excellent. Smooth surface instead of that bumpy stuff on most laptops. Last-gen Macbook keyboards (pre-butterfly) feel very nice. I use MBPs as a reference because that's what I mostly want. If I could get a MBP with dedicated GPU and no driver issues for Linux, I'd be pretty happy. Thin things are nice.
  - bostand 10y ago
    Exactly! After multiple gpu heating issues I rank MBP quality somewhere between Toshiba and acer
    - herbst 10y ago
      At least someone that understands the problem. Kudos!
herbst 10y ago
Afaik mostly because Thinkpads have all that but are slightly better.

yani205 10y ago

I wish they start doing this with phones more often

rm_-rf_slash 10y ago
That's the "eat your vegetables" line of smartphone marketing. Good for you but a hard sell. Besides if battery life really matters to you then you would get much more utility from an external battery that can store far more than a single smartphone charge.
- mulmen 10y ago
  Why is it hard to sell people vegetables? I agree with you but I don't actually know why. Is it just because there's no industry group running a "got carrots" campaign?
  - WildUtah 10y ago
    I sell people vegetables professionally. It's not difficult at all. People will pay a fair price for quality organically grown tomatoes, cucumbers, kale, chiles, peas and snow peas, and various Southern and Asian vegetables. There's too much hand work involved in root vegetables to pay easily for first world labor, but you can make it work. The problem being invoked is that the junk food market is much bigger.
- civilian 10y ago
  I've got an external battery that has usb plugs, it's situationally awesome to have.
- hocuspocus 10y ago
  Hu, no? There's only one phone maker that is getting to absolutely ridiculous levels of thinness, and that's Apple, while everyone else has understood that people enjoy 3000+ mAh batteries and care more about screen size, overall compactness and weight. I've never heard anyone say they wanted a <7mm thick phone (rather the opposite in fact).

combatentropy 10y ago

When batteries surpass 72 hours, then laptop bodies can shrink below 20 mm.

shpx 10y ago
You have to cap either battery life or weight/size. They capped battery life at ~10 hours and decrease size every year. Maybe one day laptops get light and thin enough and that changes. The 2016 13" macbook pro with 70 hours of battery life would weigh ~3kg [0]. Have you ever used a light laptop (new macbook, macbook airs or ms surface to some extent)? The (lack of) weight feels really nice. The macbook would imo be the best laptop if it weren't for the keyboard. In fairness I've never owned a laptop with day long battery life so can't compare. Actually if I could buy a 100gram laptop with 1hour battery life I'd do that, the battery is less than 20% of the weight of a laptop though. Portable 700gram 100Wh (the 13" pros are 55Wh and 50Wh) battery packs are less than $100 on amazon. Ultimately, if you _really_ believe in battery life, line the back of your laptop with 18650's (one cell is 10Wh for less than $10), all you need is like 2 circuit boards, some solder and a bunch of electric tape. You can theoretically fit 47 on the bottom of a 13" macbook pro (you need ~35 cells for 72 hours[1]). Or get someone to manufacture a portable laptop battery case, macbook pros vent through the hinge, so heat should be less of a problem. [0] https://www.apple.com/ca/macbook-pro/specs/ https://www.apple.com/ca/macbook-pro/specs/ and https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/MacBook+Pro+13-Inch+Touch+Bar+Teardown/73480#s148072 https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/MacBook+Pro+13-Inch+Touch+Ba... means 1370grams+235grams\6 [1] http://www.batteryspace.com/ProductImages/li-ion/specLI2400.gif http://www.batteryspace.com/ProductImages/li-ion/specLI2400.... and https://www.apple.com/ca/macbook/specs/ https://www.apple.com/ca/macbook/specs/ (281mm\197mm)/(65mm\*18mm) = 47
- seanp2k2 10y ago
  Or spend $700 on a pair of Hypermac 100wh battery packs https://www.hypershop.com/products/hyperjuice-external-battery-pack-for-macbook?variant=11044791238 https://www.hypershop.com/products/hyperjuice-external-batte...
randyrand 10y ago
meh. I'd be happy if I actually got the 10 im promised.

MR4D 10y ago

TL:DR - 4K screen sucks regular batteries dry - needed bigger battery for same battery life. :( I got excited that this might be a good trend until I read this paragraph: "Unfortunately, the claimed three hours of additional battery life aren’t meant to make this laptop into some long-lasting wonder — they’re really just meant to normalize its battery life. HP will only be selling the 15.6-inch x360 with a 4K display this year, and that requires a lot more power."

slantyyz 10y ago
The paragraph following yours is quite important: "By increasing the laptop’s battery capacity, HP is able to push the machine’s battery life from the 9.5 hours it estimated for the 4K version of its 2016 model to about 12 hours and 45 minutes for this model. So it is adding three hours of battery life, but in doing so, it’s merely matching the battery life of last year’s 1080p model." It is still a net gain over the previous year's 4K model's battery life.
- mulmen 10y ago
  I believe Apple is already making the argument but how much battery life do you really need? 8 hours seems like an easy figure to throw out because its a "work day" although most people can just plug in their laptops. What use case needs 12+? That seems "good enough" to me for most applications. Is it building in more life so that as the battery degrades there is still acceptable battery life? Are there more applications than I think where the laptop is actually not plugged in all day? When does that happen? Manufacturing? Some kind of in-the-field work? I have no experience with it so honestly curious how people use laptops as more than a mobile terminal in an office setting.
  - slantyyz 10y ago
    >> What use case needs 12+? Probably none, but knowing your laptop can go 12 on light use gives you a little more comfort when doing more CPU intensive work while on battery. I'd be surprised if I could get 12 hours on that HP Spectre with my bad habits (tens of Chrome tabs left open at the same time).

proee 10y ago

Wouldn't it be great if laptops had a "dewalt" powertool style bottom plate. You could decide if you want the "thin" or "thick" baseplate to balance between all-day battery life vs. ultra-thin portable 3-4 hour life. This would give the option to create a solid "3-inch thick" battery that lasts a week. It would weigh a ton, but for some situations like remote fieldwork it could be a really great solution.

mciancia 10y ago
Well, lenovo has something like that
acomjean 10y ago
As more laptops start charging from usb C, I expect we'll start seeing recharging bricks. Seems to be the way phones do it now that replaceable batteries are gone.
- ghaff 10y ago
  And I'm actually not sure it's a bad thing. I used to be in the "just give a phone that's a bit fatter already" camp. But now, to be honest, I'm more inclined to think I want the thinner/lighter phone for the 80%+ of days when the thin battery has enough juice and just carry the recharging brick when I need something more.
  - jessriedel 10y ago
    A battery case seems more practical than a brick you dongle off the phone, especially if the phone is designed to compactly accommodate one.
    - ghaff 10y ago
      Depends how easy it is to slip on and off. Also, a battery case is more or less specific to a particular phone model. You basically toss it when you upgrade to a new phone.
- 10y ago

RodericDay 10y ago

I have a 13' Air and a 13' Retina Pro. I do not care even a little bit for the Retina screen. Makes me sad that so much energy is wasted on it.

CoolGuySteve 10y ago
This was the biggest factor to my switching to Ubuntu when deciding to upgrade from my 2010 MacBook Pro. I can't stand glossy displays and I want battery life. High res displays tend to be glossy because at some point the grain on the matte coating is larger than the pixels. On the PC side, it's easy to pick a matte 1080p display on the XPS13 and Asus UX305 and it greatly increases battery life. The 1080p XPS13 gets 14 hours! And it's matte! Win-win. Whereas it's Tough Shit For You on a MacBook. Don't know why though, my old MacBook Pro has a matte display as a configurable option.
- WildUtah 10y ago
  1080p? Why not just go back to individual blinking LEDs? A non-retina screen is a throwback to previous centuries and should be tolerated only by the visually impaired.
stuckagain 10y ago
Do you have to check it on airplanes?
- RodericDay 10y ago
  Not sure I follow. I usually carry both as part of my carry-on.
  - stuckagain 10y ago
    Sorry I was just joking about your use of the abbreviation of feet instead of inches.

thoughtsimple 10y ago

Who cares how thick it is, what matters it what does it weigh? Not seeing that information.

cwbrandsma 10y ago
As an alternative point of view (as to say, I'm not calling you wrong at all, just that there are other opinions on the matter): I don't care about weight at all, or how thin the thing is. I want battery life, bigger screen size, and horse power. (Apple about lost me when they killed the 17 MBP). I call my laptops "luggable".
- thoughtsimple 10y ago
  The good thing about bringing back the 17" MBP would be all the objections over battery life and low power GPUs would be moot. Even a thin 17" is going to be huge. The last one looked like 4 cafeteria trays stacked up. I'm just not sure that there is much of a market for it. It's fun to imagine though. Mobile Xeon, ECC memory, 32 or 64 GB DDR4-2400 RAM, RAID NVMe SSDs. Priced like a Mac Pro :)
  - lj3 10y ago
    > The last one looked like 4 cafeteria trays stacked up. It's funny you mention that. The nickname for the 17" MBP was 'the lunch tray'.
    - seanp2k2 10y ago
      The 17" allow me to fit a dinner plate, side dish, and drink on top of it (closed), then carry it back to my desk or to the next meeting. The 15" won't fit the side dish anymore. I miss my Silicon Valley Lunch Tray.
  - ComputerGuru 10y ago
    My Zbook Studio G3 is the size of my old rMBP and has a Xeon 1545m, 32GB of ECC RAM, a 950 NVMe SSD, and space for another (but m.2, not NVMe, unfortunately).

rayiner 10y ago

To put that into context, it will be 18 mm and 4.4 pounds, versus 15.5 mm and 4 pounds for the new 15" MBP. Apparently the new battery is 79 watt-hours (the old one was 64 watt-hours), versus the 76 watt-hours on the 2016 rMBP. With the power-guzzling 4K screen, it'll almost certainly get less battery life than the new MBP. Which confirms the consternation over the 2016 rMBP. It's a huge regression compared to the 99 watt-hour battery in the 2015 rMBP 15", but with few exceptions PC manufacturers were shipping 50-60 watt batteries in similar configurations. And going with power-guzzling 4K displays instead of the much more efficient 3K model in the MBP.

vacri 10y ago
> 18 mm ... versus 15.5 mm On a tangent, weight I can understand, as folks physically haul around a laptop, but I've never understood shaving a millimeter or two from the thickness of a laptop. I've heard genuine complaints about heavy laptops, or too-large form-factor (big screen or overly large bezel), but thinness seems to be just bragging rights. I've known people who bought a laptop to fit in a leather bag they already liked (rather than the other way around!), but I've never heard anyone complain that laptops are just too thick. Am I missing something here?
- rayiner 10y ago
  Thickness matters when you're carrying without a case. E.g. Walking down to a meeting. Also means you can fit more papers in a bag with your laptop.
- lobster_johnson 10y ago
  Pure marketing ploy, same as with phones, which nobody wanted thinner versions of ever since we got thin-enough smartphones. It's hard to market an intangible quality like "increased battery life", but a thinner laptop has an immediate visual, futuristic, visceral appeal. The new MacBook Pro looks sleek, and immediately makes the 2015 model — once the slickest laptop around — look dumpy and old hat. On the other hand, there is such a thing as a laptop that is too thick and heavy, obviously. Many PC models still are.

walrus01 10y ago

I want something that's identical in size/weight to a 2009/2010 Macbook Pro 17" (huge in comparison to today's stuff), but with all of the internal volume that was occupied by the DVD-RW drive full of battery... I bet you could fit 100Wh of battery.

stuckagain 10y ago
I used to use (and still own) one of those PowerBook G3 laptops where you could swap the media bay for a CD-RW, a floppy, or a Zip drive, or just more batteries. With modern Li-ion battery technology in both the main battery and the media bay, that thing ran for 20+ hours. It was amazing.
- seanp2k2 10y ago
  Many Dell Latitudes can also accommodate a media bay battery. I had a D830 with a 1920x1200 screen and loved having the 9-cell + LiPo combo.
rayiner 10y ago
The 15" rMBP has a 100 watt hour battery and is a lot smaller than that.
rsfinn 10y ago
I strongly suspect that the weight of the battery that fills the volume of the DVD-RW drive is much greater than the weight of the drive, which would violate your initial condition. So which constraint do you break to satisfy your requirements?
- walrus01 10y ago
  Neither, I did not literally mean use the dvdrw drive space only, but keep the same chassis thickness and dimensions, much smaller motherboard, no 2.5" drive space (m.2 SSD only), fill the rest of the volume with battery. It would probably get a 12 hour low CPU load battery life even with the big screen.

21 10y ago

I see a parallel trend for big laptops. Like this ridiculous one (which I would love if not the price): https://gizmodo.com/acers-absurd-curved-display-laptop-has-a-predictably-hu-1790521279 https://gizmodo.com/acers-absurd-curved-display-laptop-has-a...

Animats 10y ago

Panasonic makes a rugged laptop with 27 hours of battery life.[1] [1] http://business.panasonic.com/toughbook/fully-rugged-laptop-toughbook-31.html http://business.panasonic.com/toughbook/fully-rugged-laptop-...

noonespecial 10y ago
8.2 lbs. with optional media bay 2nd battery I'm not sure it counts when it weighs so much you could just bring a second laptop along!
- StRoy 10y ago
  Most of the weight is due to the toughened design, not the battery, actually. We are talking about laptops you can use as a weapon to bludgeon someone, then take with you to swim, and they'd still be in a working state. Actually you can run over them with an SUV and they still work! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41lXVKSTOGQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41lXVKSTOGQ Of course, unlike common laptops, they don't need a case or anything. Just carry them as is with their built-in handle. If they didn't cost so much I would consider buying one. The added weight may make them slightly less comfortable in one way, but in another way, if you think about it, they're not flimsy pieces of denting aluminum you always have to treat with care, put in protective bags during transport and the like. Using a laptop like this must feel.. liberating.

randyrand 10y ago

It's annoying that most manufactures are only giving you 1080p or 4k options. WHY NOT SOMETHING IN BETWEEN! Apple has the right approach IMO, 2880-by-1800 15", 2560-by-1600 13". ~48 - 67% more than 1080p.

seanp2k2 10y ago
Windows and Linux have issues with HiDPI when scaling is not just 2x. 1080p is conveniently ~1/4 of 4K, so 2X scaling for H and W makes it look normal. Also, panel manufacturers want to pitch 4K, not 2.5k or whatever would make sense. It's the same reason we have 16:9 instead of 16:10 which many people (including me) liked much more: panel manufacturers and companies selling these to consumers care more about marketing (and selling) than how good they are to use. 100% srgb coverage is easier to sell than e.g. Backlight uniformity or low backlight bleed.

jaxn 10y ago

This is the same thing Microsoft did with the Surface Book a couple of months ago. I bought one and love the battery.

mcculley 10y ago

How much more work would it be to put in more RAM that could only be used when plugged into AC power? My understanding of the MacBook Pro design constraint is that they had to hit <100 watt-hours while using LPDDR3. Could a laptop easily have another 16 or 32 GB of RAM that consumes more power but is only available when plugged into AC power? I would be happy to have such a constraint. I love my MacBook Pro. I love being able to carry it around and deal with things like email when on battery. When I'm doing serious development work, I'm sitting down somewhere plugged in anyhow. The OS could gracefully page out to swap and power down the less efficient memory when switched to battery.

cududa 10y ago
Seems like a lot of engineering work for something that'll be solved around the end of the year
- mcculley 10y ago
  I agree with that in this particular case. I would imagine the next rev of the MacBook Pro will use some Intel chipset that can support LPDDR4 or something. But I'm wondering about this in the general case. For some definitions of "power user", it would make sense for the system to behave differently when running on battery. Pushing these design decisions down into hardware is something Apple does better than others, as they control the whole stack.
pimlottc 10y ago
Are there any existing operating systems that can handle a dynamically-changing amount of RAM? > The OS could gracefully page out to swap and power down the less efficient memory when switched to battery. According to benchmarks, the SSD on the latest MacBook Pro hit 1.4GB/s. Even at this speed, it would take at least 10 seconds to flush 16GB of RAM to disk. I doubt your computer could do much while that was happening. I wouldn't call that very graceful.
- mcculley 10y ago
  > Are there any existing operating systems that can handle a dynamically-changing amount of RAM? Some implementations of Linux do this on exotic hardware (NUMA). > Even at this speed, it would take at least 10 seconds to flush 16GB of RAM to disk. It needn't happen atomically.

bencollier49 10y ago

I misread that as "He made a laptop slightly thicker to add 3 hours of battery life". I was waiting for the subtitle "Apple hates him" or something.

sullyj3 10y ago

On a side note, why is it that I see battery capacity measured in both mAh and wH? One is charge, the other is energy. Which is more relevant?