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Kaby Lake offers significant reductions in power consumption which is important for longer batter life on laptops and definitely something Apple should be conce

• post_break 10y ago
  Except it seems like any time there is a nice drop in power consumption Apple says "oh look at how much thinner we can make it by shipping it with a smaller battery!"
  • haswell 10y ago
    That may be so, but it doesn't invalidate the point made by the parent comment. What Apple chooses to do with that improvement in power consumption may be up for discussion, but the fact that there is fair criticism about the fact that they didn't wait is not.
  • mulmen 10y ago
    Yes and then they will make the battery thinner than the CPU cooler and instead of solving that one foot will sit slightly lower than the other three and the whole laptop will wobble on a desk. The iPhone6(s)/7 camera lens is such shockingly bad design I still can't understand how Apple justified it to themselves.
  • scarlac 10y ago
    A physically smaller battery usually translates into a weight reduction. I'd even argue that it's the point of laptops: A mobile/light computer. But how you balance the two is a matter of opinion. If you look at the amount of battery-saving features they have been working on, it's obvious that they focus on lowering consumption instead of engaging the spec numbers game.
    • twic 10y ago
      > But how you balance the two is a matter of opinion. I guess. But i do wonder if there isn't some framework for thinking about the tradeoff in a quasi-objective way. Is it possible to make any kind of general statements about the marginal utility of improvements in weight/thickness and battery life? One hour of battery life lets me take my laptop to a meeting, or sit on the sofa for a while. Two hours lets me watch a movie on the battery. Eight hours lets me work away from a power socket all day. Twelve hours lets me do that and read HN in the evening. Twenty-four hours is longer than i'm ever away from a power socket. It feels like there's steadily increasing utility up to that "as long as i want to be sat in front of a screen in one day" point. A 15 inch, 2.41 cm thick, 2.54 kg laptop rests comfortably on my thighs, goes in a padded envelope, and fits in my satchel without taking up much space. A 15 inch, 2.79 cm thick, 2.5 kg laptop somehow did seem a lot more ungainly. A 15 inch, 1.55 cm thick, 1.83 kg laptop fits in a bag just as easily, and is comfortable to hold in one hand. Given that i don't often hold a laptop in one hand, that seems like a small increase in utility. Are there other reasons why that 0.86 cm of thickness and 0.71 kg of weight are a real improvement? What does it let me do that i couldn't before?
      • arximboldi 10y ago
        I don't know about thickness, but there is a reason I prefer light laptops: carrying them in a backpack. If I have a 20min commute by bike every day in which I carry the laptop, it really does make a difference. Your back will thank you for those 0.71 kg you took off it.
        • untog 10y ago
  • eigenvalue 10y ago
    That's what customers seem to want, so that's what Apple is giving them. I can say that one of my favorite things about my new iPad Pro is how thin and light it is, which makes it comfortable read in bed in a way that hasn't been true for me in the past.
• ksec 10y ago
  Oh no they dont. CPU Performance is roughly the same, power usage is also roughly the same. What you do get is some hardware accelerated scenario like playing 4K High Bitrate HEVC which would make your Skylake machine literally stand still and drop to below 10% CPU usage on Kaby.
  • spuz 10y ago
    Do you have evidence to back that up? All the media I've found talking about Kaby Lake has talked about several hours of battery life improvements.