4 ms·

Can you recommend a company that has good battery life for high intensity workloads? I'm genuinely curious.

mmastrac 10y ago
No, as I've been in the Apple ecosystem for about 10 years and haven't shopped around. I used to have a Dell beast of a laptop back then that was 1) very heavy, 2) very hot and 3) would last for hours of development time. I would actually trade whatever weight would be necessary to get my useful portable development time up to 3-4 hours.
- caconym_ 10y ago
  These days I think you'll find that laptops on the thinner and lighter side rely heavily on CPU throttling and other power saving features, as well as efficient software, to achieve good battery life. You may need to go the "brick" route if you have a heavy workload, whether or not that's due to inefficient software. I've found these days that a lot of software is simply poorly written and drains much more power than it should (the Atom editor is a good example).
  - mmastrac 10y ago
    Does such a brick still exist? I've seen the new Razor gaming laptop beasts and wondered if they might do as a development laptop with lots of juice.
    - caconym_ 10y ago
      Those Razer beasts are exactly what I was thinking. Probably anything with a primary use case of running a discrete GPU on battery power will be a good bet for heavy CPU workloads too.
Raphmedia 10y ago
Your best bet is to have a laptop with detachable batteries that you can easily swap.
- mmirate 10y ago
  Sidenote, detachable batteries are also useful in that the overall service lifetime of a battery can easily be shorter than that of the rest of the laptop.
  - Raphmedia 10y ago
    It also keeps battery swelling from wrecking your motherboard.
    - eridius 10y ago
      It also means the battery can't have a funky custom-designed shape that devices with integrated batteries can, meaning the battery has a lower capacity. That's a really big reason not to use detachable batteries.
      - mmirate 10y ago
        > It also means the battery can't have a funky custom-designed shape that devices with integrated batteries can ... so you're saying that designing for a detachable battery forces a certain finesse when designing the rest of the internals, so that there is not any funky-shaped gap big enough to put an entire LiPo cell. Also, one can easily make an "extended" model of replacement battery, which protrudes rearward (or downward[1]) of the rest of the case. [1]: http://www4.pcmag.com/media/images/396005-lenovo-thinkpad-x250-right-side-with-extended-battery.jpg?width=630 http://www4.pcmag.com/media/images/396005-lenovo-thinkpad-x2...
        Raphmedia 10y ago
        Batteries protruding downward is genius! Every laptop should have them!
walterbell 10y ago
Thinkpads that support hot-swapping of batteries.
Someone1234 10y ago
Thinkpad T###p series (e.g. T460p). It isn't good due to magic or some other vaporous marketing buzzwords. It is good because you can just install big batteries and swap them out in sleep mode. Get one or more 6 cell 72Wh rear batteries (6,666 mah). Alternatively get one or more Lenovo Power Bank 10,000 mAh (100 Wh give or take). The advantage of the Power Bank is that you don't even have to put the computer to sleep. One extra 6 cell 72 Wh battery is a lot less heavy than you're imagining (approx 1/2 pound). I'd even go as far as to say that your Macbook's dongles weigh more than doubling the battery life of the Thinkpad T460p.
aidenn0 10y ago
HP zBooks have 90Wh batteries and you can configure them with a 1080p display and no discrete graphics (just make sure you do spring the $50 for the UWVA; that's HP code for "not a crappy TN panel"); if you have no need for GPGPU and don't go crazy with the CPU/RAM you put in then you can get quite good battery life out of them. You used to be able to get laptops with batteries that fit in the optical drive-bay so you could expand the battery life, but that appears to be a non-option now that internal optical drives have gone the way of the dodo. [edit] A friend pointed me to this as well: https://www.anker.com/deals/powerhouse2 https://www.anker.com/deals/powerhouse2 it weighs as much as the first laptop I ever used, but has 400Wh.

No, as I've been in the Apple ecosystem for about 10 years and haven't shopped around. I used to have a Dell beast of a laptop back then that was 1) very heavy, 2) very hot and 3) would last for hours of development time. I would actually trade whatever weight would be necessary to get my useful portable development time up to 3-4 hours.

caconym_ 10y ago
These days I think you'll find that laptops on the thinner and lighter side rely heavily on CPU throttling and other power saving features, as well as efficient software, to achieve good battery life. You may need to go the "brick" route if you have a heavy workload, whether or not that's due to inefficient software. I've found these days that a lot of software is simply poorly written and drains much more power than it should (the Atom editor is a good example).
- mmastrac 10y ago
  Does such a brick still exist? I've seen the new Razor gaming laptop beasts and wondered if they might do as a development laptop with lots of juice.
  - caconym_ 10y ago
    Those Razer beasts are exactly what I was thinking. Probably anything with a primary use case of running a discrete GPU on battery power will be a good bet for heavy CPU workloads too.

Raphmedia 10y ago

Your best bet is to have a laptop with detachable batteries that you can easily swap.

mmirate 10y ago
Sidenote, detachable batteries are also useful in that the overall service lifetime of a battery can easily be shorter than that of the rest of the laptop.
- Raphmedia 10y ago
  It also keeps battery swelling from wrecking your motherboard.
  - eridius 10y ago
    It also means the battery can't have a funky custom-designed shape that devices with integrated batteries can, meaning the battery has a lower capacity. That's a really big reason not to use detachable batteries.
    - mmirate 10y ago
      > It also means the battery can't have a funky custom-designed shape that devices with integrated batteries can ... so you're saying that designing for a detachable battery forces a certain finesse when designing the rest of the internals, so that there is not any funky-shaped gap big enough to put an entire LiPo cell. Also, one can easily make an "extended" model of replacement battery, which protrudes rearward (or downward[1]) of the rest of the case. [1]: http://www4.pcmag.com/media/images/396005-lenovo-thinkpad-x250-right-side-with-extended-battery.jpg?width=630 http://www4.pcmag.com/media/images/396005-lenovo-thinkpad-x2...
      - Raphmedia 10y ago
        Batteries protruding downward is genius! Every laptop should have them!

walterbell 10y ago

Thinkpads that support hot-swapping of batteries.

Someone1234 10y ago

Thinkpad T###p series (e.g. T460p). It isn't good due to magic or some other vaporous marketing buzzwords. It is good because you can just install big batteries and swap them out in sleep mode. Get one or more 6 cell 72Wh rear batteries (6,666 mah). Alternatively get one or more Lenovo Power Bank 10,000 mAh (100 Wh give or take). The advantage of the Power Bank is that you don't even have to put the computer to sleep. One extra 6 cell 72 Wh battery is a lot less heavy than you're imagining (approx 1/2 pound). I'd even go as far as to say that your Macbook's dongles weigh more than doubling the battery life of the Thinkpad T460p.

aidenn0 10y ago

HP zBooks have 90Wh batteries and you can configure them with a 1080p display and no discrete graphics (just make sure you do spring the $50 for the UWVA; that's HP code for "not a crappy TN panel"); if you have no need for GPGPU and don't go crazy with the CPU/RAM you put in then you can get quite good battery life out of them. You used to be able to get laptops with batteries that fit in the optical drive-bay so you could expand the battery life, but that appears to be a non-option now that internal optical drives have gone the way of the dodo. [edit] A friend pointed me to this as well: https://www.anker.com/deals/powerhouse2 https://www.anker.com/deals/powerhouse2 it weighs as much as the first laptop I ever used, but has 400Wh.