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Seeing all that empty internal space makes me wonder if they couldn't increase the device's appeal by fitting it with a bigger battery. 8-10 hours of charge tim
by smacktoward 7y ago
Seeing all that empty internal space makes me wonder if they couldn't increase the device's appeal by fitting it with a bigger battery. 8-10 hours of charge time is good, but a $200 laptop that could go for (say) 20 or 30 hours on a charge would really turn heads.
I suppose it's possible that would require some kind of custom battery, and this is just the most appropriate battery for this enclosure they could get off-the-shelf, though.
- aphistic 7y agoI'm sure a bigger battery would increase the cost of the laptop. At $200 the margin has to be pretty thin already.
- xhkkffbf 7y agoSure. So charge $250 or $300 for the one that goes 30 hours.
- akhilcacharya 7y agoI’d snap that up immediately. A 24 hour hacker machine would be killer! A modern Tandy 100
- Brian_K_White 7y agoBoth of those positions are valid. Bigger batt for $50 more would be great, vs meeting a price point and fewest possible skus. I would yoink one with the biggest battery possible too. But I would aslo do the same for several other upgrades that I particularly value. I would take as much ram as they want to offer. I would take as much ssd space as they want to offer. I would take as much ssd speed, cpu, pixels, as they can deliver. I would pay whatever it takes to make it weigh less and be smaller while still doing all that. And don't forget to put at least 2 full speed usbc/thunderbolt/hdmi ports so I can have external portable monitor without drivers.... Then again I don't want touch, or any form of face or fingerprint, or any more than the minimum gpu to run a traditional non-compositor desktop and display video at 30fps. But now I have completely obliterated the entire concept of meeting a target intersection of functionality and price. I've thrown price right out the window. And, that's just my personal individual set of priorities. You don't care about half the stuff I would pay anything for, and you probably do care at least a little about stuff I actively don't want. (gaming gpu, touch, face id, hell webcam at all) So, back to the beginning, they came up with a reasonable set of functionality to target, and a reasonable price to target, and really, even though I too would like a big battery, it makes no sense to talk about $250 version that has a bigger battery.
- Balanceinfinity 7y agoI loved my TRS-80 100. My first laptop.
- mbreese 7y agoThey specifically don't want to have too many SKUs to manage. Adding an option for an extended battery would double their SKUs. The management side of Pine64 is pretty barebones.
- rocky1138 7y agoThis is an opportunity for an aftermarket.
- squarefoot 7y agoTrue, but starting from $200 there's still room for improvement. I would purchase in no time a $350 model with double the battery plus high power LoRa RTX module with external antenna connector, and GPS receiver. I've used a few different small ARM SBCs which were a lot less powerful than this laptop, and the software availability is astounding: Codeblocks, Boa Constructor, Anjuta, Lazarus, Geany, Notepadqq, most languages and libraries, and many other non development related software. As an example, Libreoffice on Debian Stable is available ready to install (no build required) on i386, amd64, armel, armhf, arm64, mips, mipsel, mips64el, ppc64el, s390x. Same for example for lua (the language) while the sid (unstable) version adds another bunch of unofficial ports (alpha, hppa, m68k, powerpcspe, ppc64, ppc64el, riscv64, sh4, sparc64, x32). In many contexts one could move from x86 to ARM and never feel there is something missing because really there is almost nothing missing, save maybe for the horsepower.
- jolmg 7y agoIt's an 10,000 mAh battery, though. That's huge, isn't it? I don't know any other laptop that has a battery that big. Looking online, Macbooks seem to have around 6,000 mAh.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- kube-system 7y agoYou'd want to compare watt-hours for an equal comparison of energy for batteries of different voltages. 38Wh is fairly small for a laptop battery.
- AgloeDreams 7y agoI like how we all commented at the same time. poor OP...
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- johnchristopher 7y agoHappens often. What's the etiquette ? Answer to each replies ? One single reply that address everyone's point(s) ?
- jolmg 7y agoYou're right. I see now that the high mAh is due to the low voltage.
- rchaud 7y agoLaptop batteries are powering Intel/AMD x86 processors which are much more power hungry than an ARM proc I imagine. Also, Macbooks and other premium laptops have 2k or 4k screens, while this one should be more energy efficient at 1080p.
- AgloeDreams 7y ago
- eclectocrat 7y agoYes, yes, and yes. I would pay a lot of money for a _small_ laptop with 30 hours of battery life. Something like a MacBook Air 11 inch would be ideal. Hopefully someone tries and cram a huge battery in this unit someday.
- davidhyde 7y agoFrom the technical specs it looks like it is powered via a 5V port: "Barrel Power (5V 3A) Port" That would mean that you could plug in a battery powered portable USB charger (power bank) to increase its capacity perhaps. If 10000mAh at 5V gets you 8 hours then you you could easily extend the capacity with a couple power banks.
- therein 7y agoRight but you can do that for many other notebooks as well.
- rchaud 7y agoI didn't know that. What kind of power bank would you need for a Macbook or PC laptop?
- progman32 7y agoUSB c power banks can do it. I use one for my gpd micropc. Just make sure to get a quality one that can do USB c pd.
- numpad0 7y agoOnes that do USB-PD which allows other voltages than 5V
- cerberusss 7y agoActually 5V also works on my 2016 MacBook Pro. I used an older iPad charger with a USB-A-to-C cable to prolong battery life, or to charge overnight.
- qubex 7y agoIf I’m not mistaken, 10,000 mWh is the maximum that can be brought on an airliner. EDIT: As the commenter below pointed out, the limit is 100,000 mWh and not 10,000 mWh. I stand corrected.
- fheld 7y agoAccording to [0] the limit in the US is 100Wh, so you could fit a battery that is three times bigger (assuming 3.3V). I don't know what the relevant numbers are elsewhere. [0] https://www.tsa.gov/travel/security-screening/whatcanibring/items/lithium-batteries-more-100-watt-hours https://www.tsa.gov/travel/security-screening/whatcanibring/...
- qubex 7y agoThanks, I stand corrected. Apologies for the mistake.
- StillBored 7y agoActually it doesn't ban them, it just says that you don't need any special approval if you have less than two 100Wh batteries. Which is odd, because most people have more than two batteries if your counting batteries contained in devices like laptops/cellphones/etc. This regulation seems to apply only to standalone batteries. For context 100Wh is only about 2x most normal laptops. A few systems with secondary batteries (Thinkpads for example) come within 10-15Wh of the limit when configured into their max battery configurations (although in my case that is two batteries). I'm betting that is something you could actually walk through security with. I can't imagine the guys running the scanner are making estimates of battery capacity. For sure I've carried more than 200Wh worth of batteries before, considering for a while I was regularly traveling with two fairly high capacity laptops, a tablet, charging battery and cellphone. I'm also not the only odd ball with more than one laptop. Now that i've slimmed it back down to one, I regularly notice other people dragging out more than one.
- nicoburns 7y agoThe 16 inch MacBook Pro has 99.8Wh battery...
- charwalker 7y agoI wonder how much cost saving they are finding in using like a standard, mass produced common laptop battery vs a larger or custom battery.
- p1itopre 7y agoThe other way to go about it is to shrink the screen from 14" to 12". I would prefer this configuration.
- tachyonbeam 7y agoOr 13" and a slightly bigger battery. Oh yeah :)
- fest 7y agoIncreasing a single cell battery system over 10Ah is not trivial. First, the RK3399 and it's companion PMIC is designed with single cell applications primarily. Second, I don't know the exact reason why, but commonly available lithium cells top out at 10Ah. Even many fuel gauge ICs don't support cells larger than that. Adding another cell requires substantial development (design/source the pack, balancing and charging circuit) and extra BOM cost, whereas single cell involves copying reference design (which I know because I'm designing hardware product around RK3399 and ~70Wh battery pack) TL;DR; Can be done, but developers probably wanted to reduce the risk and stay on commonly walked path.
- matt_heimer 7y agoI don't think there is as much empty space as you think. If you look at https://youtu.be/TsNR2lECd2s?t=121 https://youtu.be/TsNR2lECd2s?t=121 it has a Macbook air design where its wedge shaped with no vertical space in the front.