4 ms·

It surprises me that people find the battery life here especially impressive. Battery life is the one thing that has almost constantly been declining for decade

by caslon 5y ago

It surprises me that people find the battery life here especially impressive. Battery life is the one thing that has almost constantly been declining for decades now. Much simpler chips, much simpler displays, and significantly fewer radios made it possible to have computers that barely sipped power. How often did you have to charge your handheld console as a child?

deleted 5y ago
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nicoburns 5y ago
As far as laptops go, there's been a big increase in battery life over the last couple of decades. The latest macs can get close to 20 hours (and there are windows laptops that aren't far off that). My 2007 Toshiba only offered 2.
- numpad0 5y ago
  I think this isn't documented extensively in English - there was a very flawed protocol called the JEITA 1.0 method used by every Japanese laptop manufacturers to measure battery life as an average of high power state and idle state, circa 2001-2014. It measured _high_ power state by playing back a supplied 320x240 MPEG1 video file at LCD brightness of more than 20cd/m^2(20 nits) until battery cuts off, which was hardly representative of idle state well before 2014. When long overdue revision was made that year it bumped up load to an FHD H.264 file with minimum 150 nits with Wi-Fi connected but still hardly a high power state or representative of typical use case. Sort of a tragedy of commons. Apple started ignoring JEITA method for laptops at some point, I think ever since the Intel switch, and I remember it taking years for their unusually short advertised battery life to be not taken as an exaggeration of absurdly underwhelming performance, but simply a more down to earth measurement. Only then the actual battery life of laptops started growing to today's actual-all-day length. Your Toshiba from 2007 is likely from this JEITA era, and likely has brochure spec of 8 to 12 hours by JEITA, just like a modern laptop would say 6 to 10 hours of web browsing. So, battery life is theoretically worsening over these decades, and rapidly improving in actual terms. Refs: 1: https://home.jeita.or.jp/cgi-bin/page/detail.cgi?n=84 https://home.jeita.or.jp/cgi-bin/page/detail.cgi?n=84 2: https://home.jeita.or.jp/page_file/20140219114214_dP3lbRxp9F.pdf https://home.jeita.or.jp/page_file/20140219114214_dP3lbRxp9F... 3: https://panasonic.biz/cns/pc/prod/note/jeita.html https://panasonic.biz/cns/pc/prod/note/jeita.html

by caslon 5y ago

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

nicoburns 5y ago

As far as laptops go, there's been a big increase in battery life over the last couple of decades. The latest macs can get close to 20 hours (and there are windows laptops that aren't far off that). My 2007 Toshiba only offered 2.

numpad0 5y ago
I think this isn't documented extensively in English - there was a very flawed protocol called the JEITA 1.0 method used by every Japanese laptop manufacturers to measure battery life as an average of high power state and idle state, circa 2001-2014. It measured _high_ power state by playing back a supplied 320x240 MPEG1 video file at LCD brightness of more than 20cd/m^2(20 nits) until battery cuts off, which was hardly representative of idle state well before 2014. When long overdue revision was made that year it bumped up load to an FHD H.264 file with minimum 150 nits with Wi-Fi connected but still hardly a high power state or representative of typical use case. Sort of a tragedy of commons. Apple started ignoring JEITA method for laptops at some point, I think ever since the Intel switch, and I remember it taking years for their unusually short advertised battery life to be not taken as an exaggeration of absurdly underwhelming performance, but simply a more down to earth measurement. Only then the actual battery life of laptops started growing to today's actual-all-day length. Your Toshiba from 2007 is likely from this JEITA era, and likely has brochure spec of 8 to 12 hours by JEITA, just like a modern laptop would say 6 to 10 hours of web browsing. So, battery life is theoretically worsening over these decades, and rapidly improving in actual terms. Refs: 1: https://home.jeita.or.jp/cgi-bin/page/detail.cgi?n=84 https://home.jeita.or.jp/cgi-bin/page/detail.cgi?n=84 2: https://home.jeita.or.jp/page_file/20140219114214_dP3lbRxp9F.pdf https://home.jeita.or.jp/page_file/20140219114214_dP3lbRxp9F... 3: https://panasonic.biz/cns/pc/prod/note/jeita.html https://panasonic.biz/cns/pc/prod/note/jeita.html