Comment on Framework won’t be just a laptop company anymore

• mansfield@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Anything with over 100WH batteries would need airline approval before you can fly with it. This is why laptop makers rarely exceed this limit.

  faa.gov/…/portable-electronic-devices-with-batter…

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  • tal@lemmy.today ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Yeah, but that’s not what I’m talking about. It’s really hard to find laptops today that get up to 100Wh.

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    • ji17br@lemmy.ml ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      MacBook Pros are 100Wh as well. Battery life is incredible.

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      • frezik@midwest.social ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        Hmm?

        www.apple.com/macbook-pro/specs/

        M3 pros are 72.4Wh.

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• tal@lemmy.today ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  It does add something by way of weight, but I just can’t believe that the entire market out there honestly wants to have shorter laptop battery life over a slightly-heavier laptop. I mean, sure, all else held equal, I’d take a lighter laptop. And there’s some size where I don’t want a larger battery – like, I don’t want a Tesla Powerwall glued to the underside of my laptop. But at 100Wh, the current airline limit? Hell, yes, I sure as heck would rather have the longer battery lifetime.

  And let’s even say that someone is completely fine with their existing laptop battery lifetime – like, they only ever use their laptop plugged in, or for short stints away from a plug, like a conference room. Then you still can trade battery capacity for other desirable things. Stick a brighter screen on. Have a more-powerful CPU or GPU and the fans to drive it. Have the capacity to drive external USB devices that may slurp power off the laptop’s battery. Restrict the maximum-charge level so that the battery’s lifetime is extended – batteries degrade rather more quickly if fully charged, and a number of devices have settings to permit them to be only partially-charged – without needing to cut into the capacity for a single charge.

  I absolutely understand small-battery, budget laptops existing. Cut RAM down to a bare minimum, put in as little storage as possible, slash the battery to what’s tolerable.

  I also understand that there are people who are hell-bent on ultra-light laptops, want everything at all possible stripped out. That’s fine too.

  But I just can’t believe how hard it is to find 100Wh laptops in 2024. And traditionally, that wasn’t the case. You could find plenty of laptops with 100Wh batteries. Some laptop vendors let you choose the size of battery you wanted, and some even had dual batteries, one internal and a hot-swappable battery.

  I get that USB PD powerbanks can help alleviate some of the problem, and I’m sure that that has to have been the factor causing laptop vendors to start slashing internal battery sizes, but they also aren’t the same thing. There’s no protocol for them to report their charge, so a laptop can’t report life remaining (note that theoretically, one could have one pretend to be a UPS rather than a battery, and there are various protocols for those, though OSes don’t – well, Linux doesn’t, don’t know about other OSes – treat UPSes as another battery. It’s another box and cable and port tied up.

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• Evotech@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  It’s not wanted by the market obviously. Most only need their laptop to last from the office on the commute

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  • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    That’s just not true. My laptop (MacBook Pro Intel) has atrocious battery life, and Apple made a big deal about battery life improvement with the M-series chips. It’s a very valid complaint at my office, and we routinely have people running back to their desks to grab a charger or someone when meetings go long.

    There’s obviously a trade-off there, but I’ve heard complaints about battery life for years now, but the market just hasn’t filled that need. I guess it’s kinda filled by massive external battery banks and plug-ins everywhere?

    But having a larger battery as an option would be welcome. Make a thicc chassy as an option at checkout on the 16" laptop.

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• frezik@midwest.social ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Here’s the internals of the 13 with a 61Wh battery:

  cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/…/IMG_0054.jpeg

  And here’s the 16 with an 85Wh battery:

  …prismic.io/…/0b001897-9e05-406e-8f50-af54ba76a72…

  Where would a larger battery fit?

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  • fuckwit_mcbumcrumble@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    You’d obviously have to design the laptop around the battery and not just retrofit it in. Make it a bit thicker, make it a bit longer? The 16" already isn’t a small, thin, or light laptop so the little extra room needed wouldn’t make that much of a difference.

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    • frezik@midwest.social ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Longer doesn’t work because it has to fit in existing bags people have. Thickening it won’t work because reviewers will then complain it’s too thick.

      I have a Toshiba laptop from around 2012 which has a slide-out optical drive. To me, it’s thick but not too thick. If we could return to that size, I think we’d be good. It’d also support better cooling (my Framework 13 with an i7-1280P gets hot, and there just isn’t enough space for a bigger cooler). Reviewers over the past 10 years have pushed for thinner and thinner, and we gave up too much in the meantime.

      Same goes for screen bezels and built in webcams. All else being equal, a cam with a bigger sensor is better because it can capture more light. Thin screen bezels force a small webcam, and thus your laptop has a shittier camera than a 10 year old smartphone.

      In both cases, I don’t think actual customers care all that much past a certain point. Reviewers have been deducting stars for a slightly thicker case or a slightly thicker bezel than other models on the market, and customers just go along with it.

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      • tal@lemmy.today ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        Thickening it won’t work because reviewers will then complain it’s too thick.

        I’ve used thicker laptops for years and had no problem whatsoever with them in that time.

        I suppose that there’s some theoretical point where a laptop becomes unergonomic, but my desktop’s keyboard is far thicker than my laptop, and it’s got no constraints other than being ergonomic.

        Is someone using some kind of incredibly-thin carrying case? I haven’t seen that. I throw my laptop in a laptop backpack. It could be probably at least three times thicker and still fit in that.

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      • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        I don’t think people looking at Framework care too much about reviewers. They’re targeting DIY enthusiasts, which are also the type that’ll probably be reading the measurements and whatnot themselves.

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  • s_s@lemmy.one ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Put a couple 18650 cells under the hingle like it’s 2008

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