I think the expectation for battery life for most these days is closer to what can be found on e.g. M-series MacBooks or in the x86 world, HP Dragonfly and some ASUS Zenbooks, which range between 14 and 22 hours.
Battery life is inherently a trade off against performance and weight.
It's also a trade off against competence, because you can kill the battery right quick if drivers don't idle things properly, but even after you address that you still have the other thing.
Which makes 16+ hour battery life an odd choice for most people. Who uses their laptop for 16 contiguous hours with no opportunity to charge? It could have been lighter or faster.
Naturally Framework has the potential to make it flexible: Have a dual-use bay where one of the options is a second battery, and then if you want it you take the weight/battery life trade off in favor of battery life, and if not the machine can be lighter.
Long battery life isn’t so much about contiguous use as it is about not needing to think about charging as often and being able to not carry a laptop charger brick on excursions. It also lets you still have “normal” laptop life left over after periods of high-intensity usage.
Also generally speaking more efficient laptops are cooler which is generally a quality welcome in a device sometimes used in a person’s lap.
Yea, the Framework's battery issue for me is mostly that there is almost literally no point I could ever trust not having a power outlet nearby with the cable. I've had times where the computer, while fully shut down, loses 30% of the battery life in a few hours.
Sure, it's the bulk of a Macbook Air, but I often leave that open, with the screen on, running VMs for work all day without it being plugged in. I expect that any time I open it, I'll have at least 30-60 minutes of use before I need to plug it in. My Framework, more often than not, tells me it's about to emergency shut down as soon as I log in.
> being able to not carry a laptop charger brick on excursions. It also lets you still have “normal” laptop life left over after periods of high-intensity usage.
This is just the same trade off. For a given level of efficiency you could have put in a smaller battery and offset the weight of a second battery / charging brick that you would then only need when you need many hours of battery life.
> Also generally speaking more efficient laptops are cooler which is generally a quality welcome in a device sometimes used in a person’s lap.
That isn't really part of the trade off either. The faster ones generally don't have worse performance per watt -- they're often better because they have more cores with lower clock speeds. You get 100% more cores with 75% more performance for 50% more power consumption. For the same load they generate less heat. See also "race to idle".
They only generate more heat in absolute terms if you put more load on them than the slower alternative would have been able to handle.
I'd disagree that its a tradeoff of weight. The macbook air is an incredibly light weight laptop yet still pushes 18hrs battery life on the 13" model, even the 14" pro at 22 hours is still lighter than most laptops.
The weight isnt the problem. It's the poor optimisation of hardware and software.
Me. Road trips. Bad weather. Airports without charging options. 16h would be a bad day but it isnt outside the possible. Also, power outages and when i just forget to charge overnight.
