Why is it that laptop batteries have stayed at the same capacity (as in hours per discharge) for the past couple of decades, at least as far as I can see? Typically they seem to last for a maximum of six hours (give or take an hour or two), depending on what you're doing with the laptop, and it just seems a little strange that even though today's laptops are *massively* more powerful than the laptops of the mid 90s, the battery life hasn't been extended (or if it has, then not nearly as much as you might expect). A laptop that had a battery life of twenty four hours would be great, and such a good battery capacity would be a big selling point, I'm sure. Apologies if I'm missing something obvious, such as maybe today's batteries are much more powerful than the batteries that powered 1990s laptops, but this is negated by today's laptops needing much more power from their batteries (but even so, I'd have thought today's batteries would be powerful enough to take this extra power demand in their stride, and still last a lot longer than older batteries?).
I've wondered this myself. you think 6 or so hours is bad? Don't get an Intel hexacore CPU, twin Nvidia GPU, 2 drive powerhouse. Last one I saw a review on burned through the battery in 87 minutes just playing a 1080P movie. Imagine the life if it was playing a high end game maxed out...
Problem is - why nobody makes laptops with high capacity batteries and ULV CPUs? There will be quite a market for 15.6 laptops with enough horsepower for office work, movies and audio editing etc. that can work more than 10h on the battery. Look at newer Atoms that finally got something that looks not like 1999 budget video card (which is main problem with netbooks). With 10000mAh battery they will work for 24h or so. I won't mind even if it will be running full linux distro on mobile ARM CPU if it will work for a few days. It's possible, but nobody makes such devices. Don't even talk about tablets with keyboards - still not enough (if you do anything but simple reading you still got 7-8h at max) but way more limited than a real laptop. P.S. If you don't need portability, just huge battery life, it will be easier than pie - 3-6 180ah truck batteries, VRM and a netbook and here you go - your 2+ months on the battery.
Those "gaming" laptops... run Tekken 3 in MAME and you'll get less than 30 minutes... For weak n570-based netbook it took 4 hours of compressing /dev/urandom output with 7zip (maximum compression)... Which obviously loads any CPU more than any game or emulator.
As someone else said, part of the trouble seems to be that so many laptop manufacturers seem to only care about making their laptops ever thinner, which of course lowers the potential capacity of the laptop's interior components. It is pointless (to me, and most people, I imagine) that so many modern laptops try to be wafer thin, even at the cost of a decent keyboard (which is vital for a good typist). The first laptop I had was in the late 90s, a Toshiba Satellie Pro, which was quite chunky when compared to today's laptops, but I never once wished it's height (I mean the distance from the table top the laptop was on to the top of the lid of the closed laptop) was smaller. If anyone does wish a laptop is smaller (because of the trouble of carrying that laptop, or of trying to use it on a crowded train) then they would wish it were narrower, or lighter (in weight), not that the smallest of it's three dimensions were even smaller. I carry my laptop in my rucksack (backpack) as it's easy to carry and far less likely to get lost or stolen, and though the laptop is a bit inconvenient in size when carrying it, that's purely in the length and width of the laptop, the height is no problem at all, and wouldn't be if it were two or three times as high. And if I was buying a laptop, and I was going to choose between an ultra-thin one, or one that was two inches thick but had twice the battery life, I'd definitely choose the latter.
A friend of mine wanted to do something like that, more or less an ultrabook with a battery so big it looked like a regular laptop but it gets (in theory) 2 days without a recharge Don't know if his still working on it, but without at least a kickstarter it would be impossible to make
The 13" Macbook Air supposedly runs for 12 hours on a single charge. I think it's largely due to the new Haswell processors, which supposedly use much less power. Mavericks also has new features that decrease power consumption.
When Li-po (Lithium polymer) batteries get used more widespread in laptops you will see some good times.
I have enough laptop battery cells to turn a 3, 6, or 9 cell into a 30 or so cell pack. I should do something with them.
Batteries in general are due for a breakthrough. It seems that most of the gains in battery life have been accomplished by having processors and other components (SSDs, for instance) sip less power. That said, I've been happy with the battery life on all of my recent laptops, the MacBook Air especially.
Battery technology as a whole hasn't made any massive advances in some time. There is a new tech coming out in consumer hardware such as this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium_iron_phosphate_battery Safety is a big concern in something where a battery will be next to a heat source for its entire life as well as likely being next to a person's lap. It also has to survive being tossed around like a laptop might be and endure the low temps that being in an airplane's cargo hold will exhibit as well as survive being locked in a hot car. The easier solution is to create hardware that is more efficient as noted above with SSDs and LED lighting the screen rather than CCFLs. My personal laptop was arguably a "gaming" laptop at the time and only got 1.5 hours of life at best when not being pushed hard. I bought it knowing full well I was going to have to be tethered to the wall for the most part and the battery was only a way to keep it running while I moved from location to location. Those tiny netbooks don't have much life because the battery is physically small to accommodate the form factor. I have an old PIII based Dell that could get 4 hours off a single battery after upgrading the HDD to something much better than stock and with a second battery it easily surpassed 8 hours of life. Of course the damn thing weighed around 10lbs and was only a portable in terms of being usable anywhere. You did NOT want to lug this thing around for hours on end.
The "life" batteries are impressive in the abuse they can take, I've seen them charged at ~80 amps... but the power/wight/size ratio is a lot worst than lipo. I've been in the RC hobby for ~10 years, LI batteries haven't made much improvement in the capacity/size area. Most of the improvement's I've seen are in the current draw and safety areas. I had an alienware m11x R1 that was <5lbs and would get 10hrs of usable battery life out of it on the integrated card. They make 12 cell batterys for netbooks, I had a 9 cell acer that would last 10+hrs. Some of the busness class laptops have external battery 'slices' that can be added. I know HP and IBM used them.
Yeah the best thing you can do right now is get a CPU with really low power consumption, throw a SSD in there and a big battery... that said there have been good developments in the high drain battery field (Where you'll see used for flashlights etc.) so hopefully some of these will carry over to the laptop world sometime soon? That said given how thin the macbook air is it's pretty impressive you can get such good life of 10+ hours out of them...
Welcome to 1999.... They still aren't(and may never be) stable enough for consumer(read idiot) use. most other Li tech batteries were invented to try and build a safer battery with the same advantages as a Lipo.
Unless theres some breakthrough I didn't hear about LiPo has terrible lifecycle and degradation problems
