Technology

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 usually use their laptop plugged in, only have 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 higher refresh rate. Have a more-powerful CPU or GPU and the fans to cool 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 for people who strongly want the price to be at a minimum. 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 surely there are people who don't fall into one of those two camps.

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. In the past, 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 as an actual internal battery. There's no protocol for them to report their charge, so a laptop can't report life remaining. 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, so you're not gonna get software packages incorporating it into their "time remaining" estimate in the dock, and I'm not aware of any USB powerbanks that actually try to use this route. It's another box and cable to lug around, and another port on the laptop tied up.