Tech Blog

[#1]

Arguably the biggest bugaboo PC manufacturers (and Apple) have had to deal with the last few years is battery life. There’ve been all kinds of studies and feedback suggesting that productivity takes a hit because of all those times when your battery needs juice and there’s no outlet available. A couple of recent announcements might provide a hint as to what we can expect this year.

Lenovo’s Thinkpad T420 and HP’s EliteBook 8460p have both been announced over the last week, and their claim to fame is being the first notebooks to be able to stay on for at least 30 hours. In both cases, the 30-hour threshold can only be hit with an extra capacity battery that is an optional (and extra) purchase. Still, even if a notebook stays on for 20 hours, that’s a crazy amount of time to be productive.

The numbers are great news, but I always caution people to take the manufacturer’s stated battery life with a grain of salt. Whatever testing they do, it can’t cover the different ways consumers drain the batteries in their laptops. When I see seven hours, like Apple announced with its new MacBook Pros, I think more like five hours, or definitely less if certain apps are open and running processes.

But I’m trying to be optimistic. Could this be the year that battery life really starts to take a turn for the better? Keeping in mind that those two PC laptops mentioned above are aimed at business users, and not everyday consumers, it makes me wonder what needs to happen to have it trickle down to consumers. In fact, this is a bit of an oddity, since the last few years have seen the consumer space trickle over to the business world, reversing a tech trend that had been going on for a long time.

A friend of mine recently suggested that it might be possible to put a larger battery in a notebook that didn’t have an optical drive. This is partly how sub-$1,000 laptops were able to stay on for longer than six or seven hours — some didn’t have optical drives at all.

Size will be one thing, but technology will ultimately be the deciding factor, naturally. We’ve paid so much attention to how displays, processors and graphics cards have evolved in mobile computing, but we only really seem to focus on battery life when we’re cursing our notebooks for running low.

Maybe, just maybe, laptops like the Thinkpad T420 and EliteBook 8460p will begin opening that door to longer-lasting consumer notebooks.