> Having a solar panel defeats the metric of "battery life measured in years".
eh, I don't see why. Solar pocket calculators were still sold with the understanding that their function and lifespan hinged upon the chemistry of the internal battery.
it's not like these things can function without some form of capacitance, and getting that to last a long time is tricky.
It's impressive to dig a long forgotten solar calculator from the late 70s out of a drawer, and have it still function perfectly.
It seems like a monumental failure of the computer industry that we still don't have the equivalent in laptop form. None of my portable computers will come out of a forgotten drawer 50+ years from now and readily turn on.
A while back I wanted to run OS/2 on real hardware -- I bought an old HP omnibook 800; the batteries were all shot but otherwise it worked fine (the laptop; OS/2 was kind of a pain to setup). That's not the 70s but it's old. Lots of that vintage computer would work fine if it weren't for those pesky capacitors -- the same's true of lots of older vintage electronics.
I recently bought an old keyboard (an old IBM M4-1, a PS2 keyboard / trackpoint combination thing) -- it's from 1994 and needed a couple adapters, but connected to my macbook pro just fine, and worked pretty well.
OS2 won't know modern TLS and the keyboard doesn't have the command / meta / windows / open clover shift keys, they do fine.
My old HP calculator from high school didn't work when I tried it out...
it was a small miracle when the Dell Latitude C640s my dad collected from his work in the early 2000s turned on and worked fine around 2019. Just in time to turn them in for $50 Best Buy gift cards for their laptop recycling drive.
Having a solar array on your roof and some battery storage in house makes even a normal off-the-shelf laptop last for years, while doing a lot more practical workloads for the user.
This doesn't mean that the laptops battery life is measured in years.
eh, I don't see why. Solar pocket calculators were still sold with the understanding that their function and lifespan hinged upon the chemistry of the internal battery.
it's not like these things can function without some form of capacitance, and getting that to last a long time is tricky.
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