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That's right to be jealous about, but 8hrs+ battery life has become rather common even in the Windows world.


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To be fair, "battery life is fantastically good on Linux, and stupendously good on Windows" doesn't exactly sound like a downside to me.

It would be nice if they could get close in terms of battery. Every windows laptop I’ve ever had including my current one I use for work has had a battery life of around 3 or 4 hours. Compared to my MacBook Air which can easily seem to go over 24.

Microsoft seem to be exaggerate more than Dell, HP, Lenovo and Apple in my experience.

Shockingly with the M1 Apple's battery life claims were quite conservative. I have been able to get an hour longer than Apple's claims without having to resort to any extreme measures.


I bet that's true for most laptops regardless of whether it's got the battery life or not.

I didn't have windows on long enough to get solid battery numbers, but on ubuntu I get 8 hours of work use.

Very true, although seeing your comment made me realize how awesome it is that people consider 6 hours to be shitty for laptops nowadays. It doesn't seem that long ago that 90-150 minute battery life was pretty standard.

Not everyone needs 15+ hours of battery life. I'd argue that most people don't. Laptops were extremely popular when the battery life was two hours. Now even older laptops get 5h+.

What about battery ? it seems that the norm is 8h of usage. I guess most efforts were in CPU power reduction.

There are windows laptops that advertise over 20 hours of battery life with top current or last gen Intel and AMD processors.

I get 5-6 hours with Windows 8.1. I have a dimmed screen and passive CPU cooling when on battery, and I don't do much video.

Yeah, agreed. I recently moved to Windows (ten years Linux previously), and its shocking how bad the default battery life is.

>> or have only 5-6 hours of battery life

Laptops with long battery life are still a bit of a novelty to me -- it's probably because I'm older and the average battery life since my very first laptop (a Powerbook 170) is probably well below 3 hours. I'd be super happy with 5-6 hours of battery life.


The number of other laptops with similar battery life is very small. I’ve looked.

This is about the Surface, not Windows. I consistently have more battery life with Windows than Linux.

Interesting, thanks. I've apparently got "1:47 (53%)" remaining right now, and that's with a 6-cell slice and 3-cell built-in battery. That's just with Firefox and Citrix open.

I seem to suffer pretty badly from battery anxiety, so 8 hours is a bit of a dream :)


> - significantly better battery life than any Windows lapt I've ever seen (due in part to software admittedly);

My 11 month old Acer Timeline gets me 8+ hours of battery life with constant Wifi use. I easily work full days without recharges.


And yet we're getting ~8h of battery life on these machines with software rendering.

Did I mention the hardware is just that good? :-)


I don't think I've ever gotten close to the advertised battery life from any new laptop, Mac or Windows, but I probably use a lot of apps and settings that aren't battery friendly (e.g., I prefer a brighter than average display).

So when I do get 4h of battery life, I'm pretty happy.


The author mentions it in the first paragraph as something he was comparing his laptop to, then inexplicably decides that 8 hours of battery is good enough.

What planet are you from where battery life is an unimportant metric for a portable computer?

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