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10-Hour PowerBook Battery

Posted by pudge on from the if-only-i-ever-left-my-house-this-might-be-useful dept.

Anonymous Coward writes "Valence has apparently caved to pressure from Mac fans and finally released iBook/TiBook compatible cabling for their N-Charge Power System. The N-Charge is a $300, 10-Hour Lithion-Ion battery that powers laptops and cell phones/pdas at the same time. The next step? How about adapters to power my miniDV camcorder?" There's also a lighter version that has about half the power, for half the price.

4 of 46 comments (clear)

  1. Less power, half price by EnVisiCrypt · · Score: 5, Insightful

    "There's also a lighter version that has about half the power, for half the price."

    Half the power. That would be five hours, right? Um. There's this battery that gets five hours and it comes free with the ibook.

    I'm not sure I'd be too keen on buying one of these devices, as I can't think of many cases where a fully charged spare battery wouldn't do the trick. I guess a flight to japan would require 15 hours of battery time or so, but I can't think of something I would want to do for 15 hours straight on a plane.

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    *everything* is Orwellian to cats.
  2. External by dhovis · · Score: 4, Informative
    This is an external battery pack with 130 W*h capacity. For comparison, the 12" iBook has a 47 W*h battery. So you could extend the iBook's battery life from 4-5 hours to 15-18 hours. It supplements the internal battery.

    The downside? It weighs ~3 pounds, about 60% as heavy as the iBook.

    Still, I can see the appeal for people who have frequent long flights.

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    The internet is the greatest source of biased information in the history of mankind.

  3. Probably too ugly for most Mac users by Nipsy356 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I bet they won't be encased in Titanium or White plastic, and that will turn off some users. Additionally, the size & weight issue, vs. carrying a spare battery (or even two) makes this somewaht redundant. Unless you need uninterrupted computing, you're better off carrying two spare batteries...

  4. Using for Laptop Recording by mhbtr · · Score: 5, Interesting

    There are more and more people who are using laptops to record music in the field. Often they are recording at 24/48 or 24/96. This wide bandwidth consumes huge amounts of power because of the continuous disk access (I have found that recording at 24/48 takes 1.5 times the battery power of 16/44.1). When you are recording live music in the field, you do not have the luxury of putting your laptop to sleep - you never know how long they will be playing for. In addition, you may be powering an external USB or FireWire based A/D converter/Microphone preamp - for example, the Digidesign M-Box. For all of these situations, this sounds like an ideal supplement to the internal battery. The #1 reason I have not upgraded from my FireWire PBG3 is because it has 2 battery bays and one you can swap batteries without powering down/sleeping. Lastly, a unit like this has much more of a life than your laptop. Because of the modularity of a battery and a power cable, you don't have to concern yourself with laptop upgrades - I'm psyched I have 3 batteries for my PowerBook G3, but when I do upgrade, all those batteries will be useless. With something like this, all I would need would be a new cable. Again, this is great News!!! Eytan