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Sony Pledges More Accurate Laptop Battery Figures
Slatterz writes "Ever wondered why you never get the 10 hours of battery life advertised with your new ultraportable? Battery life ratings have been a joke for years, so it's interesting to hear that one big vendor is picking up its game. PC Authority says Sony is abandoning the usual (and wildly misleading) JEITA method for coming up with those 10+ hour battery numbers (they're still using JEITA, but not the usual way). Interestingly, the story has links showing the old and new steps Sony takes to come up with those battery predictions. It's good to see the industry coming clean on this issue."
Just wondering here, how would a move like this affect marketing of computers? The previous model had an up to 10 hour battery life, the new ultra better omgwtfbbq more magnificent version has "Up to 4, but we're not lying to you this time!"
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Somehow I just don't see that faring well with Joe Average
Properly, we should be told the capacity of the battery and the consumption of the machine at highest and lowest levels.
For example, my Lenovo X61 gets between 4 and 8 hours on its large battery. The difference comes from how I tune the machine.
At least for laptops using Intel chipsets and Linux, powertop makes it very easy to measure battery life, and (more importantly) tune it. I get my 8 hours by by switching off the wifi, usb ports, killing programs that do too many interrupts, turning down the brightness, etc. Powertop shows exactly how many watts the machine is using. The battery has about 70 watt/hours so when I get it down to 9 watts, that gives me about 8 hours.
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I have a Sony Vaio UX280 micro pc with an expanded battery, both bought 1.5 years ago. Not only did neither battery live up to their advertised battery life (3 hours standby for the orginal, 9 for the expanded), but now they are closer to 30 min and 45 min. I haven't let them run down to zero and time them, but they fall so fast after unplugging it I get my business done and shut it down. It's to the point now that I need another extended battery, but at $349 I might as well buy an Eee or similar netbook instead. Needless to say (but I'm obviously saying it anyway), if I knew the batteries didn't have the advertised life and were going to die so quickly, I would never have bought them.
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From TFA,
The old testing method: A picture showing a naked man stretching his anus to a large and disproportionate size. The Sony employee reaches into the anus and pulls out the battery figures.
The new method involves running the laptop until the battery is exhausted and timing the result.
Average time before battery goes flat under normal usage: 1 minute more than figures quoted by Dell
Average time before battery goes flat under Vista: 8 hours (i.e. during startup process)
Average time before battery goes flat watching DVD: length of film - 10 minutes
Average time before battery goes flat using Office: Fails during write process of important presentation
Average time before battery explodes into flame: 7 hours 32 minutes
Average time before stored spare battery goes flat: 5 seconds after it was last tested
Average time before battery goes flat under Linux:
Never. It is constantly recharged by sucking energy from the superior mind of the user
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Now all we need is for HD manufacturers to stop defining "Gigabyte" as "1 billion bytes", so my 160 GB drive is actually 160 GB (171 billion bytes), and not 149 GB (160 billion bytes).
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I find it very hard to imagine Sony doing anything altruistic at all. They are to Hardware what Microsoft is to Software.
So I'm wondering what's in it for them. Do they have some kind of new technology that when measured by the second method only, looks much better for them? Or perhaps their min-power usage number is the same as the movie-play version...
I'm only guessing, but I can't imagine Sony would be doing this just for the benefit of consumers, if they didn't get something out of it, since other manufacturers will still be using the old method of measuring this.
GrpA
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So they will give the expected yield of their batteries in kilotonnes now? Right?
There would simply be no point in selling laptops with more than 2 days battery life anymore, in 2 days time we'll all be dead anyway (or sucked into a parrallel universe to experience a fate even worse than death!)
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It's clearly not the whole computer industry, though, is it? Otherwise we wouldn't be having this discussion in the first place. Some parts of the computer industry call a gigabyte 1,000,000,000 bytes, other parts call a gigabyte 1,073,741,824 bytes. One of these standards is consistent with the usage of 'giga' in all other scientific and technical fields, while the other is unique to computer science. To my mind, calling 1,024 bytes a 'kilobyte' was just about acceptable, since the difference wasn't so great and 'kilo' was a convenient shorthand. But calling 1,073,741,824 bytes a 'gigabyte' is really pushing it, and now we're starting to build terabyte drives and it's getting ridiculous. If you want to use substantially different multipliers from the standard, don't use SI prefixes for them. Make up your own unit names.
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