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Sony Touts 25 Hour Battery Life For Haswell-Equipped Vaio Pro
An anonymous reader writes "Sony claims that both the new 11.6-inch and 13.3-inch models of its Haswell-equipped Vaio Pro ultrabooks are the world's lightest. The 11.6-inch model weighs in at 1.9lb (0.87k , where as the 13.3-incher is a little heavier at just 2.33lb (1.06kg). But it's the battery life on offer here that really makes the new Pros stand out. The 11.6-inch Vaio Pro offers 11 hours of battery life as standard, while the 13.3-inch achieves 8 hours. However, Sony is also offering a sheet battery you can connect to the base of the ultrabooks. On the 13.3-inch Pro that increases battery life to 18 hours, but on the 11.6-inch you get a true day-long amount of juice with 25 hours of battery life claimed."
Let's see what Apple can get away with in their next MacBook refresh...
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
My soviet made flashlight gets endless battery life, just keep cranking the handle.
"25 hours of battery life claimed." So in reality it'll be about maybe 4 hours of actual use, unless Sony's reality is screen dimmed until you can just barely make out shapes and just staring at it for 25 hours. Yep, that sounds about right for Sony Reality.
You can dance if you want to.
25 hours on an 11.6" laptop. The ergonomics boggle the mind.
So they add a large external battery that completely destroys the advertised weights and sizes ... and thats supposed to be impressive?
The 2.33 pound notebook WILL NOT run for 25 hours, since the battery adds weight and volume, doesn't it?
Guess what, my laptop will run for months ... because its attached to a UPS ... backed by a bank of car batteries, as they power other things in my home during power outages ...
You have to be an idiot to believe this sort of marketing BS ... guess thats how it made the front page of slashdot.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
all I want is a super light laptop that I can take notes on without having a netbook keyboard nor costing a freaking grand for a piss poor 1.8ghz CPU
Imagine if automakers got together and started measuring the gas mileage of new cars with a cool test of their own making—one in which the cars were rolling downhill with their engines idling. Suddenly you'd have some pretty amazing claims: Why, that three-ton SUV gets 300 miles per gallon! This subcompact gets 500! In tiny print at the bottom of the window sticker you'd find a disclaimer saying that, well, um, you know, your mileage may vary.
Crazy, right? Yet that's more or less what's happening with laptop computers and their battery lives. Right now, I'm looking at a Best Buy flier touting a $599 Dell laptop that gets "up to 5 hours and 40 minutes of battery life." Down in the fine print comes a disclaimer explaining that "battery life will vary" based on a bunch of factors. Translation: you ain't gonna get five hours and 40 minutes, bub. Not ever. Not even close.
From a 2009 article excoriating the practice.
A computer that can function for ten hours is quite useful, but a twenty-five hour battery life is only marginally more so.
How many legs does a dog have if you call the tail a leg? Four. Calling a tail a leg doesn't make it a leg.
It's MobileMark2007, not BatteryMark.
...on offer here that really makes the new Pros stand out.
Survivalists and campers are also anticipating this new release. In addition to the long battery life they can also be used to create spontaneous fires in emergency situations. These new "smart" batteries are able to sense an emergency and self ignite with no need for user input.
Will window 7 have the same battery life? or did Sony make this windows 8 only?
This might be cool if it weren't from the same company that put rootkits on people's computers, try to force everyone into their proprietory lockins, and disabled the ability for their users to choose what OS they wanted to run on their game machines. In my book Sony is irrelevant and I will continue to dissuade everyone I know from purchasing any of their products.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
For example the old sony vaio z with a battery sheet offered 16H of battery time. Just to get some idea of what the 25h from the advertisement linked up top means ;-)
Like MPG, your 'mileage' may (read: will) vary...
Who cares? Who serious considers Sony laptops anymore? The train has left the station and Sony is the conductor on the platform waving the red flag. "We have some completely awesome irrelevant technology, look at us!"
both Ultrabooks run Windows 8
Epic fail. People need a battery that lasts properly between recharges .. a very, very, very small minority need something that lasts for 2 days of work. Sony just isn't a mainstream computer producer anymore. It doesn't matter how much they pay for shiny displays in retail stores, nobody who knows anything about computers would buy one nor recommend one to somebody else.
And what does Sony have to sell the latest VAIO?
Sony has also included X-Reality, which apparently optimizes video playback quality
Since when has anyone needed optimized video playback? All the R&D in the world is no good to you if you're researching how bear's wipe their arses in the woods.
All he's asking for is a decent keyboard on a relatively inexpensive small notebook.
The difference between a great keyboard and a fucktasticly shitty keyboard is about $50.
"The Adobe Updater must update itself before it can check for updates. Would you like to update the Adobe Updater now?"
A usable keyboard should demand a multi-hundred dollar premium.
"The Adobe Updater must update itself before it can check for updates. Would you like to update the Adobe Updater now?"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/sony_rootkit
never forget, never forgive
Is it possible to reduce the light loss by using a reflective coating on all the interior parts? I'm given to understand that transflective displays do this, which allows them to bounce daylight out, making the machine outdoors-viewable in full sun.
That's a big part of why I'm still using a Fujitsu Stylistic ST-4121 --- it's always viewable whether I'm in the shade or no.
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
Coolest thing ever for glamping, a small stove w/ a USB power supply:
http://www.biolitestove.com/campstove/camp-overview/features/
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
cool. just like the X series thinkpads.
when sony's rootkit drm scheme is installed.
I got a Vaio 9 months ago and I am not impressed by how robust it is. Within minutes after opening the box, the laptop case had scratches. It looks like it is made of metal, but in fact this is just a cheap painting on a plastic case, and the painting goes away easily. Then one month ago, the screen broke while I was carrying it closed in my backpack.
The comparison is harsh with an Apple laptop that live several years without showing any sign of fatigue. I do not think I will buy a Sony machine again - except if someone tells me they made progress.
I've always wondered why companies making computing devices that run off batteries continually made things smaller and smaller, with the goal of also keeping the same (poor) battery life, rather than realizing that after a certain point these devices are small enough and they should instead start cramming ever bigger batteries into the same form factor.
Take an iPhone 4 and 5 as a recent example. The size of an iPhone 4 is just fine. I wouldn't want something smaller, in fact. Yet, with the iPhone 5 they had as one of their goals the idea to make the thing thinner in order to make it smaller. And while they made the power usage of the device better than the older device, they also made the battery smaller, relatively speaking. So in the end, the battery life isn't dramatically better than before. It is merely about the same, while you do get better performance from the device than you do the older one. I'd much rather have a device that was still the same thickness as before, with all the components inside still having undergone the size reduction they did, and with all the same power usage advances, but a much larger battery taking up all the saved space. This would give you a much better usable battery life. The device was already small enough. Making it smaller wasn't much of a gain.
Laptops have been the same story ever since there were laptops. It would be nicer if they lasted longer while running on the battery. They were pretty bulky in the beginning, but after a few years they got to a certain size that was most certainly small enough. And as time marched on, everything inside them got smaller and smaller, and we got smaller and smaller machines. And power usage for them kept getting better and better, but they kept putting smaller and smaller batteries in them as the overall device got smaller, too. And so, battery life was never improving. It was still being built to a certain battery life goal, which is all well and good, unless that goal is too short.
By this time, with all the power usage improvements that we've seen, and battery design improvements that we've seen, we should have had laptops that lasted 24-48 hours on a single charge many years ago. This story about Sony's device getting 24 hours of usable life out of a charge, with an external add-on battery for crying out loud, shouldn't be something to salivate over. This should've been the norm many years ago. With a battery inside the thing that is already capable of such usable life per charge. After a certain point, small is small enough, and we should be putting that space to use for more usable life out of those suckers.
I've seen brand new Macbooks get nowhere near the claimed battery life because I had to test them and the first complaints I got from Mac users were "Why do I only get 5 hours of battery life, the ads said 7".
Well of course a company computer is not going to get the same battery life, again it comes down to load of the system! A company computer is either used for coding or spreadsheets or complex planning software, probably Outlook also, all of which takes CPU, and more load than a browser and movies would generate. So OF COURSE it's not going to last as long as the rating says under a different load!
But the key is that Apple is very clear about how they define the life and given that usage it's perfectly accurate. Again you have no DIRECT experience so it's pretty asinine for you to claim something is true about which you really know nothing.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley