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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."
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
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.
It's the "obligatory Apple reference" (tm)
Given Haswell's power saving credentials and the retina MacPros are mainly just battery under the hood, it should get interesting.
(also thunderbolt 2 coming around the corner)
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
Say what you want about Apple, one thing you cannot (rationally) debate is that their claimed battery life is among the most accurate in the industry. Multiple reviews from multiple sources have basically all confirmed that Apple's battery life estimates are pretty accurate. Not saying that Sony's aren't accurate, but if you are going to hate, at least hate with facts instead of just making shit up.
Monstar L
There`s no misinformation on the part of Sony here. The article makes it clear how much battery life they are claiming with - and without - the extra battery.
And frankly, if the 11`` gets anything close to 11-h, I count that as pretty good. And depending on how much the extra battery weighs and how big it is, being able to work for 25-h - heck, even 15-h - gets all the way to awesome for me.
Maybe not misinformation, but lack of information - if they are going to claim 25 hour battery life, they should include the weight, size and price of the battery.
You laugh, but when the zombie apocalypse hits, he'll have a working flashlight for more than a few hours :D
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
Retina = 99% of backlight doesn't get through = bright backlight required = lots of power consumption.
The higher the pixel density on an LCD the smaller the area the light can pass through - more space is wasted with the transistors on each pixel.
Lower power consumption CPU isn't going to do much if most of the power is used by the display and most of the inside is already comprised of battery. That's why the new Ipad has a similar battery life to the previous one, but twice the battery capacity - that and the extra GPU required to drive the extra pixels...