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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."
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.
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.
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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
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?
The title is totally misleading. I can attach 10 car batteries to any laptop and make it run for days. External battery doesn't count.
Cheap, powerful, small. Pick two.
Oh yeah? Well there are convenient receptacles spread all throughout my city that I can attach my laptop to and get virtually unlimited battery life.
Pressure will be on Nvidia (or AMD) for the next one to improve GPU power consumption no doubt.
Yes, GPU switching helps, but there's still a bunch of dumb stuff which enables the high end GPU under OS X, and you'll see battery life literally HALVE as soon as that happens - even if the machine is mostly idle. At least thats my experience with my 2011 MBP 15".
Sure, more intelligent GPU switching improvements will help, but haswell will make the higher end GPUs a lot "more expensive" (relative to total machine power draw) to drive and make said GPU switching even more important.
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...
Would you like a pony with that?
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
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)
There was a Thunderbolt 1.0? Did it do anything...?
I want cheap with a full size keyboard, its amusing that a 13 inch "ultrabook" with a 1.8ghz cpu cost 800 bucks, but a 10 inch 1.6 ghz "netbook" cost 250
give me 250 under 3lbs with a decent sized keyboard, it shouldn't be that radical of a jump
And I have to say that's one of the reasons I will always prefer a Mac laptop over a Windows laptop of any kind. The power management is truly something, and I can see a noticeable difference if I use Windows on Boot Camp and then use OSX.
In my book Sony is irrelevant and I will continue to dissuade everyone I know from purchasing any of their products.
Fine, don't buy it, there are other choices out there that may suit you better. For me, I have always been happy with my Sony products, from Cameras, Palm OS devices, Playstation and laptops. They have been good for me and I am happy to continue the relationship. My HP and Lenovo laptop experiences haven't been so good, but then YMMV.
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 ;-)
Seriously, you had problems with a thinkpad? Mine has been going strong for 5 years now and runs just about any OS I put on it.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
Just because we never used a particular function doesn't mean other people might want to.
(which is why I don't get why comparing the Sony to what Apple could presumably do got shouted down as being offtopic. Yes, some people have to, or prefer to use Apple products in their daily work and won't get this Sony laptop.)
But support for 4K for the video editors sounds pretty cool in TB2
My bet is that the new Mac Pro redesign will get it too.
READY.
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A Core i7 CPU at 1.8ghz and an Atom CPU at 1.6ghz aren't even in the same ballpark. That's like comparing an MLB team to your 6 year old's T-ball team. They both hit balls with sticks and run but that's where the similarity ends.
If you want to split the difference, Woot's got an 11.6" Core i3 computer for $300 right now. It's not the latest generation but it's inexpensive, light, and more powerful than a netbook with a reasonably sized keyboard. I type on an 11.6" and the key spacing the the same as my standard desktop keyboard (minus the number pad, of course). It even has a touchscreen so you can get the full Windows 8 experience.
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.
I'm surprised they didn't lock down exclusive first distribution of the new CPUs like they have in the past. Otherwise it's all the same hardware.
"The Adobe Updater must update itself before it can check for updates. Would you like to update the Adobe Updater now?"
I think he'd prefer a unicorn. One that farts rainbows, please.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Err. Maybe I am missing something but don't you WANT the light to pass through the LCD? In other words the 1% that you claim 'gets through' is actually the wasted light and it's the other "99%" that actually provides any value?
Bad analogies are like waxing a monkey with a rainbow.
Err. Maybe I am missing something but don't you WANT the light to pass through the LCD?
Yes.
In other words the 1% that you claim 'gets through' is actually the wasted light and it's the other "99%" that actually provides any value?
No, that contradicts what you just asserted. I don't know where their 99% vs 1% numbers originally came from, but assuming they're accurate, they're suggesting that the 99% of backlight that doesn't get through is wasted energy and a massive battery killer.
The interesting thing will be what Apple chooses for the Mac Book Pro refresh. The Haswell Iris Pro is pretty darn close to the NV 650m in the current MBP and the NV 750M is probably only going to be about 40% faster than it. Not much point there. So either do without or build a MBP that can handle a hotter, more powerful card.
"The Adobe Updater must update itself before it can check for updates. Would you like to update the Adobe Updater now?"
This. Not only the battery life is accurate, it lasts relatively well (Macbook air 2012) for a light, thin and powerful machine. I'm no Apple fanboy, but, sorry for the haters, Apple engineering (+ ergonomics) is still far ahead of the competition.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
MBP 15 will stay discrete is my bet - for at least a couple more generations until intel catch up a bit more (its a big differentiator between pro and air at the moment). However an MBA with Haswell iris and 16GB of ram and 512GB of storage would be a very attractive prospect. Nvidia / AMD should be concerned...
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
Support for 4K is native to the video output on intel's Haswell motherboards. I would hope Apple wouldn't be excluded from that.
"The Adobe Updater must update itself before it can check for updates. Would you like to update the Adobe Updater now?"
How have you not "seen" that if you don't own a Mac? It's pretty obvious you do not, nor would you even if it were the better system for you.
My Macbook Pro doesn't get the claimed battery life anymore... but it's three years old and on the original battery, so it can be forgiven for dropping a few hours of charge capacity after a while (started around 8 I believe). When new it did in fact meet the listed rating when you used it only for browsing and watching movies.
What you probably saw was people making much heavier use of the system than the reference is derived from, as in anything that puts a much higher demand on the CPU. Every laptop on the market is going to have worse battery life with heavy CPU use over something like browsing.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Your response to multiple, independent sources demonstrating that a machine actually does perform as rated in everyday use is "nuh-uh"?
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
If you want to make a great laptop these days, Apple are your competition. The build quality of virtually everyone else has gone to shit. Shame about the chiclet keys though.
If you think someone isn't free to have a different definition of "freedom" you may be a tyrant.
I was thinking more of a MBP13 with any i5 or i7, Iris Pro and an efficient 1366x768 LCD would be nice (1280x800 is current). TFA's new Sony only has HD Graphics 4400 and its 13" 1920×1080 LCD is completely useless to me.
I just wish Apple understood the value of a docking station.
"The Adobe Updater must update itself before it can check for updates. Would you like to update the Adobe Updater now?"
Normally I'd agree, but there's nothing special in the Sony. The slab battery was a good idea when it was introduced many years ago. The hardware is weak (HD4400 GPU?) and 1920x1080 on a 13" monitor is stupid. They should market it with Beats headphones to make those Youtube videos sound better.
"The Adobe Updater must update itself before it can check for updates. Would you like to update the Adobe Updater now?"
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?"
The display has a certain amount of dead weight: first it turns regular light into polarised light by filtering out all of the light of the wrong polarisation, which is wasted, then you have a matrix of coloured filters where everything that's not the right colour is thrown out, then you have electronics around each subpixel which get in the way and block even more light. Before you actually show anything on the screen, you've thrown out well over 90% of the light you originally created.
The electronics part increases the more pixels you have, meaning more wasted energy, which is why retina displays require more backlighting.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
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?"
People here were complaining that everything came with those silly 1366x768 screens. 1920x1080 is at least some progress. I suppose the Retina displays are silly too since you aren't supposed to see the pixels.
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.
I want cheap with a full size keyboard, its amusing that a 13 inch "ultrabook" with a 1.8ghz cpu cost 800 bucks, but a 10 inch 1.6 ghz "netbook" cost 250
The ultrabooks are much thinner (harder to design), use more expensive batteries and much more expensive CPUs. The 1.6GHz atom is severely trounced by the 1.6GHz core i5 or whatever.
That said...
I love my eee 900, and I'd love the same thing (950g! that's lighter than almost all extant laptops and the PSU is lighter than just about any other I've seen) with a CPU 4.5 years newer. It worked great (I got used to the keyboard).
The trouble is with bigger ones is the bigger screens as a massive power draw for the backlight and that's going to bump up the weight. On most modern laptops, the backlight is the #1 biggest power hog.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
I looked at getting a retina MacBook recently but went with an NEC LaVie instead. While the retina display is nice I noticed that the MacBook was really, really heavy. More than twice what the same size LaVie weighs. Turns out their secret to excellent battery life is just really big, heavy batteries.
For comparison the MacBook has a 95Wh battery and the LaVie has a 35Wh battery, but get similar run times.
I wonder if the retina screen has much to do with it. Now that other manufacturers are making even higher resolution ones (both Sharp and Toshiba have 4k 14" laptops coming out this month) it will be interesting to compare.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Battery life should be rated at full load.
Age and eyesight are not the best friends. Read again my comment, and don't forget to use a magnifying glass this time. (build quality is not in light / thin / powerful - anyway the Air is certainly not the best build-quality choice, better get a Pro)
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
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.
Netbooks use atom processors, comparing that to an i5/i7 ultrabook is like comparing a Lada and a Ferrari.
Comparing CPU clock speed across different designs makes no sense. A 2GHz x86 CPU can be 10 times faster than a different design at 4GHz (still x86).
There's a ton of non-ultrabook 13"-14" that fits your description. Either 14" $250 chromebooks with about 2x the performance of a netbook, or $350 laptops with 3-4x the performance of a netbook.
---- Sig. gone.
This favours weak machines. Battery life should be given as idle, web browsing, watching HD video and full load. Measuring just 1 of any of these doesn't give the full picture.
"If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear." - Every fascist, ever
Docking stations won't be around much longer other than niche uses. WIDI, Gigabit WIFI, etc. Cables suck - give me an inductive charging pad, wireless everything else.
And yeah, a retina MBP 13 will most certainly get a Quad core haswell is my bet. What could get real interesting is if intel figure out a crossfire/sli type setup with a pair of Haswell CPU/GPUs. Can you say 16 thread/dual quad core high end notebook with better than Nvidia GT650M graphics capability in ~90w of power?
I have no doubt that WON'T be coming out, but in future, the CPU/GPU combo has such a huge power consumption advantage over current discrete options it opens up some interesting possibilities.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
chromebook almost fits, but I rather have a functional computer and not a cloud enabled doorstop
I know that, dipshit, why is there no middle ground here except for chromebook, I dont need an i7 to type notes and check email, and I fat finger a 7 inch netbook's keyboard constantly. Why is this difficult? you are like the 3rd person to tell me this, if I want power I will go home and sit in front of my overclocked 3770k
I had to support them for years. 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". I got the same thing when the ads said 10.
There are good reasons I flat out say to new employers, "I dont work with Apple products".
So I know full well they are the worst system for everyone. Also, dont make assumptions about people.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
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