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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.
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.
...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.
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.
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...?
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 ;-)
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.
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?"
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.
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
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.
Weight (g) - Approx. 290 g (10.3 oz)
Dimensions (WxHxD) - Approx. 277 x 16 x 130 mm (11.0 x 0.7 x 5.2 in) (w x h x d) (excluding projections)
Straight from their website.
I'm actually with Sony on this one. The last thing I want in a press release is an never ending diarrhea of specifications which are already available to those who are interested. They gave as much information as needed which is that the 25 hours is achievable with a extra sheet battery on the bottom of the laptop.
Now if you'll excuse me I have an appointment with an exorcist.
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.
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?
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...