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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.
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.
The sheet battery weighs only 290 g,
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
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 ;-)