Slashdot Mirror
HP Made a Laptop Slightly Thicker To Add 3 Hours of Battery Life (theverge.com)
When a technology company like Apple releases a new product, chances are it's going to be thinner than its predecessor -- even if may be slightly worse off for it. HP is taking a different approach with its new 15.6-inch Spectre x360 laptop, which was recently announced at CES. The machine is slightly thicker than its predecessor, and HP claims it features three hours of additional battery life. The Verge reports: The difference between the new x360 and the old x360, in terms of thickness, is minimal, from 15.9mm to 17.8mm. (For reference, the 2015 MacBook Pro was 18mm thick.) It's an increase of 1.9mm for the Spectre, but HP says it's now including a battery that's 23 percent larger in exchange. At the same time, the laptop is also getting narrower, with its body shrinking from 14.8 inches wide to 14 inches wide. Unfortunately, the claimed three hours of additional battery life aren't meant to make this laptop into some long-lasting wonder -- they're really just meant to normalize its battery life. HP will only be selling the 15.6-inch x360 with a 4K display this year, and that requires a lot more power. By increasing the laptop's battery capacity, HP is able to push the machine's battery life from the 9.5 hours it estimated for the 4K version of its 2016 model to about 12 hours and 45 minutes for this model. So it is adding three hours of battery life, but in doing so, it's merely matching the battery life of last year's 1080p model. The x360 is also being updated to include Intel's Kaby Lake processors. It includes options that max out at an i7 processor, 16GB of RAM, a 1TB SSD, and Nvidia GeForce 940MX graphics. It's supposed to be released February 26th, with pricing starting at $1,278 for an entry-level model.
I wish there was a better way to quantify the durability of phones. Something akin to crash test ratings. You can get water resistance and dust resistance for phones... add scientifically measured standardized scratch, bend and shatter resistance tests.
And yes, while I think that it's unfortunate that they're doing this just to feed a hungry 4k screen (I'd much rather just not have the 4k screen), and also that they're shrinking the width ("Meh"), kudos to them for bucking the "must get thinner every time!" trend.
Your headphone example is not only a great example of sacrifice in the pursuit of useless thinness, but it's a great example of the sacrifice of durability, too. I've had many USB ports and USB plugs break over the years, but never in my life had headphone jacks or plugs break. I've had the headphones and their cords break, but never the plug or jack. Because it's a thick solid piece of metal plugging into another thick solid piece of metal. That sort of thing is what I want in my ports, I don't give a rat's arse that it adds half a dozen grams to the device's weight.
And likewise, for that incentive of ditching it - pushing people towards going wireless with their earbuds - for Thor's sake, the last thing I want to have to deal with is another piece of household electronics to charge. You've got my support when you have an long-range wireless charging standard in place that everyone has agreed that they're going to move to. Not a second before then.
And so long as you're wired, it should be kept analog, because that gives you the cheapest earbuds and removes any DRM/lockout/incompatibility/etc fears from users.
For the love of Crom, am I the only one here who wants to keep the U.S. technologically competitive?
Nice bait and switch there. No one said anything about it being as replaceable/upgradeable as a typical desktop PC. However, my 2008 MacBook Pro had a replaceable optical drive, hard drive, memory and battery. I bought it with 2GB of RAM and upgraded. I replaced the hard drive twice with faster models as they became available. I had replaced the battery four times.