Reason to love being a Mac owner #4,592…

Pete Mortensen ()

Apple never, ever expresses battery life based on the number of cells that make it up. The ThinkPad I have at work is available with a 4, 6, and 9-cell option. And I have no idea what any of it means or why I should care. Apple just tells me how long I can work without a power source, which is what I actually care about.

The PC-makers just don’t get it.

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About the author

Petemortensen

Pete Mortensen is a design strategist for consulting firm Jump Associates and the co-author of Wired to Care: How Companies Prosper When They Create Widespread Empathy, a book and blog that are significantly more interesting than you might initially think. Pete's particular Apple avocations are both around design--interface and industrial. Follow him on Twitter!

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Posted in Cult of Mac |

  • st george

    Sure they do. They sell way more PCs every year than Macs, and they probably always will. It’s just another business model. Toyota offers all sorts of stupid options packages on their cars, Honda has 2 trim choices total. Does that make a Honda the only car worth owning? Geesh, you guys need a little perspective sometimes …

  • http://kdmurray.net Keith

    So, that three hours of battery life… is that with the screen at full brightness? or half? Is it while trying to encode video? or write a blog post? Were you wanting to watch the whole dvd of ‘Return of the King’ or just the first half?

    Perspective? u needz it.

  • Roger

    You don’t care so no one does.

    Wow.

  • Terry

    I don’t think you either read or comprehend what the article was saying because your reply makes no sense.

  • http://www.technovia.co.uk Ian Betteridge

    I think this may qualify as the most stupid, pointless post on any serious blog, ever. Aside from being demonstrable false, as even a cursory look at Dell’s site would find (hint – look at the product pages, not the tech spec ones, like http://www1.euro.dell.com/content/topics/topic.aspx/global/products/adamo/topics/en/emea/adamo-onyx?c=uk&cs=ukdhs1&l=en&s=dhs&redirect=1), it’s just dumb.

    It makes you sound like the kind of person who spends his time combing the Internet for any negative reference to Macs, then writing 5,000 word “Emergency Response Briefings” which you circulate to your friends.

  • Fred

    Alright, Monkeys, here goes:

    You are ALL freakin’ losers for commenting on blog comments. Losers and freakin’ babies…

    Get outside. Get lives. Freakin losers…

  • Hywel Thomas

    My cursory look at one random laptop each from Dell, Lenovo, Alienware, Novatech, Sony and HP showed that 4 out of 6 PC makers quote cells, not hours, buried in the tech specs. HP was the best.

    Curiously, Ian links to the Dell that most wants to steal share from Apple. They’re obviously copying marketing as well as design and price.

  • http://www.foodorpoison.com Mark

    Perhaps PC purchasers are simply intelligent and knowledgeable enough to understand that battery cells equate to both battery life and battery size and weight. That is, a 6-cell battery will have more life than a 4-cell battery, but that it’s also larger in size and weight. When choosing between battery types, therefore, it’s a balance: more battery life in exchange for a larger and heavier battery. The absolute battery life, in this case, is irrelevant.

    That’s obvious, of course, to everyone, except the Apple fanbase apparently.

  • Wes McGee

    My cursory look at the sites picked by Hywel Thomas showed the following quotes:

    Lenovo: “Integrated graphics: Up to 13 hours;
    Switchable Graphics: Up to 12.7 hours” (Thinkpad T series)

    Alienware: “6 Cell Lithium-ION Battery” (Area 51 m15x)

    Dell: “5+ hr battery life using Li-Polymer cells; 40 Whr” (Dell Adamo)

    NovaTech.co.uk: (I’m not from Britain, so I never heard of them or their brand, but ok…) “4 Cell Lithium Ion Battery” (X30 13)

    Sony: “# Estimated Battery Life: Up to 4 hours (standard capacity battery)
    # Up to 8 hours (large capacity battery)” (P Series)

    HP: An entire table detailing battery life for their models at http://www.shopping.hp.com/shopping/html/popup/battery_popup.html

    By my count that’s FOUR out of six PC retailers showing battery life in time rather than, or in addition to battery capacity via cell count. These were not buried in hard to find pages.

  • freakin monkey

    More important here, not that this is earth-shattering stuff requiring insults and put-downs, is the idea behind the post. Really, out of the box, Macs just work. The comment was an extension of that idea. At work the PCs there fail to even boot regularly and the Macs carry the load. My boss is actually intimidated by how much she can do out of the box and told me she’d stick top PCs–here’s some odd behavior–enjoying a product like a Mac isn’t odd by comparison.