For me, the most interesting part of that keynote was the stuff about batteries. I think it’s safe to predict that similar long-life, non-replacable custom batteries will be appearing in the smaller Apple notebook computers in coming months.
Apple’s gone to great lengths to push this battery idea. Witness the expensively-produced video on the MacBook Pro page, that spends a lot of time explaining why it had to be this way. This shows that Apple expected some backlash.
The negative feelings on this issue runs deeper, though, thanks to a problem that’s industry-wide, not just confined to Infinite Loop.
That issue is that, for years and years now, computer users have not been able to trust the battery claims by computer manufacturers.
You know what it’s like when you go shopping for a notebook. If you read “up to five hours battery life”, you know that the most important words are “up to” and that, in reality, they change the meaning of the sentence to “about three hours – four if you’re lucky – and you’re not doing anything terribly disk- or CPU-intensive”.
We’ve all become so used to this that we take it for granted. We KNOW that we should knock a huge percentage off the battery life claims of the manufacturers. Worse, THEY know that we know. And they still keep doing it. The only way to get a good appreciation of a machine’s actual average battery life is to buy one and use it; or wait for others to do so, and post their reviews on retail web sites.
What I hope – very much – is that with this expensive video and marketing campaign, Apple is finally doing the right thing and giving ACCURATE, RELIABLE figures for the battery life.
If you didn’t see the keynote, or follow it on the zillions of blogs and Twitter streams, it’s really worth having a look at that video. This battery design and manufacturing process is a big deal.
Who knows, maybe in the lab they’ve been able to squeeze out 10 or 12 hours on the prototypes, and they’ve gone for 8 as the “official” figure because it will be achievable by real people doing real computing, and that it will therefore mean something.
What I fear, however, is that 8 hours is the lab maximum, that this expensive video production has been a waste of time, and that the claimed 8 hours will be hard to reproduce by the likes of you and I.
You might think that’s needlessly skeptical, but the skepticism is only because my mind’s been indoctrinated by years of overblown battery claims. I hope I’m wrong, and that the early adopters of this new 17-incher are able to confirm Apple’s claims.
And I also hope that, within a year or so, I can buy a new 15-inch unibody MacBook with the same battery inside. I don’t mind it being sealed up, as long as it lives up to claims Apple makes of it.
(Photo used under CC license, thanks to moria.)
Giles Turnbull is a freelance writer in England. He also writes for the Press Association and The Morning News. You can find out more at his website, and follow him on Twitter @gilest.
