These gains are just through improvements in processors. Now, combine that with parallel leaps for battery tech...
It's also good that battery tech hasn't jumped too far ahead already - the constraint has helped in the development in these mobile chips.
The display panel is still the biggest energy draw on my laptop. There's a lot of chance for improvement there too. A 2 day battery in 5 years isn't that crazy.
I need to recharge my own wetware at least once a day. So there is a nearly guaranteed several hour idle period where I'm not using any technology and where laptops and phones can be recharging too.
I don't see much end user value in not taking advantage of that.
It's like if you parked your car literally at a gas station every night anyway. Would you really care about a fuel tank that could let you drive for more than 24 hours?
I would want a 2, 3, even 7 day battery. Why not? I don't want to bother about charging every day.
But my worry is that with more and more efficiency in computing and battery tech, if Apple instead decides to reduce the battery capacity? Especially with no competition in sight, or competitors trying to follow Apple, we may end up with smaller batteries instead of more battery life. They seems to be doing that with iPhone. Also 18 hour battery life can quickly degrade to few hours if some processes are spinning the CPU continuously which can happen knowingly or unknowingly with several apps open (Docker occasionally does that to my MBP).
With several days battery life, I can even go for short travels without even bothering about how to charge it.
The problem with multi day battery life is you never get in to a routine and you get caught out every time. I had a pebble watch which had a 10 day battery life and almost every 10th day it would go flat on me mid day or I'd get a warning about low battery while I'm outside and then forget about it when I get home.
Now I have an Apple Watch that lasts almost but not quite 2 days, I charge it every night and it has never gone flat on me and I find it no hassle since I take it off before bed anyway so I just drop it on the charger.
Kindles suffer this problem. The battery lasts forever so you never get in the habit of charging them. Then you get caught out and it's at 0% and you can't read your book. Too much battery capacity is surprisingly harmful.
This is precisely why Kindles and similar devices should (a) use battery chemistries that are power dense so that they can charge quickly, and (b) come with a wireless charging mat that you can set up on an end table wherever you like to read (or where you put all your stuff when you walk in the door).
The only device that I don't have this issue with is my logitech mouse which gets 70 days on a single charge. It shows a red light on the side when its at about 2 days charge left and I usually remember to plug it in when I leave for lunch.
Especially now that thanks to USB-C, it's easier than ever to augment laptop batteries. For $60 you can grab a 100Wh RavPower battery pack that can double the lifespan of a MacBook.
Aside from being more attentive with charge, another consequence of smaller battery is that you get more cycles per a given amount of total battery usage, and shallower cycles per a fixed interval of battery usage. All else being equal, a larger battery may be able to live longer.
Personally I would like a larger battery because that means i can leave my charger at home, or even use a weaker USB-C PD on the go just to reduce the drain rate.
The problem with the fuel tank analogy is that liquid gasoline is really heavy and your energy efficiency would drop dramatically, due to lugging around an extra 80 gallons of gasoline. That's not necessarily the case with a larger battery. You still have to carry the additional battery material, but the marginal costs IMO are nowhere near as high.
It is really only charge my AirPods Pro every week or so. I much prefer having a bulkier case with battery I can forget about to a smaller case but more frequent need for charging.
It’s actually revolutionary for how I use a computing product. If i had to charge them everyday I assume they’d be dead 1/2 the time because it’s annoying to have yet another thing to plug in.
Yeah, I do this with my Tesla, and it’s a game changer: when I need to drive, my “gas tank” is always full and will take me anywhere I need to go for 90%+ of the driving I do regularly.
I'm not sure I or really anyone actually wants a 2 day battery life.
Like, we can do that on smartphones right now but users have signaled that the 1 day device is fine for them, notably because of the human gap.
You know the gap.
If you charge your phone every night it becomes a habit tied to your daily routine.
If you were to charge your phone every other night, you might lose track of what day you are on, not charge it and then the perceived battery life experience is worse. This is why smart watches with 3-4 days of battery have not prevailed over those with one heavy day of battery. They are annoying to know what day you are on so you might just charge it every night and if you do, the platform is trading off so much power that the experience is worse.
Plus, then you have to carry 2 days worth of battery or have half the power envelope as a laptop with one day. the concept all sounds great but the reality of people using things really has honed in on the fact that these things need to fit into habit and use cases that make sense.
Why are you assuming you need to charge a 2-day device every other day? You charge it every night, and in exchange you make it through heavy use days, late nights, and the times you forget to charge it. I had a 2-day phone and downgraded to a 1-day phone and my phone now dies on me much more often, including in each of those scenarios, and looking at the battery level and charging have become a bigger part of my life.
The Air form factor is already pushing the limit of what you can do with aluminium and still have high confidence it won't warp when you shove it into your bag, or have it fall over when you open the screen past vertical.
I could see them slimming down the battery to get more components in, maybe, rather than two day battery life.
Which would probably be the right call. There just aren't enough circumstances where not plugging in your laptop while sleeping is necessary to justify it.
Personally I'd like them to make a model with a cellular modem, with all-day battery life even reasonably far from a tower. That would be fun.
I'd expect carbon fiber reinforcement to add stiffness soon on some of these larger, ultra-slim devices. That's what we use for sports equipment, and CF+Al bonding is a well solved problem in manufacture.
Apple just increased battery life on the MacBook Pro from ~12 hours to 20 hours and kept the form factor the same. Likewise the MacBook Air. Feedback from people using them suggests gains are even bigger for people who use them on battery under load.
And they all added hardware features to fill that space. Look at the iFixit teardowns and you'll see it wasn't to make the phones thinner. It was to make room for wireless charging, LIDAR, and other features.
As much as I dislike them doing it while disregarding other aspects, we need/want slimmer. A notebook PC should be as thin as a real notebook or maybe even less. And it should be sturdy enough, after all, a 5-6 mm plate of metal is quite robust.
Currently miniLED for backlight is power hungry compared to simple edge LED. It's used for high contrast HDR. MicroLED won't available for laptop near the future.
