Comment by bronz | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bronz | Hacker News Reader

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out of all the laptops that are around right now, the xps series seems to be the closest to my fantasy -- this is due largely to their developer models which come with linux and linux supported hardware. when you say w do you mean Wh? ive heard murmurs of the legal limit for battery capacity in a laptop being 100Wh so that is very disappointing that the new xps would not even approach that anemic cap.

i was in a mall the other day and happened across a windows store. i was very pleased to see they had a range of xps laptops on display. i found them to be very attractive and well made. IIRC some of them had a power button on the side of the laptop instead of the top of the keyboard. my current laptop has a power button like this and i cannot fucking stand it. i press it by accident at least twice a day. any sane person would realize what a terrible idea that is -- it totally baffles me why they do this. its very sad to see such an obvious flaw on these otherwise great laptops.

The biggest battery capacity I've had in a laptop was 160Wh with the Thinkpad X220, I'm curious where that supposed 100Wh limit comes from.

i was watching a laptop review on linustechtips and i think he said it. this is why i said i heard it instead of stating it like fact!

e - i think that limit comes from airlines limiting the size of individual batteries they transport. https://www.faa.gov/about/office_org/headquarters_offices/as...

The whole 100W thing was, as far as I can tell, an almost completely unsupported theory advanced by a Mac blogger about why Apple doesn't put bigger batteries in their laptops. There is apparently some FAA document saying something to that effect, but of course there are lots of regulations on various books that are unenforced or unenforceable, and there have been dozens, maybe hundreds, of laptops made over the years with larger batteries, and none have ever been, to my knowledge, barred from flying.

"Lithium ion batteries (a.k.a.: rechargeable lithium, lithium polymer, LIPO, secondary lithium). Passengers may carry all consumer-sized lithium ion batteries (up to 100 watt hours per battery)"

https://www.faa.gov/about/office_org/headquarters_offices/as...

I remember seeing the link in the original blog post, so I knew it was a real thing, but I'm extremely skeptical of the theory that it has anything to do with anything.

The simple fact is that the FAA doesn't screen battery sizes. If you brought something the size of a car battery, they'd probably not allow it, but the difference between a 95WHr and a 140WHr laptop battery is something they're neither interested in nor capable of actively checking. Apple put a small battery in the laptop because it's more important to them to have a thin light laptop than it is to have more battery life. This random person unaffiliated with Apple then decided with no evidence that it was because of some basically unknown FAA document. That's all I meant.

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