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Comment by cpr | Hacker News Reader

Damn, I miss my old “lunch tray” 17” MBP...

I never heard a good reason for cancelling that model. Presumably with modern hardware they could be much more portable now. Imagine how much battery life they could get if they had a 17” with one of the low power cpus and just fit it with the largest battery they could?

It looks bulky and unwieldy, and Apple doesn't want their logo on anything that unsexy.

The practical limit for battery capacity is 100 Wh; beyond that you need airline approval to travel with it. Apple's 17" Unibody MBP had a 95 Wh battery, and when that was discontinued the 15" rMBP offered 95 or 99.5 Wh until the Touchbar was added. If Apple were to reintroduce a 17" model, it could only offer 19% higher battery capacity than the current 15", which means it probably couldn't offer any better battery life.

I'd rather just see the 15" rMBP get a bit thicker so that it can have more variety of I/O and stay at the ceiling for battery capacity.

The practical limit for battery capacity is 100 Wh; beyond that you need airline approval to travel with it.

Does that also apply if it’s two batteries, both physically removable, from the outside? Just curious. SWMBO and I travel with can lights for diving, big batteries but none individually over the limit.

apple could never "regress" to user replaceable batteries unless ive retires/is replaced.their design culture would not allow it

Yeah, it’s per battery. I usually carry two nearly 100wh battery banks. Never a problem. I imagine 100wh limit is what they’ve determined they can contain if it catches fire. I believe they also offer exemptions for slightly more with airline approval.

Seems to be you can carry max 15 devices with built-in 100Wh battery and 20 extra 100Wh batteries. Larger batteries require approval.

https://www.iata.org/whatwedo/cargo/dgr/Documents/passenger-...

Btw, newer Lenovo T4x0 models have a very nice dual-battery configuration, which allows you to swap the battery without shutting down.

It is Apple, so they weren't selling well so they dropped it.

...which is what I’d do if I ran the company. Wouldn’t you?

(Ex-MBP 17”-er here.)

By that logic, the iPhone is on its way out and the SE back into production.

How did you reach that conclusion? The large phones sell better than the small phones.

As it happens, I’m also an SE owner who is devastated that it has been discontinued. I love my small phone, but it seems that I’m in a minority.

Numerous articles discussing the new models vastly underperforming estimates and expected sales volumes. Meanwhile, when the SE launched it sold very well. I think they’d have a similar success with an SE2 given those two factors and the age of the SE. I doubt the factors that led people to purchase the SE have changed toward the negative in that time.

Your statement implies that you believe that Apple are making larger phones which don’t sell as well, and that they know that smaller phones would sell in greater volume but are choosing not to do that.

This is patently absurd.

I had the first 17" Powerbook G4. I miss it so much. My favorite laptop ever. Even better than my Thinkpad 600e and 600x.

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