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Comment by josephduffy | Hacker News Reader

I agree working in a wider range of ambient temperatures would be nice, but they do have a support article stating the temperature should be over 10°C, so I wouldn't say they've not tested it.

https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT201640

Note that the iOS devices work from above 0°C (https://support.apple.com/en-sg/HT201678) so maybe improvements will be brought to laptops too.

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> I agree working in a wider range of ambient temperatures would be nice, but they do have a support article stating the temperature should be over 10°C, so I wouldn't say they've not tested it.

Yeah, the point is 10 C is sufficient ... for California. Not necessarily for the rest of the world. I'm sure they specify some temperature range, it's just not quite enough. Besides it was left outside for 10 minutes, not hours.

To add insult to the injury, all my older Apple laptops were able to survive bouts on the balcony, and if anything, the winters were colder 10 years ago.

Discharge rate of batteries falls with temperature. 10C is a very common lower limit for high performance lion cells. There's a complex set of tradeoffs vs fundamental physical limits here. It's not at all a case of "aw shucks we forgot places other than CA exist" which is something you're just projecting onto the situation.

I had to buy a new battery for my car because despite a battery shop and the dealer saying there was nothing wrong with the battery, short trips in the car below 10C would kill it in a week.

As someone else pointed out, the dew point is not something you want to explore with personal electronics.

I don’t think you’re being entirely reasonable here. If you need a laptop that works at 3°C, don’t buy one that states it needs 10°C. If you just didn’t know, you’re presumably still in the laptop’s return window.

Fwiw, I’m in New York, and I really do think this is a reasonable operating temperature for a laptop.

I don't need a laptop that works at 3 Celsius. I need a laptop that won't completely shut down if temporarily exposed to 3 Celsius.

Well, it didn’t break or anything, it just had to warm up, right? Was the battery discharged?

I am a little surprised it didn’t hibernate. That could potentially be a software issue.

So you need a laptop whose operating range includes 3°C. How long it is exposed to 3°C doesn't matter because components can already take damage from the very moment they are cooled below the operating range.

I don't know where you live but I've spent enough winters right next to Cupertino, 20 minutes walking distance from 1 Infinite Loop to be precise, and it's not warm at all, in fact it's cold as hell without heating (not as cold as some places apparently, but still cold enough to freeze your balls off, or cause your laptop to shutdown). So no, it's chemistry at work, not "Cupertino is warm enough to not have this problem."

> Yeah, the point is 10 C is sufficient ... for California.

It is currently below 10 C at Apple’s headquarters.

Computers are generally built for indoor use, regardless of where you’re using them in the world.

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