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Comment by tluyben2 | Hacker News Reader

I would pay any amount of money for a high res, bright sun readable, 15 hour battery, i7 with 16 gb of memory. If that costs $5k I would pay it.

Edit: thinking about it; 'any amount' here, for me, would be $7k max, but I would pay that for this configuration. That makes it such a shame you cannot really expand laptops besides some ruggedized ones. They would make a base version for $1k and allow extension up to $5-6k with all the trimmings.

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There's a Panasonic SX-series ToughBook that seems like it would fit all of your demands nicely, it's available with a 12.1" 1600x900 matte display, i7-3540M, RAM upgradable up to 16 GB and up to 18 hours battery life (the larger battery has almost 100 Wh). http://www.dynamism.com/top-notebooks/panasonic-sx-series.sh...

You are right; that is exactly what I want. I saw it before and forgot about it. Thanks!

I remember my old friend saying that he could use the 'hump' battery on his think pad and it'd give him around 14 hours. But that was a 14 incher. Honestly though, I think we've got enough power in todays laptops for even casual gaming over and above office work that first priority should be battery life and second should be screen resolution keeping all other equal.

I use my laptop for building apps and games (2d games, no fancy smancy 3d stuff); gcc + xcode + eclipse (or intellij for that matter) are burning a hole in my i7 (2010 mbp with 8gb and i7). Often (I live in the mountains) I have no or bad internet, so that whole 'cloud compiling' thing won't work for me. That's why performance matters for me and all performing laptops have almost no battery life :) My mbp, during ios debugging sessions, cries for power in less than 2 hours. That's horrible. My core 2 duo 2008 with new battery makes 3.5 hours, but is too slow for a lot of work and to be honest; 3.5 hours is way too little for any serious programming session.

I'm trying to get my consumption pattern down while programming by using more scripting languages (like Lua) so I don't have to compile, can do repl/live coding which seems to be nicer for battery than compiling the whole shebang.

If any devs have ideas how to make this more efficient. If I would be able to work more efficiently (which I now have been using Lua), I can buy an ARM laptop / hybrid like the Transformer prime and do most of my work on that, only going to a higher performance machine for asset (sound/gfx) creation.

I wrote a game solely on the openpandora using lua; it was actually quite a nice experience despite the tiny screen. And that thing actually does over 10 hours with one charge.

I program almost exclusively on my chromebook, with an oldish amd64 atom processor. I program almost exclusively in Go using vim. Vim is very low cpu usage and I would expect that to get you pretty far. Go is very sweet here because it has a fast, and very efficient, compiler which produces fast, and very efficient, code. All of these together might extend the battery life of your laptop. I have no experimental evidence for this though :) Go also compiles to ARM pretty well as I understand. Could be a good'un.

You can get such notebook right now (only without sun readable) with additional sheet-battery, like this: https://store.sony.com/p/Z-Series-Battery/en/p/VGPBPSC27

The problem will be it's weight.

It says not available, but I see what you mean; I did not know the Z series. But it seems low res still. 1080p is the minimum once you get use to it. But thanks for posting this because it definitely makes me aware that besides searching shallow specs I need to dig deeper into the accessories. I just imagined everyone would be as obsessed with battery life as me and so that would be the sales argument :)

The Z can have a 1080p screen if you want. It's also an extremely light laptop as is, so I think adding the extra battery won't make it all that heavy.

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