3 comments

  • johndoe081519 hours ago
    &quot;With watts, you can tell how much literal power is under the hood — how much energy is provided by your battery [...]&quot;.<p>Ouch.
  • perilunar16 hours ago
    &gt; &quot;At its most basic, the watt is a measure of work. It’s the amount of energy it takes to do something at a particular speed.&quot;<p>Oh dear. This article is full of confusion between energy and power.<p>But I agree that batteries should list total <i>energy</i>. Just list the voltage, energy (in Wh or J) and the max power output (W).
    • VogonPoetry16 hours ago
      Yes, totally agree. Also a paragraph on the relationship between energy, heat, cooling and that computers effectively turn all energy into heat might have been useful.<p>The April 1st date on the article is telling.<p>Shout out to &quot;Technology Connections&quot; YouTube channel for recently publishing &quot;Power is not energy&quot; - &lt;<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=OOK5xkFijPc" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=OOK5xkFijPc</a>&gt;.
  • JohnFen19 hours ago
    Yep, this has been a pet peeve of mine for a very long time.
    • Numerlor19 hours ago
      While more informative on its own, it&#x27;s still kind of useless with the wide variance of power usage across models.<p>Laptops use Wh but you still need to do the same research as you would have if it was in mAh (ignoring the 100Wh max for planes that you&#x27;d have to calculate yourself)
      • crote17 hours ago
        The problem is that mAh tells you absolutely <i>nothing</i> about battery capacity. An mAh rating is useful if you&#x27;re comparing two single-cell batteries using the same chemistry - but that&#x27;s not what we are doing in practice.<p>For example, a 100Wh battery could be built using a single li-ion cell, which means it would be 27,000mAh. Same battery using an LFP cell? 31.250mAh. But wait, it&#x27;s a laptop - it&#x27;s far more efficient to put multiple cells in series. Four li-ion cells in series would mean a capacity of 675mAh, or 540mAh if you use five cells.<p>The five-cell one is probably more efficient, but if you blindly look at the mAh rating it looks like it has a significantly smaller capacity. Nobody is going to buy that, so the marketing team will convert it back to &quot;single-cell equivalent&quot; and put 27,000mAh on the box <i>while still keeping an 18.5V rating</i>, and people who passed a highschool physics class are going to think it&#x27;s a 500Wh battery.<p>It gets even worse with LFP, because now the marketing team is asking you to convert it to &quot;single-sell li-ion equivalent&quot; and the figure is now <i>completely unrelated</i> to what&#x27;s actually happening! That 520mAh 6-cell LFP battery? Just put a 27,000mAh label on it: who cares, bigger is better.