

Air Battery Would Last 2.5s on Machine with 1990's Efficiency - allanca
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/09/if-a-macbook-air-were-as-efficient-as-a-1991-computer-the-battery-would-last-25-seconds/245041/

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Bud
Um, I doubt this, very very much.

The Air has a 50 W/h battery. That's 50W for a full hour. So if they are
saying that it would last 2.5 seconds, that means the putative 1990s computer
would have to consume 60 x 24 x 50 = 72,000 Watts!

Someone at the Atlantic needs to figure out basic math.

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roc
I read it to mean they were factoring in the computing power as well.

i.e. they estimated that it would take 72,000 Watts-worth of 1990s computers
to match the processing power of a Macbook Air.

Though that does add further caveats to an already less-than-ideal comparison
(as an MBA is not going to last seven hours at 100% CPU load).

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davidw
Sounds like they ought to mention how long that is in football fields.

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laconian
If you placed all the iPhones in the world end to end on a line, some of them
would be in the ocean.

There, I wrote about iPhones. Now give me my ad revenue.

~~~
qq66
How many iPhones in the world? If I guessed about 100 million that would be
about 8000 miles, which wouldn't necessarily be in the ocean if you started
the line in Europe and cut across Russia/Eurasia.

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beej71
I'd chuck mine in the ocean just to make it true.

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bryanlarsen
A counterpoint: the Air still does not match the battery life of a TRS-80
Model 100 from 1983: 20 hours on 4 AA batteries.

A Model 100 was pretty much the opposite of the iPad: great for creative
activities (writing, taking notes, programming) but poor for consumption
activities.

~~~
ugh
Writing is important – but not everything.

~~~
flamingbuffalo
exactly. I've posted this before, but: "if a person can't produce something on
an ipad that's a reflection of the user, not the device."

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ars
Can I produce a program for iPads on an iPad?

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shawndumas
do web apps for iPad count? (see textastic)

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bonaldi
so if someone could make a 68030 as efficient as an i5, I could have a
PowerBook 170 that would run for a week on a charge? Yes, please _.

(_ I'll need someone to knock up a Twitter reading client in MPW too, pls)

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phil
Heck, why not go even further back?

<http://atomsandelectrons.com/blog/2010/04/apple-t/>

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modeless
This is just another way of stating Moore's law. Chip transistor count doubles
every year and a half; chip power use doesn't.

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skeletonjelly
Oh Macbook Air. For some reason my tired brain kept thinking about what an Air
Battery would look like.

~~~
ghshephard
Something like this: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f2a3uTU0fgc>

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skeletonjelly
Wow. It exists! Thanks.

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ck2
If only battery technology had kept up with computing technology.

We'd definitely all be driving electric cars today if that happened.

The best (commercial) batteries today are only a few times better than the
ones used in electric cars 100 years ago.

~~~
eru
I've read the rate of improvement for batteries is around 8% a year. That's
still exponential, just not as good as transistor count. But nothing else
improves that fast.

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rnernento
Makes sense to me. If they calculated that in 1990 it took x watts to generate
y processing power by now x has gone wayyyy down if y remains the same. They
don't have the best documentation but it doesn't seem unreasonable.

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keeperofdakeys
Here is an older, portable Macintosh with more (claimed) battery life than
most of the modern Macs.

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gGwVTq_xcZk>

