Not too long ago, if you went out in the market looking for a new laptop, the blue shirts would try to sell you their wares by extolling the virtues of the CPU and RAM speeds. Not anymore – all everyone really talks about these days is how long the battery lasts. General wisdom in the industry suggests that consumers are somehow willing to pay more $ for a laptop that lasts 8hrs than the one that lasts 4hrs.
You see, with a few OEM vendors providing similar hardware to most PC vendors globally, hardware is no longer a differentiator as it used to be. Hence, the PC vendors need to create a unique value proposition in the mind of the consumers. Consumers love to use to word ‘mobility’, never mind if they don’t understand even an iota of it. Through repeated ad campaigns, we’ve been convinced by the marketers that all we want out of our PCs today is mobility – that’s all that matters. A perfect example of this is the success of a new category called netbooks or mini notebooks. However, the increasing focus on battery life (this is my definition of mobility – the amt of hrs I can be away from my friendly power port while using the machine) has led to a lot of discrepancies in the way the battery life is reported to us, the final users.
One of the typical issues is the battery autonomy number reported by PC vendors. These days, one can find a lot of laptops that claim to last for 8hrs on a single charge (some even more). Happily, you start using the machine and just after 2-3hrs of normal usage, you suddenly realize that your laptop is screaming for power. What happened to the 8hr claim, you’re left wondering. And this is wherein lies the root of the whole argument.
Most vendors use the Mobile Mark 2007 battery testing software that warrants the laptop to run at 20% display brightness, WiFi off and no applications running (duh!!!). Any person who uses a laptop today knows a thing or two about ‘multi-tasking’ – we like to listen to music on iTunes while surfing the Web and doing a bit here and there on the Excel too. MM’07 ensures your prized possession won’t be much more than a glorified paper weight, but THIS IS HOW MOST VENDORS REPORT THEIR BATTERY NUMBERS!!!
The reason why I was tempted to pick this issue is that just recently, I came across a PC vendor that claimed an insane number for its battery – something that was totally off the charts. AMD has raised this issue a couple of times in the past, claiming that such tests handover unfair advantage to Intel since MM’07 works better with Intel chips (Intel chip logic puts it to sleep when not utilized, something AMD chips don’t do).
So what does a typical consumer do in such cases? Unfortunately, there seems to be no solution on the horizon as of now. Some companies use typical user cases to define their battery longevity (i.e. up to 5hrs video, 15hrs music, 10hrs of web surfing over WiFi). However, until the entire PC industry agrees to adopt a uniform battery benchmark, the ‘all day’ batteries will continue to flourish.
All hail the marketer!!!
I cannot agree more. I as a buyer if I am looking for laptops I would check for battery life. Infact when I bought my laptop this was one of the things I compared amongst different products. And have paid more $$ on this but have not got a good return for my money.
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