Let's talk batteries - why does apple get higher density batteries?

[Irenicus]

I am still impressed by what apple achieved with the latest macbook air, but I am not a mac person and want to see that kind of result in a 15" windows notebook.


And there is the issue. Even new haswell based windows notebooks on the market, with significantly bulkier casings and weight, has around .5-.7 ish of the new macbook air battery life.


I looked up the wh of some of these new notebooks and it seems that many manufacturers are putting 44wh batteries in the 15" chassis (AFTER removing the cd drive on top of the rest by the way).


I get it, those batteries are cheaper, so if we get a more efficient intel chip, lets reduce the money spent on the battery for similar results.


But where are the higher end windows notebooks with high density batteries like the macbook air?


they fit a 54 wh battery in the new 13" macbook air, and there are companies with 15" chassis out there with triple the volume and double the weight, that can only bother with a 44wh battery?


where is the 80wh battery? 91wh battery?

I've only seen ONE case of the latter and that was the sandy bridge samsung series 7 chronos.



Are apple and samsung the only companies with access to top level battery tech? Or is this just an issue of economics?


I want a windows based 15" notebook, sans cd drive, that can comfortably get over 10 hours.


Where is it?


even the similarly sized notebooks FAIL miserably on battery life on windows machines.

Look at the battery results here

http://www.theverge.com/2013/8/20/4636510/acer-aspire-s7-review-2013


costs more than the new air, and has HALF the battery life. What is going on?

 

[ElFenix]

part of apple's battery life superiority is that apple's OS is more closely tailored to the hardware. knowing the exact functionality of the hardware the OS is going on allows apple to eke far more gains out of power management. throw windows on a mac and the batery life tumbles. next up, the air has an inferior screen to the acer (in particular). the S7 crams in more pixels, it also needs a brighter backlight than the air just to result in the same brightness up front. which means higher power consumption. apple doesn't use an IPS panel, which again, would take more power.

further, the verge's battery life test isn't repeatable between models because they set brightness to 65%. 65% is going to be different from laptop to laptop.

 

[sheh]

I'm pretty sure you can find non-Apple 15 inchers with decent batteries. I can't point to specific models, but I recently got a basic 15" ASUS which has 50Wh in 2.4kg (including DVD-R). Surely some higher specced models would feature better batteries.