this post was submitted on 09 Jul 2024
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[–] fuckwit_mcbumcrumble@lemmy.dbzer0.com 244 points 3 months ago (12 children)

Who'da thunk, battery life sells battery powered devices.

[–] unmagical@lemmy.ml 119 points 3 months ago (4 children)

So let's keep making phones thinner and thinner while simultaneously growing the camera bump instead of making a flat profile with, say, 2 days of life!

[–] bamboo@lemm.ee 22 points 3 months ago (7 children)

So on one hand, I agree with you. On the other hand, I think lightness is a thing people care about. I recently needed to get some photos backed up off an old phone of mine, and I didn’t realize how heavy my current one is until I picked up my old one. Thinness is irrelevant, but a 50% weight difference is not. Other than that, I don’t think most people get much utility out of more than a day of battery life, so 1.5 days new degrading down to 1 seems reasonable and in line with what most people want.

[–] mannycalavera@feddit.uk 11 points 3 months ago

Ask them about the lack of a headphone jack 😉.

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[–] sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 11 points 3 months ago

Exactly. I really liked my old phone, the Moto G Power, which:

  • had no camera bump
  • had 2+ days battery life
  • was pretty affordable (I think it was $250 new?)

I still have it for stuff around the house (gets like 3-4 days w/o the SIM), and I would totally still be using it as my main phone if it still got security updates. The screen is a little larger than I want, but it has been a solid phone for me.

I got a Pixel 8 mostly because of the longer software support and GrapheneOS support, and I honestly don't care about the camera, and the big bump is pretty annoying. I really wish I could just have my Moto G Power w/ a small screen and longer software support. In fact, I'd totally use a Pinephone if it had reliable calls and texts, better battery life, and better audio quality. I really don't need much, I just need a phone that will keep working for years and not need to be recharged throughout the day...

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[–] RamblingPanda@lemmynsfw.com 42 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I personally like it, when my devices die in the middle of a sente...

[–] BaroqueInMind@lemmy.one 38 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (3 children)

Looks like you had plenty of time to complete it since you took the time to type out the ellipses. If only you had wri

[–] WindyRebel@lemmy.world 4 points 3 months ago

Here you are thinking it was the device when it was actually the robot that malfunctioned over the period and then lost battery.

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[–] shalafi@lemmy.world 10 points 3 months ago (3 children)

My phone has a 22000mAh battery. I never consider charging it unless I'm going to the woods overnight, and then only to be sure I have a power bank.

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[–] ShittyBeatlesFCPres@lemmy.world 110 points 3 months ago (3 children)

Copilot+ is a reason not to buy one of those laptops. It’s a privacy and security nightmare.

[–] morbidcactus@lemmy.ca 19 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (12 children)

Pretending it's not locked down like the og surface arm devices, I'd consider getting one and totally drop some flavour of linux on it, 3:2 is a great aspect ratio for laptops.

Otherwise yeah, I wouldn't go anywhere near it

Edit: apparently I don't need to pretend, this hasn't been an issue for a while so that's actually great

[–] Telodzrum@lemmy.world 24 points 3 months ago (3 children)

They're BIOS locked and only accept Windows keys. On the plus side. Tuxedo is developing Linux notebooks with the same powerful, low-power ARM chips.

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[–] mrvictory1@lemmy.world 7 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

It is not bootloader locked, Linux support is WIP

EDIT: Source here https://www.reddit.com/r/SurfaceLinux/comments/1dnu5nw/comment/ladiom2/?context=3

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[–] bdonvr@thelemmy.club 9 points 3 months ago (6 children)

Is it that different than standard Windows? Either way I'm just hyped that it seems the age of ARM desktops is upon us, I definitely won't be using any "Copilot+" branded OS though.

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[–] bamboo@lemm.ee 6 points 3 months ago

Linux support should be here soon

[–] pycorax@lemmy.world 104 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Is this really a surprise to anyone outside of the AI hype machine?

[–] neshura@bookwormstory.social 26 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Not really no, it also likely isn't a surprise to the engineers and project managers working on these products. Which is likely exactly why they have standout battery life: the project managers knew AI wouldn't sell so they made the laptops appealing via conventional means anyway.

[–] themurphy@lemmy.ml 6 points 3 months ago (4 children)

The project manager wouldn't have a say in battery life, as it's really just because of the ARM chip.

And I don't think anyone thinks Copilot is good in its current form, AI hype or not. It feels like a web app with no real control over the machine.

[–] pycorax@lemmy.world 11 points 3 months ago (1 children)

It's a common misconception but ARM isn't inherently better at battery life than x86 though. It's more that Qualcomm's designs are as compared to the companies on the market that produce x86 hardware.

[–] balder1991@lemmy.world 6 points 3 months ago (1 children)

TIL, I did some research because of your comment and indeed, the difference in their use cases is mostly a market thing, not so much a limitation of each one. This answer is particularly good at explaining that.

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[–] MonkderDritte@feddit.de 4 points 3 months ago

Ah no, more battery life isn't because of the ARM chip. Not with general usage, outside of minimal instruction set use.

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[–] MyOpinion@lemm.ee 55 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I turn everything that mentions Copilot off. I don't need this crap and I never asked for it to be made.

[–] Ashe@lemmy.blahaj.zone 6 points 3 months ago

My company hired an AI person and I was sure to tell him I stripped the registry values from my computer. I'm an admin sooo

[–] maxinstuff@lemmy.world 46 points 3 months ago (5 children)

Linux support also appears to be coming along nicely (though not ready yet).

[–] woelkchen@lemmy.world 21 points 3 months ago (2 children)

Linux support also appears to be coming along nicely (though not ready yet).

Linux, as in kernel: Yes. Qualcomm doesn't develop FOSS GPU drivers, though. freedreno only supports older Adreno GPUs.

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[–] Tronn4@lemmy.world 36 points 3 months ago (5 children)

I spent a good 20 minutes trying to remove copilot from my windows 10 machine last night. It embedded itself into the taskbar, the edge explorer, and I finally had to go into system components to disable it. No doubt there will be another ms update that will revert all these settings again

[–] knightly@pawb.social 19 points 3 months ago (1 children)

At some point you have to ask yourself if it would be less hassle to switch now or to try and tough it out until Windows becomes unbearable.

[–] floofloof@lemmy.ca 6 points 3 months ago

Windows is already pretty unbearable.

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[–] EnderWiggin@lemmy.world 25 points 3 months ago (3 children)

I feel like narrow AI tools duped me for a while, but the more I started to really use Chat GPT professionally, the more I've likened it to professional mimicking software. It essentially works to pyt out responses that sound the most convincing but have nothing to do with putting out responses that are actually at all accurate. These are terrible tools outside of asking basic questions, idea generation, and generally summarizing existing information you feed into it. I use it to help me make lists and better phrase emails and company messages at this point and nothing that actually requires any actual fact finding.

[–] GamingChairModel@lemmy.world 10 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Professional bullshit artists, in the sense of the technical definition given by Harry Frankfurt in his influential book:

Frankfurt determines that bullshit is speech intended to persuade without regard for truth. The liar cares about the truth and attempts to hide it; the bullshitter doesn't care whether what they say is true or false.

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[–] gh0stcassette@lemmy.blahaj.zone 7 points 3 months ago

It's a good troubleshooting tool. Pasting in weird error messages that don't turn up any useful search results is pretty useful, even if the response it gives is partially inaccurate, it usually at least gives a bit more information than a search engine, which gives me more context to narrow my search terms and find a solution to the error.

It's especially useful for learning Nix, since the online documentation is a bit shit and ChatGPT seems to have enough grasp on the Nix language and how to configure things in NixOS to tell me what I'm doing wrong.

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[–] atocci@lemmy.world 18 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

I got the Surface Pro X a few years ago purely for battery life, performance be damned. Great decision, and it fit my use-case perfectly. Maybe a little too perfectly for Qualcomm, because I have no reason to upgrade to something more performant when all I cared about was the battery life.

Edit: This recent push towards Windows on ARM is also benefiting these old WOA devices. Programs that would barely run before (because they were compiled for x86 and had to be emulated on a chip that could hardly handle all that extra overhead) are now getting native ARM version releases that run way better. In my experience, my Pro X's performance has effectively been improving as time goes on, so I have even less of a reason to get anything new.

[–] skooma_king@lemm.ee 14 points 3 months ago (2 children)

I have actually come to prefer using AI instead of a search engine at work for most things sysadmin related (using DuckDuckGo’s AI chat feature), but I 100% have found that Copilot performs far worse than competing products. Having it that engrained in the computer is a very negative feature, despite the battery improvements.

[–] TechNerdWizard42@lemmy.world 9 points 3 months ago (4 children)

Copilot sucks. Gemeni is a sassy teenager. Chatgpt 4o is actually halfway decent. When they announced Gemeni had a million context tokens, that was awesome. But it can't give coherent output to save its life. Useless.

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[–] floofloof@lemmy.ca 6 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

The Copilot in Windows and in Bing is quite bad, but the Github Copilot seems better. If you know of a clearly better one for programming I'm interested in trying things out.

[–] tal 12 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

I know how Microsoft can increase battery life by between roughly 50%-100%, depending on model.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/surface/devices/surface-laptop-7th-edition

Battery capacities34

Surface Laptop 13.8”: Battery Capacity Nominal (Wh) 54 Battery Capacity Min (Wh) 52

Surface Laptop 15”: Battery Capacity Nominal (Wh) 66 Battery Capacity Min (Wh) 64

Offer a 100 Wh battery.

[–] bitwolf@lemmy.one 8 points 3 months ago

That tracks, AI is somehow twice as annoying as nfts and I've been dying for a decent ARM / RISC-V Linux laptop.

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