Maybe my favorite thing of all from Monday’s event was the ingenious battery tech Apple used in the new MacBook.
Timothy B. Lee, writing for Vox about this image:
When you crack open the laptop’s case, most of the space is taken up by its battery. Or, more accurately, batteries — plural. The irregular brown rectangles in the laptop’s four corners, as well as the big one in the middle, are all batteries. The device’s logic board — the brains of the laptop — is at the top. At the bottom of the image you can see the underside of the trackpad.
That logic board is tiny, Moore’s law at work. But batteries follow no such law. So Apple figured out how to break them into pieces to better fit into every nook and cranny of the MacBook case, all while leaving them connected as a single functional unit. Incredible.
In the MacWorld article about USB-C Shawn’s post links to one of the photo captions says that “ports-wise” the new MacBook is closer to the iPad than a MacPro. Looking at that logic board, I’d say it’s pretty close to an iPhone as well.
Exactly. They learned everything they need know about making that logic board from the iPhone and iPad. In fact, they could probably go smaller if they didn’t have to manage so much power for the larger screen.
That is indeed a lot of battery. And not a lot of logic board. Interesting.
Ingenious design… but I was hoping for a little more battery life for such a low wattage CPU. Its rated as equal to 11″ MBA which is pretty good.. but shame they couldn’t push a few hours more.
Also… not sure how the next model will get much better battery life as the CPU won’t get more efficient… so I guess that leaves small gains from other system components and the screen.
I used to think that Apple would be forced to switch their low-end laptops to ARM-based SoCs. But it looks like Intel has eliminated much of the power-hogging and space heating effects of their mobile CPUs.
But just imagine how much thinner and lighter the MacBook (and all mobile devices) could be if and when some new high-density battery technology is developed.
They’ve been using similar heterogeneous cell battery packs for a while now. The 2012 rMBP has one. The main difference I can see is that the individual cells in this laptop don’t have uniform shapes, with those odd angles cut out of them.
I’m surprised that a 3 or 4-core A8X wasn’t used. They can go to 1.5GHZ.
“It’s a fairly naive comparison, but it’s worth pointing out that the A8X now has a Geekbench score that is very close to a dual-core Core i5-4250U — the Haswell chip that’s inside the mid-2013 13-inch MacBook Air. The A8X CPU manages single- and multi-threaded scores of 1812 and 4477 — while the Core i5-4250U is at 2281 and 4519. Geekbench isn’t representative of the full laptop or PC usage experience — but at the very least, it means that web browsing on the iPad Air 2 is now as fast as a modern laptop.”
http://www.extremetech.com/computing/192628-the-ipad-air-2-with-a-tri-core-cpu-is-almost-as-fast-as-a-modern-pc