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AMD — "We're Not Entirely Honest" About Batteries 154

Posted by CmdrTaco from the big-shocker-here dept.
Slatterz writes "In an apparent attack of the bleeding-obvious, an AMD rep has come clean and admitted (on behalf of the industry) that notebook and phone battery life figures are completely unreliable. AMD's senior vice president Nigel Dessau says that 'we are not being entirely honest with users about what PC battery life they can expect to actually experience.' He says AMD will now use a combination of idle time (where the machine is left to sit idle, and timed to see how long it takes for the battery to go dead), and 3DMark06 to measure battery life. Great in theory but some of the industry already bases battery figures on a two-test measurement, and the results are still wildly inaccurate."
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AMD — "We're Not Entirely Honest" About Batteries More

AMD — "We're Not Entirely Honest" About Batteries

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  • Isn't this simple? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by AlterRNow ( 1215236 ) on Monday March 16, 2009 @11:08AM (#27210465)

    1) Fully load the machine
    2) Time until battery death
    3) Advertise "minimum" battery life

    What is wrong with that? Then I can expect at least 40 minutes of battery life and anything more than that is nice. You will generally not be fully loading the machine so it will always be more than 40 minutes anyway..

    • This would be the most honest approach - everyone could apply their own estimate of improvement over that. However, marketing demands a, shall we say, more nuanced description of capability.

    • Re:Isn't this simple? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Vectronic ( 1221470 ) on Monday March 16, 2009 @11:17AM (#27210621)

      No it won't... not all batteries are exactly the same, no matter how good the quality assurance may be, and same goes for the hardware itself, every transistor, capacitor, resistor, transformer, etc all have varying degrees of quality/conduction/capacity.

      It could even come down to a single resistor that measures the battery output, could be slightly faulty, and turn the PC off sooner.

      They could still say "40 minutes" but it would be more like "32 to 48"... other things come into play as well, such as the temperature/altitude/humidity... how much dust is in/on the heatsinks/vents, or possibly a fault in the charger... the list goes on...

      • It could even come down to a single resistor that measures the battery output, could be slightly faulty, and turn the PC off sooner.

        Then the laptop is defective and should be sent in for repair/replacement :) I know that there is some variance ( there always is ) but isn't the metric simply more reliable because of the universal way of testing it ( loading the machine/battery fully ) then some "average" which differs depending on how the manufacturer determines "average"? After all, if you suspend-to-ram, the battery life averages in the tens of hours and on average, that might be the state the laptop is in.

        • ...then some "average" which differs depending on how the manufacturer determines "average"?

          Isn't that what AMD has been doing? "...depending on how the manufacturer determines"... in this case, determining it to be longer than it actually is.

          You could even test, and then claim for each individual battery, and put a sticker on it "[This battery lasted 3.798 Hours in our test]" and chances are very high that when that user uses it, they won't see the same time span, maybe 3.274 hours... you could test every battery, in every computer, which would be more accurate, but still have variance, for inst

    • I'd prefer to see min and max times. Max being light productivity app usage and min being playing a game that utilizes the GPU heavily.

      Consumers will see the 2 numbers and can quickly decide if the performance meets their needs based on how they intend to use the laptop. Consumers are smarter than the average monkey. If they see a laptop advertised as "Battery Life: 45 Minutes - 2.5 Hours", they can guess what might affect battery consumption.

      • You don't know many consumers, do you? The vast majority of consumers think that brighter and more saturated colors on a TV means that it's a better picture. Just like the recent study of people preferring the sound of mp3's to CD's. The squashed, over-loud sound of an mp3 is not "better" in any metric than a CD, but it's what people are used to, and people don't like change.

    • Now try that with every battery off your line, and you have the minimum that you'll advertise. 6 months after selling those machines, the minimum will be even lower because batteries degrade. So maybe you advertise that figure?

      And of course, that figure will be something like 10 minutes, which still doesn't give you any kind of an idea of how much time I can reasonably expect my laptop to work off of battery power doing reasonable things.

      To be honest, I think they key thing should be that it's standard

    • Re:Isn't this simple? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Chris Burke ( 6130 ) on Monday March 16, 2009 @11:29AM (#27210865) Homepage

      3) Advertise "minimum" battery life

      What is wrong with that? Then I can expect at least 40 minutes of battery life and anything more than that is nice.

      What's wrong with that? What's wrong is that you're telling the customer a number that by and large they aren't interested in. What they want to know is if they can watch a full DVD without recharging. If they can work on their Excel spreadsheet for the entire 6-hour cross-country flight if the plane doesn't have plugs. You tell them "minimum 40 minutes" and they say "Whoa! That's not long enough to do anything!" and you say "Well it's just the minimum, under typical usage conditions it will last much longer," and then they ask "And how long is typical? Long enough to watch Casino Royale on BluRay?"

      What's your answer? Hypothetically you should be able to actually say whether it'll last long enough to watch the movie, but how do you answer that question in general? What is "typical"? That's what people really want to know, the minimum number doesn't really do them much good except to say that if they really load down the laptop, it won't last long. Which makes the product look bad, and is still by and large not that helpful.

      It's not an easy question, more difficult in many ways than talking about performance. Considering that power has only become a major concern for commodity chip makers in recent times, I'm not surprised that their battery life estimates aren't very accurate. Of course, whatever estimate they do use, no matter how accurate, will be measured in a way that makes their parts look good. That won't change, ever. I'm sure that's part of your motivation for the minimum time metric -- there are far fewer ways to screw with it. Which is nice, but not sufficient by itself.

      • "Well it's just the minimum, under typical usage conditions it will last much longer"

        Incorrect. I would respond, "That is the minimum time under the heaviest possible load it can be put under."

        Typical - Hard to pin down because everyone's usage differs for various reasons ( operating system, time of day, intended usage )
        Fully loaded - Nearly constant

        I'd like to kindly point you to my initial post where I quite clearly said "fully load" and not "typical load"..

        • Re:Isn't this simple? (Score:4, Insightful)

          by Chris Burke ( 6130 ) on Monday March 16, 2009 @12:13PM (#27211643) Homepage

          Incorrect. I would respond, "That is the minimum time under the heaviest possible load it can be put under."

          And they'd say "Okay, is playing a DVD the heaviest possible load, so I couldn't even play half of one movie? Or will I be able to play my movie? What about working on my earnings report?" and then you either have to refuse to give them any other number and lose the sale, or start talking about "typical" usage.

          I'd like to kindly point you to my initial post where I quite clearly said "fully load" and not "typical load"..

          Yes, I noticed, and I'd like to point you to my post where I clearly understood what you are talking about and said "That isn't very useful to the customer". Just because the minimum battery life has the useful property of being easier to quantify without hand-waving and assumptions doesn't mean it's actually the more useful number. Customers want to know if their lap top will last on a cross-country flight doing what it is they usually do.

          • I fully load my machine during cross-country flights, you insensitive clod!

            Ahem, meme's aside..

            1) If a customer doesn't know how much load playing a DVD is, they don't care about advertised battery life.
            2) Minimum is a more useful number because it always applies. Typical usage figures can be plucked out of thin air because it varies too much.

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by AK Marc ( 707885 )
              1) If a customer doesn't know how much load playing a DVD is, they don't care about advertised battery life.

              They know exactly how long a DVD is. It's often printed on the outside of the box. The issue isn't they they don't know how long the DVD is, but that they don't know what reources it takes to play one. Is that "full load" and if not, how long should the battery last?

              2) Minimum is a more useful number because it always applies. Typical usage figures can be plucked out of thin air because it vari

            • Re:Isn't this simple? (Score:5, Insightful)

              by Chris Burke ( 6130 ) on Monday March 16, 2009 @12:55PM (#27212395) Homepage

              1) If a customer doesn't know how much load playing a DVD is, they don't care about advertised battery life.

              O_o Seriously?

              You think knowing the % CPU utilization of watching a DVD (or BluRay, if this makes you feel better) is a pre-requisite to caring about the question "Will my laptop be able to play a full DVD between recharges?"

              And I suppose anyone who doesn't know engine timings and torque curves wouldn't care about the question "Can I get to Grandma's house without refueling" too. That's weird, because I care about MPG but know very little about the engine physics that inform it. Should they scrap the "city/highway" MPG usage models, and instead tell you what MPG you'd get with the accelerator floored the entire way?

              You're being ridiculous. Obviously people will care about being able to do the things they want to do without knowing exactly how much load on the system that actually entails.

              Of course, even if I accept this premise, you're still not giving them the information they want. Okay, so I know that the fully loaded laptop life time is 40 minutes, and I know that my DVD player uses 5% of my processor. Now what? What's the scaling factor so I can do the math? Oh right it's not that easy, even if you're an electrical engineer. I know what it is you said I should know, and you still can't answer the question I care about.

              2) Minimum is a more useful number because it always applies. Typical usage figures can be plucked out of thin air because it varies too much.

              Easy to figure out is not the same as useful. Minimum is rarely useful because it rarely applies to what the person is actually doing. When the "typical" numbers can be 6x higher than "minimum", and what people really care about is "typical" for all the difficulty of defining what that means, then no minimum isn't that useful.

              Sure the minimum should be specified. That does not get you out of the tricky problem of estimating 'typical' battery life, because that is what the customer wants to know, and for good reason. If you refuse to give them anything more useful than minimum, then you lose sales because you can't or won't answer the questions they care about.

            • The real problem is the customer will NOT know how much load a DVD is on any given system. There are too many unanswered questions even for that. Does this DVD player software process the video with the CPU or with graphics hardware? How well do the power management features on the optical drive deal with a constant low load, it it spinning down then constantly having to be spun-up? Does constant low load hamstring the OS power management system. Is the DRM rootkit trying to phone home using the Wifi c
        • They really should put out "common tasks" metrics:

          (Margin of error = +/- 5 minutes)
          FULL LOAD (minimum runtime): 40 minutes
          Idle: 5 hours
          Blue Ray play time: 3 hours
          Video Games (100% GPU, 75% CPU (or whatever standard metrics are agreed on)): 90 minutes

          With some standard like the above, and presenting it to the user without a wildly inaccurate answer of hours for "typical use," the user can review it and get a feel for the general amount of time it will run without feeling like they've been given a pr

        • The usefulness can actually be heavily limited. Nvidia and Intel, respectively the largest manufacturers of GPUs and CPUs both have horrible idle-power draws. An Nvidia GPU will typically pull over half of load watts while idle, and intel's processors generally just under half at idle. Pair that with one of the horribly inefficient northbridges from either intel or nvidia and you have a system that together actually uses a good bit more than half of full load at idle. Considering that even moderate usag

      • So you give min/max/medium load and you define medium load as something like displaying the 480p stream from Netflix over a WPA encrypted Wifi connection. Something with a few power-intensive operations going and relatively constant processor and graphics stress.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by crossmr ( 957846 )

        Actually its quite simple you need to test and advertise the following:
        1)Minimum battery life under full load
        2)Minimum battery life under full load after 1 year
        3)Maximum battery life at idle
        4)Maximum battery life at idle after 1 year
        5)Maximum battery life watching a DVD (disc)
        6)Maximum battery life watching a DVD (disc) after 1 year

        Someone should create some kind of class action lawsuit on this based on some truth in advertising legislation. Something that would force companies to report these kinds of sta

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Eivind ( 15695 )

        Batteries aren't good enough, is the main problem. (or power-drain is too high, take your pick).

        A Nintendo-DS can be played continously for around 20 hours before the battery is dead. At which point it just doesn't matter very much, because it's "atleast a complete day" no matter what you do. (let's assume that the sum of sleeping, eating and such is atleast 4 hours a day!)

        2 - 5 hours or something, which is what many laptops get, is just too sucky. It basically means you *cannot* reasonably expect to extens

    • 1) Fully load the machine

      How? You've got, at a minimum, CPU, GPU, display, and disk. How do you continuously load the CPU so that all execution units are constantly working at their utmost? Same thing with the GPU. As for disk, are you reading, writing, seeking, or switching from one to the other?

      Even if you could come up with such a worst-case scheme, it'd probably get so hot that the hardware would either throttle itslf back, or melt.

      • Even if you could come up with such a worst-case scheme, it'd probably get so hot that the hardware would either throttle itslf back, or melt.

        Then it isn't really fit for use as a computer, let alone a laptop, is it?

        • Even if you could come up with such a worst-case scheme, it'd probably get so hot that the hardware would either throttle itslf back, or melt.

          Then it isn't really fit for use as a computer, let alone a laptop, is it?

          That's one opinion.

          Suppose you have a design that can run safely at level 10 indefinitely, but only temporarily at level 11. Do you:

          A. Set the firmware to run only at level 10
          or
          B. Program it to switch between level 10 and 11 depending on level of usage and temperature?

          (Hint: most every manufacturer these days uses some variation of B.

    • What is wrong is that doesn't tell the whole story because it fails to measure real-world performance except for one rare edge-case -- Max CPU duration.

      It would be like automobile MPG being estimated based on full-throttle driving on a race track -- it doesn't mirror how the product is actually used. Instead we have city/highway ratings which attempt to mimic two use cases.

      The difficulty with automobile engines is that they must operate efficiently across a variety of RPM ranges and trade-offs must be made

    • Re:Isn't this simple? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Tom ( 822 ) on Monday March 16, 2009 @11:43AM (#27211117) Homepage Journal

      What is wrong with that?

      It gives me, the customer, absolutely nothing to work with. There's a reason we don't calculate "miles per gallon" (or km/l over here) for the "pedal to the metal" case.

      In an ideal world (you know, where everyone knows basic math and nobody is fooled by politicians' campaign promises) you'd have a bunch of measurements at various loads and simply print a curve that tells me what I need to know because I have a somewhat good feeling for where my average use scenario is on the curve.

      • Re:Isn't this simple? (Score:4, Interesting)

        by AlterRNow ( 1215236 ) on Monday March 16, 2009 @11:59AM (#27211399)

        That is a much better and useful idea actually.

        Unfortunately, most metrics seemed to be measured with only one value but I would really like to see a 'battery life curve'.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by hitmark ( 640295 )

          because its easy to do side by side comparisons of a number, its hard to do so with a curve (unless they come as transparent overlays).

          it seems us humans always end up hunting for a one number description, be it battery life, driving distance or housing loan security (the latter being the reason for the wave of economic issues)...

    • So, you're happy with your car being rated at 6 miles per gallon? Because getting anything more than a race driver flogging it around a track with the throttle pinned is nice?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by mcgrew ( 92797 )

      I thought I was the only one to think that way, considering EPA mileage estimates on cars (yes, the dreaded slashdot car analogy). People say that EPA mileage estimates should be changed to "consider people's driving habits" which must have changed over the decades -- people are getting stupider? They sure seem to drive stupider. Maybe I'm just getting old.

      At any rate, the EPA highway estimate for my car is 35 MPG, but if I set the cruise control to 50 mph I get 36, as reported by the car's onboard computer

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Molochi ( 555357 )

      The problem is that all machines aren't "fully loaded" equally. A system with a given cpu running full tilt at 3GHz at 50W is going to drain a battery faster than the same cpu at 2GHz at 35W, even if the same amount of work is accomplished. A notebook with a powerful GPU running a game like oblivion will suck a battery flat in no time, but isn't comparable to an Intel or lowend AMD/NV system because you couldn't even run the program on them usably. This is also true of minimal use scenarios, of course. Atom

  • battery runtime doesn't concern me as much as (Score:5, Informative)

    by bensafrickingenius ( 828123 ) on Monday March 16, 2009 @11:11AM (#27210527)
    battery lifetime. I maintain about 200 laptops, and the damn batteries are usually completely useless after about a year. Oh, and of course, the laptop has a 3 year warranty, and the batteries have 1 year warranties. You can extend that to two years -- it'll only cost you about as much as a second battery would to do so.

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by T Murphy ( 1054674 )
      New zinc/silver batteries are well in development. One company ( http://www.zpowerbattery.com/ [zpowerbattery.com]) is planning on a business model that although the initial cost is much higher, the batteries can be recycled, so by exchanging old for new you come out ahead, and the batteries have more recharges than Li batteries. Some students in a class I took last quarter did a poster on these batteries, and I'm looking forward to replacing my current battery that took a year to cut charge life from 2 hours to 20 minutes with

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by Dan Ost ( 415913 )

      My experience has been that a new battery that gives 3 hours up uptime gives 2 hours after a year and less than an hour after 3 years. Of course, our laptops are used mostly when docked, so we don't cycle our batteries as often as we could.

  • Not much different than EPA ratings on cars (Score:4, Insightful)

    by cabjf ( 710106 ) on Monday March 16, 2009 @11:12AM (#27210545)
    It's only really useful in comparison with other models. Your actual mileage (or battery time) can and will vary depending on usage and maintenance.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by sunderland56 ( 621843 )
      At least with cars, the government - not the manufacturer - selects the test metric, runs the test, and publishes the results. If each laptop maker uses a different battery life test then you can't compare them at all.

  • on the other hand.. (Score:5, Funny)

    by pak9rabid ( 1011935 ) on Monday March 16, 2009 @11:16AM (#27210609)
    ..at least they're being honest about not being entirely honest..
  • That's great, a clearly hostile post on how crappy AMD's battery tests were and will continue to be. Only there is no alternative suggested, or even a hint that the poster thinks there is an effective alternative. Battery life depends on usage and there is no good test. Get over it.

  • Howbout this? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by alta ( 1263 ) on Monday March 16, 2009 @11:21AM (#27210715) Homepage Journal

    I can see more variance in cellphones because those are devices that are on 24 hours on battery and usage patterns are reflective of how many minutes a person has. So someone with 1000 minutes and unlimited sms/data is going to use theirs a lot faster than I, with 550 shared minutes and no data.

    On laptops, I think we can get a little more predictability. First of all, I'd venture to say that at least 80% of the time, if the laptop is on battery, it's being used. I don't know of too many people who fire up a laptop and walk off. However the variance is in the type of use. A photoshopper or developer is going to put a lot more stress on the battery than a Word/IE user. A teen is going to stress it more than a octogenarian. And a gamer is going to beat it down more than anyway. Well, maybe not as someone folding@home.

    I think the solution for this is for someone with enough clout to develop a standard test that cycles through heavy/light load every 20 minutes. Let it run until it powers off. I think this should be a 'measurement company' such as futuremark. HP/Apple/Dell are never going to agree on a test, but if futuremark creats 'wattmark' and it becomes standard, they'll all use it.

    At that point the consumer can say, "Ok, this machine gets 6 hours on wattmark, I'm a LIGHT user, and I usually get 20% more than wattmark" or "I'm a gamer, and I only get half what wattmark says"

    But with the vendors publishing their own magic numbers, and consumer has NO idea what THEY can expect out of that machine/battery.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by shermo ( 1284310 )

      I can see more variance in cellphones because those are devices that are on 24 hours on battery and usage patterns are reflective of how many minutes a person has. So someone with 1000 minutes and unlimited sms/data is going to use theirs a lot faster than I, with 550 shared minutes and no data.

      I'm on a 60 minute plan with 100 txts, you insensitive clod!

      If there's anything that annoys me more than the rest of the world complaining about their internet, it's the rest of the world complaining about their cellphone plans.

  • what? (Score:4, Funny)

    by TheCreeep ( 794716 ) on Monday March 16, 2009 @11:21AM (#27210719)
    I'm shocked! SHOCKED I tell you! You mean the phones/laptops don't run as long as advertised? I can't believe this! It's impossible! Next you'll tell me a 8GB pendrive/SSD holds less than 2^33 bytes.

    • I'm shocked! SHOCKED I tell you! You mean the phones/laptops don't run as long as advertised? I can't believe this! It's impossible! Next you'll tell me a 8GB pendrive/SSD holds less than 2^33 bytes.

      Yeah, well they did something a little sneaky there - which is they don't use the same definition for "Gigabyte" as computer scientists often do...

      Specifically, in this case, they made each byte only 7.45 bits instead of the full 8 bits. Hence, when you boot up your OS and check the drive capacity, it'll say 7.45 GB instead of 8GB.

    • From my understanding of flash chips, it actually should be holding the proper number of bytes. Unlike hard drives (where they redefined a kilobyte as 1000 bytes - and so on), I'm reasonably certain flash chips can only be manufactured in a "binary" scale - explaining why you end up with 8 GiB, 16 GiB, 32 GiB, etc. in SSDs, phones, SD cards, etc.

      The discrepancy should only be coming from the formatted capacity - whatever is used in the formatting is gone.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Wildclaw ( 15718 )

      I like memory manufacturers. They usually give me more memory than I am buying. For example, last time I bought 1GB (10^9) memory I got a 7% bonus. Very nice of them.

      Most operating systems seems to have bugs in them though that count memory incorrectly. I hear that it has something to do with some wierd fundamentalist cult.

  • Shouldn't this be posted in the 'idle' section?

  • Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Monday March 16, 2009 @11:24AM (#27210781)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Morty ( 32057 )

      Some percentage of people "surf" CPU-intensive websites, such as hulu, while others read news. Some save their work frequently, requiring the drive to spin up, while others save less often. Some like to watch DVDs in background, requiring a spinning optical drive and CPU- or GPU-intensive decoding, while others don't. Even naive users will have different power utilization profiles. There is no "average joe".

  • Give us "real" numbers like how long the battery will last sitting in a drawer or under "full load" in a particular device, and how long the battery will last under a variety of scenarios.

    An "emergency" phone user is more interested in how long they can leave their phone in their glove compartment before recharging.

    "Light" users want to know standby time and how many minutes of standby time they lose for every minute they talk.

    "Heavy" users are more interested in talk time and how much "talk time" they lose

  • It's not just batteries (Score:5, Informative)

    by Weaselmancer ( 533834 ) on Monday March 16, 2009 @11:49AM (#27211241)

    I wrote a battery driver for a Windows CE device once. Here's how we did that.

    There is an A/D line on the AC97 codec that we use as a measurement probe to the battery. Used that to determine the actual voltage being seen. Charged the device 24 hours, and ran a program that dumped that output to a file until it died.

    Then fit a third order polynomial to the data. We use that to predict where you're at percentage-wise on the draining curve. Then we made the mistake of looking at the metrics for other batteries we got from the manufacturer.

    As it turns out, the characteristics from one battery to the next varied wildly. Even after you average a dozen or so batteries you'd still get better results throwing darts at a dartboard.

    In short, that 3DMark06 test is probably reading battery capacity from something similar. That would be worth looking at for another source of possibly bogus readings.

  • I'm sure the 5% or so of laptop users that have an AMD chip are absolutely crushed.

    (feel free to check my figures, as I pulled them from the nether -- my nethers.)

  • base your battery life figures on full consumption specification of all the components at operating temperatures.

    simple math which instantly gives you the worst case scenario, which is probably more reliable than current methods.

    also provide a scaled estimate based on battery age from an average number of charges.

  • ... isn't some developer's idea of benchmarks, but estimates based on actual Real World Use.

    For example - my laptop* will last a day or two unplugged in sleep mode. There's one metric for you - how long will it last if you stick it in your bag and forget about it?

    My laptop will last maybe an hour - if that - running Photoshop. That stresses the disk, the ram, pegs the processor, etc.

    It might last through a DVD if I'm not doing anything else. Optical drive is the big drain here - newer machines can handle

  • From the post: "Great in theory but some of the industry already bases battery figures on a two-test measurement, and the results are still wildly inaccurate"

    So What?... As long as they begin to publish true measured figures (Idle & Loaded) as opposed to some guess that they would make, then spin in the marketing department, no-one can complain if their own results vary. All the manufacturer can do is publish what they can measure. Any specific user who claims that their performance differs needs to

  • Battery life figures are utterly useless. CPU load varies from user to user (consider the guy who is checking email, vs the guy who is gaming) to the point where any attempt to measure battery life, other than full tilt 100% cpu utilization, is doomed to failure.

    It'd be better to produce the 100% CPU battery life figure since then everyone's expectations are managed and all will perform at or above the published battery life numbers in the field.

    The industry is ridiculous and opens itself up to class actio

  • of being honest with your mistakes and PR lies ? well. thats something new alright. intel, nvidia, microsoft would have taken a different approach than what you have done though.

  • put a DVD in the drive and see how many minutes you get before the playback stops...

  • We have effective laws against false advertising now. If battery claims cannot be verified under the same conditions, companies should be sued out of business. The same goes true for automobile manufacturers. I have yet to see a car that gets even close to published MPG figures under normal conditions.

    How can these companies continue lying to us and get away with it? Even if there is some kind of special estimate that they do (I don't know, removing certain services that come with the laptop, running

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