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zippy
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Join Date: Jul 2005
Location: Unknown
 
2007-08-03, 14:20

Quote:
Originally Posted by zsummers View Post
Perhaps the clearest way for me to explain is to say that for me and (I think) a lot of potential subnotebook customers, having a very small computer without much battery life is pointless. The point of smallness is portability. And part of being portable is not being tethered to an outlet. I consider it more important to be small with good battery than small with the ability to use an optical drive (who does that on the fly?).

You make a good point, though. I do care about smaller and lighter--but only smaller and lighter than the current line-up. I don't technically need a subnotebook.

Essentially, though, the 12" was a subnotebook (if not in literal terms)--or would be in the current line up of 13", 15" & 17" machines. But it may well be the case that Apple could take it down to 11" or even 10" & close to an inch thick (I believe the 12" PB was 1.08" thick) without greatly affecting the heat dissipation. My current 15" is an inch thick, for instance, and the processor isn't spreading a great deal of heat laterally--in fact, the optical drive does very little in dissipating heat on this machine.

I was shocked when digging around in my old 12" PB how much of the computer was the optical drive. Volume-wise, it was close to 1/5 to 1/4 of the machine. My point is basically that the necessary heat-dissipation could still happen in a somewhat smaller, PB-like machine without an optical drive, while upping battery and adding a few extra features--close enough to a subnotebook for me. But I don't really want a 9", 0.5" thick machine with 3.5 hours of battery life and no optical drive.
I don't think you'll get as much of an improvement in battery life as you are all hoping by eliminating the optical drive. The best ways to improve battery life is going to be: scaling back the processor, and maybe switching to Flash based drives.

Many people here keep mentioning, or implying, that if they eliminate the optical drive, they could suddenly up the processor, and or battery life. Those two things are at odds with one another, so you're going to have to pick one at best.

Now, factor in all the heat issues with the current MBPs and MBs, do you really think Apple is going to fair better with a smaller shell? They'd be lucky to get even the current MB processors in there. There are special processors designed for this kind of device, and Apple will most likely use those. Same as Sony.

As for battery, Sony advertises 4 to 7.5 hours on their TZs both with hard drives and flash based (interesting that the flash based aren't higher IMO) and 4 to 10 hours on the TXs. That's a fairly decent range, especially on the TXs. The TZs suffer a bit because they have beefier processors. More would be great, sure, but batteries get heavy quickly and you don't want to have an amazingly small notebook that is abnormally heavy for it's size. Any battery occupying the vacated space of an optical drive would be exponentially heavier than the optical drive was.

Personally, I'd be happy with something in the 3 to 3.5 lb category, and if by some miracle it could be less than 3, that's great.

I don't think we'll ever agree here, so it's pointless to keep going round and round. I'll just take comfort in my belief that Steve Jobs agrees with me - a belief that I think is supported by Apples product history.

Do you know where children get all of their energy? - They suck it right out of their parents!
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