Dear Manufacturers, if there's a newer tech allowing better battery efficiency, don't reduce battery capacity to maintain profit margins but instead please keep the same capacity and bump up the price <i>slightly</i>. People will still buy them if your product has 12-18 hours battery life while the competition has a mere 4-6 hours. We really don't mind paying extra for longer worktime.
The title is misleading, it should be 50% more battery life than did their predecessors. What this means is that if their predecessor's lower power usage offered an additional 10 minutes of power, Haswell will now offer an extra 15 minutes.
That would require the CPU to currently be using at least 33% of the laptop power on average, which sounds high.<p>My phone is currently reporting 30% on wifi and 24% on the display - and this is a small screen device that spends most of its time with the screen off.
Looked up up
"Power Consumption Breakdown on a Modern Laptop" by Mahesri et al. and "Component-wise energy breakdown of laptop" by Kothuru et al. on Citeseer.<p>According to published research from 2005 and 2010, with vintage laptop processors (which were more energy hungry than ones today), you can't get 50% more battery life by even if you eliminated the CPU power usage entirely -unless you're running a CPU pegging benchmark all day.<p>Probably Intel marketing managed to fool the reporter into translating CPU power efficiency changes into battery life increases.
Every time I see one of these things it is <i>fully</i> exciting. Then the actual product gets bogged down in patent bullshit and we never see it.<p>What happened to the CPU heatsink where the whole damn thing rotated? If the fan in my laptop was as efficient as that thing promised to be I'd get an extra hour or so already.