Poll: Haswell options.

With the increased battery efficiency of haswell, they could either make a smaller lighter Pro by reducing the size of the battery, or they could keep everything the same size and give us more battery life (perhaps double it light usage senarios). Which would you prefer?

 

Why not both?

To take it one step further - it sure would be nice to have both types of Surface devices (same with more battery life, or more portable), and perhaps even another Surface which caters to users who require more power. I don't see why there can't be multiple Surface device that fits everyone's needs while using all the variances of the mobile Haswell platform. I mean, the resources are there. The demographics are there. Might as well take advantage of these 2 business observations.

 

Maybe they will, but I'm not certain the demographics are there. At least not in large enough portions to spend the money to design 2 devices. In particular my guess is that designing the thinner and lighter option would be more expensive to microsoft than the more battery life option, so all else being equal, I think thats what we will see. Part of the reason for this poll is to see which is more important to people (basically I'm just following through on e-schreiber's thought). If things are pretty much split, maybe it is worth designing 2 devices.

 

With the way reviews of things like the new Air are going, it doesn't sound like it's going to necessarily be one or the other. The 13" Air has only a slightly larger battery than the current Pro (54Wh vs 43Wh) and gets over 13 hours. All else being the same, that would mean with the same size battery as the Pro it would get ~9.5 hours.

In other words, I don't think the choice is between the same battery life and thinner/lighter or greater battery life and the same size. I think it's between thinner/lighter and slightly increased battery life (maybe something like 6 hours) or the same size and drastically increased battery life (something like 10 hours).

I'd gladly take the 6 hour one, in that case. That being said, as I've said before elsewhere, I think the best solution might be a battery slice option (that of course wouldn't interfere with the covers). I don't see that option happening, but I think it would have the best chance of appeasing everyone.

 

Thinner and lighter slate, slightly longer battery life, and a solid keyboard dock option with battery like the Helix. Total weight with battery dock 3lbs please!

 

The real advantage of waiting for Haswell is current atom battery life in an I-Core tablet. The Surface was thin and compact enough for me. The kickstand and type cover keep the whole package sufficiently thin to be incredibly portable. If the tradeoff was thickness for battery life into the 10 hour range, I'm all over that.

 

Well that and lower operating temperatures. 'The future looks cool'.

 

I completely agree. I considered offering an inbetween option to the poll, but I didn't want to complicate things. Basically I just wanted to see if maximizing battery life was more important than making it smaller to people. I think if they make it smaller we will still get more battery life as you say. I doubt they will go to the extreme of giving us the same battery life with whatever size that ends up requiring. BTW I would say that the first generation Pro battery life is 6 hrs under my normal usage, so that would be the formentioned extreme =)

 

I think the battery size on the 13" Air is more like 7.2Wh:

Teardown of New Mid-2013 MacBook Air Reveals Smaller SSD, Increased Battery Capacity - Mac Rumors

"iFixit found that the new Airs also sport batteries with increased capacity driven by higher voltages: increasing from a 7.3 V, 6700 mAh power battery to a 7.6 V 7150 mAh power battery"

That's substantially larger than the Surface Pro. I think our batteries are a little large than the new 11" Air, which reportedly get 9 hours of life - so there is still hope...

 

Its 7.2 Ah, which at 7.6V is 54 Wh. The mAh unit is a bad one.

I wonder how much they would have to increase the size and weight of the pro to give us 16 hrs with Haswell?

 

Isn't the Surface Pro something like 42 wh? The new Macbook Air is 54 wh, so there's a good 25% + increase in comparative battery capacity. So, reduce 13 hrs by 1/5 (plus a little extra)= 3- 3.5 hours less? 9-10 hrs of max (read: intermittently active usage) battery life for a 42 wh battery would be awfully impressive..... !!! I admit, I just don't quite believe the hype yet.....

 

Hmm, accorting to Dsstrauss's post, the ivy-bridge Air had a 49Wh battery, which is 10% less than the Haswell one. How log was the ivy-bridge battery life on the Air?

 

Auxiliary battery anyone?

 

According to one article its 7 hrs for Ivy bridge vs 12 for Haswell, so considering the differences in battery capacity ( 49Whr vs 54Whr), thats a 55% increase in battery usage efficiency. For my usage I get 6 hours on the Pro, so I'd guess 9.3 hours keeping the battery the same. Basically the same as the other guesses =P

Altertatively, to get 6 hours on haswell would require a battery 35% lighter than the current one.... I bet that doesn't get us down to RT weight/size. The battery is a significant fraction of the Pros weight, but it would have to be nearly all of its current weight to get us down that far... granted a smaller battery would allow for a slightly smaller case, but most of that weight is in the front and the back plates (I think) not the side, so reduced thickness wont help as much.

 

Lol =)

Seriously though Id guess 72Whr, so ... maybe a pound heavier =) But thats every waking hour battery life! No breaks for lunch.

 

My understanding was that it's the fan construction that adds the thickness, and the battery that adds the weight. ??? If so, battery size is only one half the battle. The second part is getting the heat reduced enough that fans can be removed on an icore-- something that Haswell isn't offering. I think that's about another gen out?

 

Great poll!

I'm very very curious to see the results. I just finished watching the Samsung London event and I noticed that the obsession with thinness goes on. Like other manufacturers out there, Samsung makes the point of detailing the thinness of their gadgets using decimals of millimeters (13.9mm). I was raised under the metric system and never in my life I saw the common man employing that degree of precision in a conversation! As a matter of fact, talking in terms of millimeters is already considered a bit too much and reserved to professionals (carpenters, engineers, scientists, etc.).

Decimals of millimeters is insane! That's like showing up for a meeting and been told you're 15 seconds late. C'mon!

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Samsung ATIV Q, I5 Haswell claims 9 hours battery live driving a 13" 3,200 x 1,800 display. Samsung announces ATIV Q: a Windows / Android hybrid with a 3,200 x 1,800 display

@Steve ... Samsung claims that the panel is optimized for use in bright sunlight.

Poll started at 4-1 and now is 5-4. Interesting.

 

On Intel's presentation at Computex, they said that HP will release the first fanless Core-i device this Summer. From what I can remember from the video, it will be an AiO computer. So it's happening in this generation.

 

So the artist in the forum got what they wanted: Core-i, high-resolution, 13" screen, outdoor use.....and Wacom!