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?