The problem with measuring battery life for laptops

David Pogue over at the New York Times wrote a piece last week lamenting the uselessness of the battery runtime, as quoted by laptop makers. If you've ever used a laptop before, you know exactly what he means--you just can't seem to hit the runtime that they tell you is possible. Obviously, nobody is outright lying here, since the laptop advertisements always uses words such as "up to" to indicate the runtime.

Anyway, what Pogue was nitpicking over was the impotency of the current standard, the MobileMark 2007 test. This test was invented by a trade group with Intel at the head, and made up of other laptop and chip manufacturers. Unfortunately, the contention is that the published results were taken from a test set that does not adequately mirror real-world usage.

Instead, Progue advocates a benchmark suggested by chip maker AMD, which indicates the best-case/worst-case scenario for better decision making on the part of the consumers. So the battery runtime that is printed on the box will say something like "2:30 Active Time/4:00 Resting Time." This sounds like an excellent idea to me. What do you think of this?

For more information:
- check out the article at the New York Times

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