Chaszmyr said:
Apple announced yesterday that the MacBook Pro is 67% brighter than the PowerBook G4. What does this mean? At full brightness, the battery life is probably a fair amount shorter than the 5.5 hours that the PowerBook G4 has, but if you turn down the brightness I'm sure that the battery life is comparable.
Your argument is really interesting. I know that, although my battery is aging, if I go to minimal screen brightness, and turn off wireless, my iBook can still do close to four hours (it originally got about 4-4.5 without taking those measures, but no longer does).
Mmmm, I'm not so sure that the extra brightness doesn't come from electrical or optical efficiency gains. I don't think the brighter laptops get there merely by pushing more juice into the bulbs. I could be wrong, though. But what you said definitely has a flip side that is good. If the real world profile of this thing is comparable to the battery life of the existing PB's, then you can turn the brightness down, keep the same screen brightness, and get more life.
Then again, I guess this thing would be quite fast even if one core were put to sleep. Now *THAT* could offer you some real power savings... I'd be curious to see how these things do when they're set to reduced processor performance.