STUART GOLDENBERG

DAVID POGUE - REVIEW


Two things about battery-life measurements for laptops: First, they usually bear little relationship to reality. Second, laptop ads use language that does not always reflect reality. That phrase is: “Up to.” As in,

“Up to five hours.” “Up to” is just an excuse. You know what? I’ve got a laptop that gets “up to” 1,000 hours on a charge! Because “up to” just means “something below this number.”

Well, so what? Why pick on laptop makers? Every industry does it, right?

Wrong.

In 2003, the digital camera industry had a similar problem. Every company was advertising its cameras’ battery life in exaggerated terms. Each had its own testing protocol, none representative of real life. Very soon, consumers realized that the battery statistics were basically meaningless.

Eventually, CIPA (the Camera and Imaging Products Association), a trade group, took action and developed a standardized battery-life test. Nowadays, all cameras are tested and advertised the same way. And CIPA ratings now match up with reality.

But laptops are more complicated, right? Many more factors determine battery life: what you’re doing, how bright the screen is, what wireless features are turned on, and so on.

Yet other industries have faced this problem, too. Cellphones, for example: The battery dies a lot faster when you’re making calls than when you’re just carrying the thing in your pocket. Cars: You generally get much better fuel efficiency on the highway than in the city. Even iPods: You get better battery life when you’re playing music rather than video.

So their manufacturers do the only logical thing - they give you the worst-case/best-case numbers.

But with laptops, what do we get? “Up to five hours.”

This is important, because battery life has become a huge selling point.

Why doesn’t the computer industry invent a standard battery test?

Actually, it has. Those “up to” numbers are the results of a test suite called MobileMark 2007.

There are a few problems with the MobileMark test. One of them is the identity of its inventor. It’s Bapco (Business Application Performance Corporation), a trade group led by Intel and composed primarily of laptop and chip manufacturers.

Let’s see: a benchmark developed by precisely the companies who profit if battery life looks good. Isn’t that like putting the foxes in charge of henhouse inspections?

Another problem: Unlike CIPA’s camera tests, the MobileMark test protocol doesn’t reflect real-world use. Consider, for example, the screen. It’s the most power-hungry component of a laptop, so specifying how bright it is during your test is extremely important.

Well, the MobileMark test specifies that you have the screen set to 60 nits (a brightness measurement).

Not to nitpick, but at full brightness, laptop screens put out 250 to 300 nits. The MobileMark test, in other words, specifies setting the screen at a fraction of full brightness - a setting that few people use in the real world.

The MobileMark test, furthermore, doesn’t specify whether batteryweakening features like Wi-Fi and Bluetooth are turned on during testing. That decision is left up to the manufacturers when they test their own laptops. Can you guess what they usually decide?

All of this brings us to Advanced Micro Devices, which has spent several weeks blogging about all of this silliness and bringing it to the attention of tech writers like me.

A.M.D. thinks the industry should adopt a much more realistic benchmark for laptops, then represent the results in a style that matches cellphones, iPods and cars. It’s proposing a new logo that clearly shows the best-case/worst-case numbers. Your laptop’s box might say, “2:30 Active Time/4:00 Resting Time.”

Predictably, A.M.D. reports that it is meeting with “considerable resistance” from the big industry players.

So yes, everybody’s got an agenda on this one. But yours should be to support A.M.D.’s campaign. It’s logical, it’s fair - and it’s long overdue.