As nice as some of old-ish business and workstation laptops like Thinkpads, Latitudes, and Precisions are in some ways, one aspect that’s looking increasingly aged is battery life and brick size. I don’t necessarily need my laptops to be powerhouses, but it’s nice to not need to carry the charger brick most of the time, and on the odd occasion I do it’s better if it’s not literally a brick.

I have a circa 2008 15.4” Precision that I’ve upgraded quite a lot thanks to its modularity and expandability, and it’s still pretty serviceable except that even with a brand new larger-model battery it’d be a stretch to get 4-5 hours of life out of it, and its charger brick is monstrous. It’s a stark contrast to a 16” M-series MBP, which is also a high-performance (if not quite workstation) class laptop, but gets somewhere between 2-4x the battery life and can charge up overnight with a compact 30W USB-C phone charger without any adapters.

It’d be interesting if one of those projects that retrofits old ThinkPad shells with modern mainboards were built around an ultra-efficient ARM SoC instead of the usual x86 fare. That’d address the issue pretty well.