somewheres

  Again, this is down to the sensitivity of lithium 
  batteries. If the charge of the battery falls below 
  the minimum safe level, the device will charge it 
  before allowing you to take power. There are a couple 
  of reasons – it's important to make sure the battery 
  doesn't fall into deep discharge, and to ensure that 
  device power isn't immediately cut off (=hard crash) 
  if the user subsequently disconnects the power before 
  the device charges to acceptable levels.

No. It comes down to mediocre design, and unfortunate misconceptions, and tunnel vision about what's worth designing for and what isn't.

1. If the main board is receiving power, it can use some of that power.

2. The user can pull the plug, and and cut power to the main board, and guess what, the main board can simply stop working without trying to consume power from a battery without enough power to operate safely.

3. The operating system can employ an architecture that tolerates hard faults, in the middle of code execution, and address them upon the next successful reboot. Yeah, that's expensive to develop, and yeah, Apple computers are expensive.

4. With each of these preceding points in place Deep Discharge of lithium batteries is irrelevant, because the main board is in control of whether or not the battery is even called into action at all. With AC power, no power needs to be sourced from the battery. Anxieties about a bricked device are circumvented with a durably designed OS. The end.

Let's be honest, those 40W spikes are due to video playback and/or other GPU bound tasks. Sorry, wait for the battery on those. But booting the OS should be unconditionally permissible on AC power.

So design the OS bootstrap to never spike consumption past the load capacity of the power supply. Once booted, deny access to processes that will slam power consumption, until you have a sufficiently energized battery.

Hey, presto, a weightless solution solved in software without any additional added mass!

If it's plugged in, it can boot. Anything else is a malignant abomination masquerading as design.

No exceptions.

Gee, maybe it's because you have a million tabs open, and all of them are websites with shitty, wasteful javascript begging the CPU for useless operations to update every single tracking pixel and cookie, with up-to-the-minute anaylitics, attached to sessions that are years old, on how your eyes move over their ad banners, so that a genetic machine learning algorithm can determine which ads are most likely to convert to clicks and then sales.

Hint: It's the ad for the top 7 ways you didn't know you could get bunions, and there's a 50% chance it will convince you to buy new shoes.

You are not alone. It's just that Hacker News suffers from some extremely myopic forum sliding and public relations tactics, as well as groupthink among industry insiders who have rationalized perfectly sensible reasons to never cross the party line on topics regarding the things that make them money.

Partly, they don't want to bite the hand that feeds them. Partly, they know damn well that they're screwing people over. True believers that actually buy the Brooklyn bridge are rare birds.

I'd rather see a hard crash and know for sure that the battery is too empty to perform work.

Stupid battery warning meters are a lie, and a waste of valuable power.

If you have enough power to show me that you don't have power, I know your battery meter is full of shit. It means the board can still operate, and is probably performing a small subset of tasks without my awareness, in a low power mode.

Maybe the accelerometer is still capturing events, maybe lots of things are happening, below the threshold of activating the monitor and expensive motors.

The greatest sin of all, though. The hands-down WORST crime committed, is when the hardware IS PLUGGED INTO A POWER SOURCE, BUT REFUSES TO POWER ON BECAUSE "THE BATTERY NEEDS TO CHARGE FIRST."

WHAT???