I am very interested in learning how they provide 12 hours of usage for the Surface Book. What do they disable to extend the life? They battery capacity?
It's just 12 hours of video playback that they actually cite when selling the thing (wifi locked to a network and autobrightness off, all else default). That's nice and similar to other high-end devices like a MBP, but it's so powerful that if you actually do the things on it that you'd want to buy a high-powered device for (e.g. editing video, gaming, 3d modelling) you won't last anywhere near that.
In short, if you use it like a tablet, you get typical tablet battery. If you have it docked to the stand to use the dedicated GPU etc, I assume you're going to get more typical windows laptop battery life. But that's not much different from my MBP either, I usually get about 5-6 hours of battery life rather than 10-12 because I use it a lot for the things I actually needed to buy a MBP for, which isn't just watching video and checking my mail.
Or they're just misleading about how they measure the battery life. We used to have "8h of battery life" 10 years ago, when in fact they lasted 3h. Apple has done this, too, more and more lately unfortunately. Their "12h" battery life is more like 8h for moderate usage.
I think this is really interesting as the gap between casual browsing and more intense stuff like running my unit test suite on the software I'm developing has such noticeable effects on battery life.
With all the low power states and stuff, when you're actually using the CPU for a while, the battery life easily cuts in half.
The discussion thread is about battery life under heavy usage which never meets the advertised battery life since no one would buy a laptop that only advertised its minimum battery life. "Will last at least 3 hours after full charging" isn't catchy.
