Observations

• 23% increase over the prior two weeks in the number of SKUs advertised with battery life.  (34 to 42 SKUs) 23 SKUs I observed advertised battery life or inference to it during the week of 8/10/09, and 19 the week of 8/17/09.   (See raw data at very end of blog.)
• 2X increase in the number of ways battery life is being advertised.
  • Four different ways observed from weeks of 7/27 and 8/3:
    • “up to X hours, Y minutes”
    • “up to X hours” (no minutes)
    • “X+ hours” (no “up to”)
    • “X cell battery for longer performance” (adds concept of battery cell)
  • Five NEW ways battery life was described or inferred to the consumer weeks of 8/10 and 8/17 in addition to those listed above:
    • “up to X hours of battery life that will last in class all day” (adds idea of all day computing)
    • “X  cell battery” (no information on what this means)
    • “X cell battery will give you up to X hours of battery life”
    • “X cell Li-ion battery” (no battery life claim and introduces battery type)
    • Graphic with icons, small description, but no data.

    

• Still in these advertisements there is still only one battery life measurement being advertised.  This is like buying a car and only seeing the “up to 52 MPG,” even though you would never realize that gas mileage in city driving.  Also, it’s like advertising battery life for a mobile phone and only listing “up to 300 hours battery life”.  (See raw data at very end of blog.)
• Apple notebooks never list battery life, only Windows-based PCs.
• Two retailers provided disclaimers for the advertised battery life information.  (See raw data at very end of blog.)

Conclusion

Net-net, more notebooks are advertising battery life or inferring it, and the different ways of describing it to the consumer has more than doubled.  Some questions:

• Do nine different ways to describe battery life help set clear battery life expectations? I will let you be the judge.
• Do disclaimers or explanations behind the metric help increase awareness? Do they deserve broader application? I will let you be the judge.
• Does one single measurement of battery life help tell the whole story? I will let you be the judge.

If you would like to read more about the battery life discussion, please find the links below:

Nigel Dessau’s blogs on battery life

Pat Moorhead’s (me) blogs on battery life

FriendFeed page with select press articles

Improving Understanding of Notebook PC Battery Life Measurements

Let me know what you think!

NOTES:

Week of 8-10-09

Week of 8-17-09

Pat Moorhead is Vice President of Advanced Marketing at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.

Week of 7-27-2009

Week of 8-3-2009

Observations

• 14 notebook SKUs I observed advertised battery life during the week of 7/27/09, and 20 SKUs I observed advertised battery life during the week of 8/3/09.

• In these advertisements there is still only one battery life measurement being advertised.  This is like buying a car and only seeing the “up to 52 MPG,” even though you would never realize that gas mileage in city driving.  Also, it’s like advertising battery life for a mobile phone and only listing “up to 300 hours battery life”.

• Battery life as I observed it is being advertised four different ways:
  • “up to X hours, Y minutes”
  • “up to X hours” (no minutes)
  • “X+ hours” (no “up to”)
  • “X cell battery life for longer performance”

• Only two retailers out of eight I observed provided disclaimers for the advertised battery life information.

During the holiday time frame, we hope and expect this situation to change. A few retailers have unofficially indicated that they are planning to adopt a “Min and Max” (aka guardrail approach) to notebook battery life communications.  Based on the lack of consistency I observed in the circulars, I expect this will be a very welcome change for consumers.

Above is a sample graphic that AMD has proposed for this guardrail approach.

If you would like to read more about the battery life discussion, please find the links below:

Nigel Dessau’s blogs on battery life

Pat Moorhead’s (me) blogs on battery life

FriendFeed page with select press articles

Improving Understanding of Notebook PC Battery Life Measurements

Let me know what you think!

Pat Moorhead is Vice President of Advanced Marketing at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.

As a reminder, MobileMark 2007 is now being advertised and merchandised in retail circulars across the US. This benchmark is developed by the Business Applications Performance Corporation (BAPCO).  (More background and our suggestions for more accurate battery life metrics can be found here, here, and here.)

Applications in MMO7 compared to consumer use

In my opinion, it is not credible to construct a consumer benchmark consisting primarily of applications that business people use. To demonstrate my point, take a look at the battery life benchmark applications now being used in consumer adverts.

These benchmarked applications inside MM07 include: Microsoft Project 2003 for project management, Microsoft Excel 2003 for calculation sheets, Microsoft Outlook 2003 for email, calendar and scheduling, Microsoft PowerPoint 2003 for presentations, Microsoft Word 2003 for word processing, WinZip Computing WinZip 10.0 for archive compression, Adobe Photoshop CS2 for manipulating and compressing images, Adobe Illustrator CS2 for manipulating images and Adobe Flash 8 for vector graphics and animation.

Do these look like your most commonly used consumer PC applications to you?  Here’s my personal list of most commonly used consumer applications as a starting point:

• Web browsers like Firefox, Safari, and Chrome or Internet Explorer. And with browsers come Google, Gmail, YouTube, Hulu, ESPN.com, Disney.com, etc.
• Music apps like iTunes or Windows Media player
• Video or movie playback for DVDs, Blu-ray or iTunes movies or TV shows
• Games like Spore, Sims, and Worlds of Warcraft

Like I said, you be the judge.

Application % weightings in MM07 compared to usage patterns

Even if we pretend for a moment that consumers don’t use web browsers, listen to music, watch videos or play games, and they primarily use the listed MM07 apps. Surely someone on the planet does that, right?

BAPCO has published MM07’s “distribution of measured application task times“, or in other words the apps the tested notebook was running 5-10% of the time when it wasn’t idling or resting 95-90% of the time.

Inside MM07, The “measured application task times” for Adobe Flash Creation is 33.6%, Adobe Photoshop CS2 is 21.8%, Adobe Illustrator CS2 is 16.7%, Microsoft Excel is 16.6%, WinZip 10.0 is 7.1%, Microsoft Word is 1.1%, Microsoft PowerPoint is 1.0%, Microsoft Project is 1.2% and Microsoft Outlook is 1.0%.

I ask, when you use your notebook, do you spend 72% of your time recoding Flash videos, manipulating and compressing pictures in Photoshop and Illustrator?   I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess that that is not an accurate reflection of most of our usage profiles!

MM07 Applications compared to retail notebook software loads

One final aspect I would like to examine is the software preloaded on retail notebooks compared to the MM07 load. I also looked up the potential costs associated with a consumer adopting the MM07 software load if they bought it on their own.

I took what looked like popular notebooks and those which advertised battery life and compared their software load with MM07’s software load. I looked at five notebooks advertised in major Sunday circulars last weekend and here is what I found.

Granted this is a pretty limited sample, but as you can see above, there was 0% correlation between the MM07 software load and what is installed on these notebooks. Note: SKUs #1 and #2 did have a 60 day edition of MS Office Pro⁽¹⁾.  SKUs #3, 4, and 5 came with 60 day edition of MS Office Student Edition⁽²⁾.  Close but no cigar.

I then looked at what it would cost a consumer to buy the latest and greatest MM07 updated apps.  Here is what it could cost at retail:

As you can see above, it would cost the consumer approximately $2,701 at retail to load all of the updated MM07 applications.

Conclusion

My goal was to compare MobileMark 2007 (MM07) application selection and activity distribution and compare that to a consumer’s behavior. I showed the following:

1) MM07 Productivity is utilized in consumer facing advertisements to indicate comparative notebook battery life.
2) MM07 Productivity tested applications do not contain a single web browser, music app, video playback app, or game.
3) 72% of MM07’s application usage comes from Flash video encoding and photo manipulation and compression in Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator.
4) MM07 tested applications have a 0% correlation between what is pre-loaded on retail notebooks and are six years old on average. (Yes, I admit it was a small sample, but you get my point…)
5) If a user bought software representing the MM07 test suite, it could cost $2,701 at retail.

I ask you, do MM07 applications represent real world consumer usage behavior and purchase characteristics?  You be the judge.

Notes:

⁽¹⁾ loaded w/MS Works (word processor, spreadsheet, calendar) & 60-day trial of MS Office Pro2007 (Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Outlook, Access, Publisher)

⁽²⁾ loaded w/MS Works (word processor, spreadsheet, calendar) & 60-day trial of MS Office 2007 Home & Student Edition (Word, Excel, Powerpoint, OneNote)

Pat Moorhead is Vice President of Advanced Marketing at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.

The facts about MM07 and notebook display brightness

MM07 requires the following (1): “The display brightness should be measured for a white screen while on battery and be set at the lowest possible setting, no lower than 60 nits.” One needs a nit meter and yes, we have a few of those in our labs.  :-)

So what is a nit?  Wkipedia defines a nit as a “candela per square meter.” Yes, that really helped me too.  Think of a “nit” as a unit of measure of brightness.

How does 60 nits compare to brightness of other home electronics?

I pretend to be a technically-capable business, strategy and marketing guy, which according to the engineers, makes me REAL dangerous.  You see, 95% is good enough for my trade, but for theirs, its 99.999% and I respect that.

So I wanted to know what 60 nits really related to, as I didn’t know nits from nuts.  You should have seen the look on the engineer’s faces when I asked them to borrow their nit meter. Chad, his real name J, showed me how to use the nit meter and instructed me how to use the nit meter and to make sure to have a white background on all devices.

I literally went around my house testing many of my home electronics and tested them without changing any settings outside shutting off “auto adjustment” on the phones which I am told is best practice.  I suppose I can call this my family’s “comfort setting” based on the setting my family and I actually use the devices.  So there is variation in room setting, light, etc. that dictates this.

Here are the test results:

Net-net, the lowest nit measurement I observed with my “comfort setting” was still 2.58X brighter than the MM07 brightness level of 60 nits on which notebook battery life is measured.

I then wanted to see how nits related to notebook screen brightness.  So I tested a few notebooks I had in my office to see what the “max nits” were when the screen was set to the highest setting.

As you can see from the figures above, the MM07 requirement was between 20-30% of the samples notebooks’ max screen brightness.

What notebook display brightness setting do consumers use?

Now, I know that a sample set of one doesn’t represent anything, and I’m far from normal, as my friends frequently tell me, but the results of my home survey were interesting – interesting enough to make me  real curious about what others  are doing with their screen brightness settings.

So last week I started Tweeting and Facebooking questions to real users on what is the display brightness setting on which they place their notebooks. I received qualitative and quantitative responses.  Yes, I know, this isn’t a 17-country, global discrete choice, double blind methodology survey followed by focus groups, BUT there were telling, directional  indicators.

Quantitative: I wasn’t expecting anything like the response I got from Neowin respondents.  They actually placed a poll on their community website asking the question, “What brightness level do you run your notebook?“  Over 1,100 community members voted in a few days, and according to Shane Pitman, Editor-in-Chief, “Polls require a member account, and to be logged in to said account. Provides accountability, keeps people from voting multiple times.”

The results were overwhelming in that 75% of the Neowin community member respondents kept their notebook display brightness between 61% and 100%.  Somehow, I don’t think that fits into the 60 nit range.

Qualitative: These responses were as valuable as the quantitative as they gave insight into “why” they did this.  Some comments gave insight into the folks who use their notebooks at very low display settings.  I didn’t use their Twitter names to protect the innocent. :-)

Here was the response to my question, improper grammar and all, “Research question: what display brightness do you run your notebook at? (Please RT)”.  Here is just a sampling of public tweet responses.

• “On the machines I see, normally I prefer to have them fully backlit with the slider up to around 75% or so.”
• “I run my laptop at maximum brightness unless the battery is really low, or I have an external screen. “
• “Now running MBP 15.4″ 3.1 at 75% brightness with auto adjust turned ; but was at 100% without auto adjust til you asked! “
• “90 – 100% brightness, 90% of the time. “
• “depends entirely on my battery level and surroundings. “
• “Research question: what display brightness do you run your notebook at? (Please RT). I run full bright 95+% of the time. “
• “oh sorry , 100% unless I’m running low on battery, where I bring it down to a minimum, I’m guessing 50%, but thats rare”
• “usually around 60-70%”
• “i don’t use them much, mainly desktop, but i either have brightness at full or minimum: latter at night and if battery low”
• “When running laptop on battery, i set brightness to 25-40%, when plugged in -100%.”
• “100% brightness. Left default setting (and I appreciate it that way… old eyes). “
• “slammed up to full when possible, monitor screens vary though”
• “mine is usually as bright as I can make it. I hate dim screens. “
• “max brightness notwithstanding battery impact. “
• “I lower my screen brightness to the lowest, usable level that’s comfortable. It’s all about the battery life. “
• “Agreed…I think mine is usually around 30% or so. “
• “it varies by location due to lighting levels. Usually around 30% or 40%. Never > 50% when on battery. “
• “ME: 90 to 100% on AC, about 50 % on battery when I’m watching movies and about 20 to work. “

I also received some really interesting responses related to interpretation, explanations, tools and resources on brightness after asking about 60 nits. Got to love social media.

• “not all that hard. Need 800+ nits to read screens in direct sun, 30-150 for night highway signs: http://bit.ly/cjxJB“
• “60 nits = table in an office with 300 lux illumination: http://bit.ly/FvoKe BTW sRGB calibration target = 80 nits. “
• “oh and here’s a Kodak guide on how to use a digital camera and gray card as an ad-hoc nit estimator: http://bit.ly/1IMLK3“

You be the judge

I titled this blog, “MM07, 60 Nits, One Nit-picker and you” and now I ask you, am I just nitpicking? I ask you to make that decision for yourself.  I have described a few things:

• First, MM07 test requires a 60 nit or higher display brightness. To maximize battery life benchmarks, systems are set at the minimum allowable 60 nit level. This setting is thereby integrated into this battery life benchmark that is then used in consumer advertisings.
• Secondly, worst case, the display brightness of many electronics inside my home at my family’s “comfort setting” is 2.58X more than the MM07 nit setting requirement. Based on the small set of notebooks I tested, MM07’s 60 nits equated to around 20-30% of the max notebook brightness. Your mileage will vary, maybe.
• Third, my unscientific querying last week says many classes of users crank their screen beyond 61% and many at max brightness. Yes, I said max. Some self-selected a lower brightness setting to conserve battery life.

Nuff said, you be the judge.   Agree, disagree, I would love to hear your thoughts on this.

(1) MobileMark 2007 White Paper, March 2008, Revision 1.0. 4.2.1 “Display brightness”

Pat Moorhead is Vice President of Advanced Marketing at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.

I can assure you that no devious plot exists to mislead you. It really comes down to three simple factors.

#1: Measurements are best case: Like a car’s “highway miles per gallon” which gauges the best case (cruising at a sustained speed for an extended period without stop-and-go driving), notebook battery life is typically based on MobileMark® 2007. This benchmark primarily measures battery life while the notebook is doing nothing – not even wirelessly connecting to the Internet. A “city-driving” equivalent of notebook battery life doesn’t exist…yet.

#2: Different strokes for different folks: Notebook users are different; we all use notebooks differently, and therefore will see different battery durations.  Some watch HD web videos on YouTube, some may just do email, and some play more games than others. ALL which will mean varying battery life.  You can see this data from AMD here that shows the phenomenon.  This even shows that battery life under system use can even vary by component manufacturer.

#3: Battery life varies over time: The longer you own your notebook, use it, charge, and recharge, over and over again, the more the battery loses its effectiveness.  So theoretically, your longest battery life will be on the first day you crack open the packaging.  See all the people selling new batteries for old notebooks?  Some even say, battery life is variable with heat.

So what should a consumer like you do?

• Grade battery life on a “curve”, let’s say 60%. If the label says 10 hours, my guess is it’s probably only about 6 hours in real use.  (UPDATE: this isn’t always linear, so be very careful with this.)
• Ask your retailer and systems providers to provide the “city miles per gallon” or using the tried and tested cellphone analogy, “talk-time”. They all have web sites and when all else fails, you can ask them over Twitter.

I may have not added back 40% of your battery life, but hopefully you know why you only get 60% of it!

(This blog was originally published at the Technologizer web site. Updated with full blog June 8, 2009.)