Suddenly, I have PC (battery) envy
It has been years since I've had to use a Windows PC, having spent several years on the Mac (with minor bouts of Linux along the way). Today, however, I'm suddenly envious of my friends who haul around those monstrously ugly HP and Dell machines.
Why? Twenty-four hour battery life on the HP EliteBook 6930p, as ZDNet reports. Twenty-four hours!!! One battery. Dell was no slouch either with a 19-hour battery.
My MacBook Pro? Maybe three hours if I baby it. When I travel internationally I carry a BatteryGeek extended-life battery that gets me another eight to ten hours, but it's really heavy, making it a bit of a chore to lug around.
To get 24 hours out of the HP laptop requires a host of fortuitous events (special "Ultra Capacity Battery," updated Intel graphics driver, SSD drive, special LED display, etc.), but I'd happily pay extra and jump through hoops to get this kind of battery life from my MacBook Pro. Happily.
Heck, I already paid something like $500 to $800 for my lug-along extended-life battery for my Mac. Paying extra for something that would break my bank but not my back...? Done.
Matt Asay brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to The Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. Matt is vice president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops open-source software for content management. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. You can follow Matt on Twitter @mjasay. 
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I have an HP laptop with a 17 inch monitor and it sucks my battery dry fast. XP doesn't last an hour and openSUSE can make it stretch to about 2. And that is with Amarok and Eclipse up and running and an Ethernet connection.