Battery life! Along with weight and size, that's probably one of the Big Three when it comes to laptop attributes everyone's keeping an eye on. Apple's been pretty good in the battery life arena recently; the current "bronze" PowerBook G3, while being both smaller and lighter than its predecessor, boasts a longer-lasting 5-hour battery. Pop a second one in if you don't need the CD/DVD drive and you can work "up to" ten hours unplugged. Of course, your mileage may vary depending on which reality you're living in. We figure four hours per battery is probably optimistic; and nobody who's tried has actually been able to watch Austin Powers twice on a single charge, contrary to Apple's ad campaign. Still, that's a solid chunk of charge, and the upcoming iBook packs a "6-hour" battery to raise the stakes.

But that doesn't mean things can't get better. Faithful viewer Shane Burgess pointed out a CNN article which discusses a new laptop battery that provides a solid fifteen hours of juice. PowerBook veterans may recall older third-party products that took a similar approach; a battery that's the same shape as the laptop itself and clips onto the bottom, connecting to the A/C adapter jack. Since the battery's much larger than one that could fit inside the laptop itself, it can provide a lot more power. This new generation of mega-batteries, however, also uses the extra space more efficiently and increases capacity with new battery technologies.

Of course, using one of these clip-on batteries means that you'd have to tote around an extra couple of pounds, but for many people, that's a terrific trade-off. Now before you start moaning about how Wintel laptops are now going to have way longer battery life than PowerBooks, it's worth noting that the article lists Apple as one company whose products will soon benefit from these new batteries. Let's see; a PowerBook G3 with dual internal batteries and the clip-on should get up to twenty-five hours of runtime. Now that's a battery life to write home about.