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April 08, 2016

Apple MacBook Pro 13inch MC700LL/A Battery

Researchers at MIT and Chinaâ€™s technology-focused Tsinghua University have developed aluminium-based nanoparticles that could triple the capacity of lithium-ion batteries â€“ the most common type of rechargeable battery, and one commonly used in consumer electronics such as laptop computers.

The discovery, published in the journal Nature Communications, addresses a key factor in degrading the performance of lithium-ion batteries, the fact that their electrodes expand and shrink during each charging cycle, a process that consumes lithium.

The researchers said they have developed an electrode made of nanoparticles with a solid shell and a "yolkâ€ inside thatâ€™s isolated in such a way that it can expand and contract without affecting the shell. The technique can greatly improve cycle life, as well as boosting capacity and power.

The electrodeâ€™s nanoparticles contain an aluminium yolk and a titanium dioxide shell, resulting in a component whose "skinâ€, or solid-electrolyte interphase (SEI) layer, is more stable, meaning it doesnâ€™t consume lithium in the way that current batteries do, the researchers said."We made a titanium oxide shell that separates the aluminium from the liquid electrolyteâ€ between the batteryâ€™s two electrodes, MIT professor Ju Li said in a statement.

Li, who worked with three others from MIT and three researchers from Tsinghua, said the method was a "chance discoveryâ€.In laboratory tests, the electrode gave more than three times the capacity of stadard batteries using graphite anodes at a normal charging rate, according to Li. The lab tests found that the battery retained a high charge capacity after hundreds of recharging cycles, he said.

Aluminium is a low-cost material and the teamâ€™s method could be easily scaled for industrial-level manufacturing, Li said. The team said it has successfully tested fuel cells using an aluminium-titania (ATO) anode, or negative electrode, with a lithium iron phosphate cathode, or positive electrode.For high-power, high-density batteries, ANO is "probably the best anode material availableâ€, Li said.MITâ€™s Junjie Niu, Kangpyo So, and Chao Wang and Tsinghuaâ€™s Sa Li, Yu Cheng Zhao, and Chang An Wang collaborated on the research.

Vaio has been slowly making its way back into the US after splitting off from Sony, and today it's taking a big step with the introduction of three more laptops targeted at pros â€” or, really, anyone who wants a higher-end machine. Of the three, the highlight is the Vaio Z Flip, which includes a 13-inch, 2560 x 1440 touchscreen display that can â€” surprise â€” flip around to be used like a tablet.

The Z Flip is an expensive laptop, and Vaio says it has the build quality and power to back it up. The laptop's top and inside casing is made of aluminum, and for whatever reason there is literal stone underneath the trackpad. Inside is either a Core i5 or i7 Skylake processor, 8 to 16GB of RAM, and a battery large enough to, supposedly, keep it running for around 11 to 12 hours, though Vaio says its battery estimate isn't final. It also includes a stylus. The Z Flip is very much Vaio's answer to the MacBook Pro. It's essentially trying to offer a comparably high-quality machine for people who want to run Windows. The Z Flip has already been on sale in Japan, but this marks the first time it'll arrive in the US. Pricing starts at $1,799.

Vaio is also introducing a slightly cheaper version of the Vaio Z Flip without some of its flashier features â€” namely, flipping. The Vaio Z Clamshell (technically, both of these laptops are just called the Vaio Z, but Vaio also refers to them as the Z Flip and Z Clamshell to differentiate them, so I'm doing that here) uses a very similar body, but it doesn't have a touchscreen and only uses a 1080p display. There is still stone beneath the touchpad, though, so at least you have that. It starts at $1,499.

As with the above two laptops, the third laptop Vaio is announcing today has also been on sale in Japan for a while now. It's apparently Vaio's best seller, too. It's called the Vaio S (but goes as Vaio Pro in Japan), and is a surprisingly nice-looking laptop that manages to feel like it belongs to the late-2000s thanks to the inclusion of both an ethernet port and a VGA port along one side. If you're still into iPods and 3.5-inch phones, this might be perfect for you. It'll start shipping to the US in early March, while the Z models will begin shipping in early February.

Windows adds much-needed versatility, but low-end hardware limits it anyway.
HP has significantly improved the Wi-Fi in the Stream this year, moving from a basic 2.4GHz 802.11n adapter to an 802.11ac adapter from Intel that can connect at theoretical speeds up to 433Mbps. As far as 802.11ac goes, itâ€™s still fairly basic, but barebones 802.11ac is still much better than basic 802.11n, if only because it can connect to networks on the less-congested 5GHz band.

GPU performance also gets a nice boost, which is appreciatedâ€”these things make good kid laptops, and the ability to play games like Minecraft and other light and/or educational fare is a selling point. The Stream uses a Celeron N3050 based on the Braswell architecture, and Intelâ€™s prioritization of GPU performance means that it can double the GPU performance of the last Stream depending on the benchmark. (Usually. You will run into games where the weak CPU becomes the bottleneck, though, something weâ€™ll examine in more detail later.)

The GPU improves graphics API support, too, though thatâ€™s not tremendously important in such a low-end system. DirectX 12, OpenGL 4.3, and OpenCL 2.0 are all available.

The trackpad is another area of improvement. The last one could be flaky at finger tracking and clicking, and as of this writing HPâ€™s drivers donâ€™t provide support for Windows 10â€™s improved trackpad gestures. The new one supports those gestures and is actually pretty good at them, and both finger tracking and clicking seem more reliable. For the price, itâ€™s as good as youâ€™re likely to find.

And though it's still a weak point overall, the screen is a little brighterâ€”it maxed out at about 150 nits in the old Stream but gets all the way up to 200 nits in the new model. HP may not use the same components in every Stream it sells since manufacturers often source components from multiple places, and thereâ€™s some small variation even among PCs with identical components. But hopefully this means that HP is using slightly brighter, higher-quality panels in all its Stream laptops now.

Finally, despite that brighter screen, the new Stream delivered significantly better battery life than the first one. HP promises about ten hours of runtime, and in our light Wi-Fi browsing test the new Stream delivered just over eleven hours. It also performed admirably in our WebGL test, which keeps a light but continuous load on the CPU and GPU. Whatever you're doing with this thing, the battery should hold up.

The new Stream 11 does have one major regression, and itâ€™s in a place where the first Stream was already pretty weak: processor performance. The old model had a Bay Trail-based Celeron N2840 processor, which is based on an older architecture (and consumed slightly more power) but ran at speeds of up to 2.58GHz. The new one peaks at 2.16GHz, and whatever minor architectural improvements Intel has made from one year to the next arenâ€™t enough to make up for that kind of speed drop.

In the heavier, more sustained Cinebench rendering test, the newer Celeron wins out; it presumably needs to throttle its performance under heavy workloads where the N3050 doesnâ€™t need to. In the briefer Geekbench test, which is more representative of standard "burstyâ€ computer usage, both single- and multi-core scores fall quite a bit.

Some of this is Intel's fault, since it doesnâ€™t offer as many Braswell CPUs as it did Bay Trail CPUs, and none of the dual-core models offered comparable speeds (the newer N3060 comes close, but it was only added to the lineup recently). HP could have stepped up to one of the quad-core variants, but it may have driven the cost of the laptop up, which would sort of defeat the purpose. The new Stream is by no means unusable, but itâ€™s too bad to see the processor performance take such a big step backward while everything else improves.

There are a few things to mention about the Stream 11â€™s software loadout. The standard model from HP ships with a 64-bit version of Windows 10 Home. Thereâ€™s about 15GB free on the disk out of the box before you install any updates, and the one we got didnâ€™t ship with the Windows 10 November Update (aka build 1511)â€”installing that takes time on slower systems like this one, and it consumes several gigabytes of space that you need to reclaim manually with the Disk Cleanup tool. Expect this to be an ongoing issue with the new Windows 10 update model.

Thereâ€™s also a fair amount of pre-installed software. Some of it is useful: thereâ€™s a one-year subscription to Office 365 and 1TB of OneDrive storage, and thereâ€™s 25GB of Dropbox storage space, though you couldnâ€™t sync a 25GB Dropbox folder to the internal storage. Some is less useful: McAfee and Avast security software that can be uninstalled in favor of Windows Defender or your third-party anti-virus software of choice; WildTangent games; and a bunch of HP support software. The limited amount of internal storage keeps HP from going too wild with pre-installed software, but thereâ€™s still enough here to be annoying.

HP and Microsoft do offer a Signature Edition version of the laptop, which I donâ€™t have firsthand experience with. It will include fewer pre-installed apps and may or may not ship with the 1511 build installed. In any case, we typically recommend the Microsoft Signature versions over the standard OEM versions when possible, as long as there isnâ€™t a huge price difference. Both versions offer the one-year Office 365 and OneDrive subscriptions, which is the only pre-installed software you really want on these things anyway.

The laptop also includes a Trusted Platform Module (TPM), something the first-generation model didn't include. These are primarily useful for purposes of disk encryption, which isn't supported on the Stream 11 by defaultâ€”regular BitLocker isn't included in Windows 10 Home and the Stream apparently doesn't meet the incredibly specific requirements for on-by-default encryption. But it's there if you want to use it for something.

The Vaio Z Flip's Iris Graphics 540 GPU is supposed to offer better performance than Intel's mainstream graphics chips, but it still isn't good enough to play serious games. The Vaio scored a really strong mark of 89,876 on 3DMark Ice Storm Unlimited, a synthetic benchmark that measures graphics prowess. That's more than double the category average (40,830) and 50 percent better than the Yoga 900 (60,259) and Surface Pro 4 (60,424).

Despite these high scores, the Z Flip mustered just an unplayable 26.7 frames per second when running Rainbox Six Seige at 1080p resolution with low special effects. That rate rose to an acceptable 42.8 fps at 1366 x 768, but that's well below the display's native, 2K resolution.

Battery Life
Vaio miniaturized the motherboard, a feature the company calls the "Vaio Z Engine," to make room for a large battery and plenty of cooling on this hybrid. As a result, the Z Flip lasted a strong 9 hours and 4 minutes on the Laptop Mag Battery Test, which involves continuous surfing over Wi-Fi at 100 nits of brightness. That time is comfortably ahead of the ultraportable category average (8:21) and the Yoga 900's showing (7:57), and miles ahead of the Surface Pro 4's mark (6:05). All of those machines use standard, 15-watt processors. However, the MacBook Pro, which also uses a 28-watt CPU, lasted a full 12 hours and 4 minutes, and the Surface Book (15-watt CPU) endured for 12:29.