The “Range Anxiety” Society
As we electrify all parts of life, battery reliability will become a bigger and bigger issue
Recently, my six-year-old MacBook Pro was staggering on its last legs.
One of the chief symptoms of its impending demise? The battery would croak with barely two hours of use. I’d replaced that battery two years before, and already it was collapsing again.
I tried to make lemons out of lemonade. As I wrote in a previous blog post, I used my rapidly-depleting battery as a type of Pomodoro: If I only had two hours to work, I couldn’t procrastinate — I needed get the words out as fast as possible.
But that little mind-hack only went so far. The truth is, having a laptop that only lasts for two hours placed bleak limits on what I could accomplish while working out of the house. Normally I love writing at a café, because the presence of other humans simultaneously calms and stimulates me.
But with the Macbook’s battery-life so dismal, it rarely seemed worth going out. When I’m writing, I’ll spend one hour just amping myself up to do serious work — so I’d finally be hitting my stride only to discover I had a mere hour left. I ended up sticking at home, worried that if I went out to work in public, I’d be too worried to work. Meta-worry!
