This is exciting. I’m hoping to make my first System76 purchase this year. 1.6lbs is a lot but hopefully a lot of this is battery (I’m only used to mAh as a metric; how much is 49Wh?) I’m also interested to know the refresh rate on the display. An odd name given ground zero for the pandemic, but why not get a head start on rehabilitating the name?
Watt-Hours are unambiguous units of energy, Amp hours are ambiguous without knowing the voltage.
since you said mAh (milliamp-hours), I'm thinking you are talking about phone batteries which are typically in the 3.3-3.6V range depending on the chemistry, then 1000mAh would be 3.3-3.6Wh.
As a comparison the Dell XPS 13 has a 52Wh battery, so it's not a very big battery. 49Wh is what the new MacBook Air has, but the Air has a much lower power CPU.
49Wh is very small battery for a laptop, even a light one, which this one isn't particularly. So spec-wise not impressive. Not surprising as it's competing with some pretty big players with a lot of hardware expertise.
For reference the LG Gram 15 has a 72Whr battery at 1.1kg. The current champ in 'battery size to weight ratio'. Most ultraportables have a 50-60Whr battery at around 1.3kg.
Just to clear things up you mean 3.64 lbs (1.65kg). I saw 1.6 lbs and was like "woah that's well under 1kg for a 15" laptop!"
I think 3.64 lbs (1.65kg) is perfectly acceptable for a 15" laptop, not the lightest but also not the heaviest.
However 49Wh is on the low end for this size laptop imho. Granted it isn't having to put a HiDPI screen and hopefully the Ryzen is more energy efficient than Intel but I doubt it is going to be a show stopper in the battery life department.
