Ultralight laptops are great to put in your bag and travel, and they look pretty stylish. However, a neat build often comes with trade-offs. Battery capacity is a common occurrence as companies struggle to fit large batteries into cars that are less than an inch thick. German PC manufacturer Tuxedo Computers’ latest ultra-light InfinityBook Pro 14 aims to solve this problem for Linux users with a massive battery.
Introduced today, the InfinityBook Pro 14 Gen7 comes with either more storage or a bigger battery. The company sells it with a 99-watt-hour (Wh) battery option, which is roughly the size of a lithium battery that is legal for use in an aircraft (100 Wh).
Notably, the laptop uses a Lithium Polymer (Li-Po) battery rather than the Lithium-Ion (Li-Ion) battery that is more common among laptops. Li-Po batteries tend to be lighter, more stable, and have a longer lifespan, making them popular in smartphones. However, lithium-ion batteries tend to have a higher capacity for smaller and slower self-discharge.
However, this is a high-capacity PC battery that is only 0.63 inches (16 mm) thick and weighs 2.87 pounds (1.3 kg). Let’s take a look at the lithium-ion batteries in some of the other ultra-light devices we’ve recently reviewed: the HP Elite Dragonfly’s 0.65-inch thick Chromebook has a 50Wh Li-ion battery, the 0.61-inch thick Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Yoga has a Lithium-Ion a 57 Wh ion battery, while the 0.59-inch thick Acer Swift 5 has a 56 Wh lithium-ion battery. At 99 Wh, the InfinityBook is closer to mega-gaming laptop territory like the Alienware m17 R5, which is 1.05 inches thick, weighs 7.3 pounds (3.3 kg) and has a 97 Wh lithium-ion battery.
Of course, in addition to battery size, there are several other factors that affect how long a laptop will run before it needs to be charged. Tuxedo claims that the InfinityBook Pro 14 can last “about 10 hours”of “office work and web surfing via WLAN”and up to 16 hours of standby time. It’s not an apples-to-apples comparison, but Lenovo claims up to 14.9 hours at 250 nits in MobileMark 2018 and 19.7 hours of 150 nits local video playback with the ThinkPad X1 Yoga.
Tuxedo also releases a storage-focused version of the laptop, with a 56Wh battery and a claimed six to eight hour battery life with the laptop set to 150 nits, and it uses WLAN and lasts for nine hours on standby. The laptop storage option supports up to 4TB of storage across two SSDs in a Raid 0 or Raid 1 array. The Storage Edition is also lighter at 2.43 pounds (1.1 kg).
Tuxedo is charged via a 90W power adapter or via USB-C. It features an Intel Core i7-12700H processor with eight Efficiency cores, six Performance cores, 20 threads, a 4.7GHz turbo clock, and a TDP of 40W. It can also support the RTX 3050 TI Max-Q (4GB, 35W TGP that can scale up to 45W) and has a 14-inch 16:10, 2880×18000 screen. Tuxedo claims that the IPS display can go up to 400 nits and cover 99 percent of sRGB.
Tuxedo’s announcement states that the laptop comes preloaded with Linux drivers and a Tuxedo Linux distribution, Tuxedo OS, which is based on Ubuntu with KDE Plasma Desktop.
When configured with 8GB DDR4-3200 memory and a 250GB Samsung 980 EVO Plus NVMe SSD, the InfinityBook Pro 14 costs €1,629.41 excluding German VAT (approx. $1,625.47).
A laptop with a 55 Wh battery costs 1,587.39 euros excluding German VAT (about $1,583.56).
Listing image from Tuxedo Computers