Messing with 18650s is rather risky, I’m not sure if exposing them as individual cells is a good idea.

I mean, there are plenty of devices with them out there. !flashlight@lemmy.world seems to only really be interested in lithium-battery-driven flashlights. I don’t think that an 18650 is intrinsically unsafe.

My understanding is that you can get (slightly cheaper) unregulated cells, but that normally, for end users, one uses regulated cells. The electronics on each cell aren’t smart enough to do things like measure and report charged capacity, but they should be adequate to avoid fires if the battery is shorted.

And there’s no standard for a “smarter” battery pack that would do things like report more information.

The native code of the game will be running translated, but the expensive calls to 3D engines and such will all be caught and replaced by native ARM libraries.

Yeah, that’s true – some games are going to be GPU-constrained, and the instruction set isn’t gonna be a factor there.

A significant chunk of what I’m getting at, though, is battery life. Like, my understanding is that Apple’s got somewhat-better compute-per-watt-hour ratings on their ARM laptops than x86 laptops do. But having that is contingent on one running native ARM software, not running emulated x86 software. Apple can say “we’re just gonna break compatibility”, and put down enormous pressure on app vendors to do so because they own the whole ecosystem. They have done multiple instruction set switches across architectures (680x0 to PowerPC to x86 to ARM) and that ability to force switches is something that they clearly feel is important to leverage.

For people who are only gonna run open-source Linux software – and this thing is shipping with Debian, which has a native ARM distribution – then it is possible that you can do this, because for open-source software

But Windows can’t do this, because there’s a huge amount of binary software that will never be retargeted for ARM. You’re going to be burning up your battery life in translation overhead. And you can’t do it with Linux if you want to run binary-only software – often Windows software – which is what Steam distributes. That library of software is just never gonna be translated; some of it probably doesn’t even have the source around anywhere. I don’t even know if Steam in 2024 has a native way to distribute ARM binaries (though I assume that one could have the game handle the target and running appropriate code).