Anything with over 100WH batteries would need airline approval before you can fly with it. This is why laptop makers rarely exceed this limit.

https://www.faa.gov/hazmat/packsafe/portable-electronic-devices-with-batteries

It does add something by way of weight, but I just can't believe that the entire market out there honestly wants to have shorter laptop battery life over a slightly-heavier laptop. I mean, sure, all else held equal, I'd take a lighter laptop. And there's some size where I don't want a larger battery -- like, I don't want a Tesla Powerwall glued to the underside of my laptop. But at 100Wh, the current airline limit? Hell, yes, I sure as heck would rather have the longer battery lifetime.

And let's even say that someone is completely fine with their existing laptop battery lifetime -- like, they usually use their laptop plugged in, only have short stints away from a plug, like a conference room. Then you still can trade battery capacity for other desirable things. Stick a brighter screen on. Have a higher refresh rate. Have a more-powerful CPU or GPU and the fans to cool it. Have the capacity to drive external USB devices that may slurp power off the laptop's battery. Restrict the maximum-charge level so that the battery's lifetime is extended -- batteries degrade rather more quickly if fully charged, and a number of devices have settings to permit them to be only partially-charged -- without needing to cut into the capacity for a single charge.

I absolutely understand small-battery, budget laptops existing for people who strongly want the price to be at a minimum. Cut RAM down to a bare minimum, put in as little storage as possible, slash the battery to what's tolerable.

I also understand that there are people who are hell-bent on ultra-light laptops, want everything at all possible stripped out. That's fine too.

But surely there are people who don't fall into one of those two camps.

I just can't believe how hard it is to find 100Wh laptops in 2024. And traditionally, that wasn't the case. You could find plenty of laptops with 100Wh batteries. In the past, some laptop vendors let you choose the size of battery you wanted, and some even had dual batteries, one internal and a hot-swappable battery.

I get that USB PD powerbanks can help alleviate some of the problem, and I'm sure that that has to have been the factor causing laptop vendors to start slashing internal battery sizes, but they also aren't the same thing as an actual internal battery. There's no protocol for them to report their charge, so a laptop can't report life remaining. Theoretically, one could have one pretend to be a UPS rather than a battery, and there are various protocols for those, though OSes don't -- well, Linux doesn't, don't know about other OSes -- treat UPSes as another battery, so you're not gonna get software packages incorporating it into their "time remaining" estimate in the dock, and I'm not aware of any USB powerbanks that actually try to use this route. It's another box and cable to lug around, and another port on the laptop tied up.

It's one of the slot in ones though right? so it doesn't really count - it effectively integrated.

two USB ports

I don't know if both could provide the same amount of power, and I'd bet -- given that laptops don't -- that the phone would only be able to charge off one.

USB ports aren't perfectly interchangeable today. If they can't be made to be, I kind of wish that at least USB would have a set of standards for indicating power-in capable ports and ports by wattage capability. Like, reserve one color or symbol or something for one, one for another. Right now, device manufacturers just do whatever and sometimes don't indicate what is what. I mean, yeah, it's great that they're backwards compatible, but when you have ports that don't all behave the same, it'd be nice for it to be immediately-obvious what they do.

Also, while I'm dreaming, I'd like power-pack and battery capacity to be listed in watt-hours rather than amp-hours, given (a) that voltage isn't universally the same and (b) that what people care about is about how long something can be run ("I have an N watt device and an M watt-hour battery...").

If you don't care about 3.5mm a FairPhone comes pretty close to that description.

You can get laptops that have 5G radios that you can use for data with Linux.

As I understand it, there's no support for voice/SMSes at the radio level, but in theory, if you were willing to tolerate it and your cell service provider offers support, you could do WiFi calling.

Could also get service from a random other VoIP provider, use that over the data connection.

Probably not as battery-efficient, requires more of the stack to be awake to be listening for incoming calls.

I think that a larger downside is that Android software is designed for a touch screen and low power usage and low data usage across the board, and GNU/Linux software generally isn't.