Why the watt is the most important spec in battery-powered devices
Every time I see “mAh” on a consumer product, I cringe. Megahertz are starting to bruise, too. That’s because the most critical components of portable gadgets — batteries and processors — should really be measured in watts: it’s the one common spec that gives you a real idea of what your device can do.
With watts, you can tell how much literal power is under the hood — how much energy is provided by your battery and how much is coursing through your chip. Watts determine whether there’s enough cooling to let that processor run free, instead of overheating and throttling prematurely. Watts can even tell you how much battery life you have left, based on the watt-hours (Wh) of battery remaining and the wattage at which your device is draining.
You can do it all with elementary school math — so why aren’t watts everywhere? Consumers are regularly exposed to wattage measurements when buying light bulbs or reading their power bills. But many gadget manufacturers insist on measuring their batteries in milliamp-hours and their chip speed in megahertz or gigahertz, neither of which are a good measure of a device’s true power.
The Steam Deck gaming handheld is my go-to exampl …