Ask HN: Why don't buildings have dry warm up rooms for your laptop in winter?
In winter, a laptop can get cold enough during a long walk or commute that it picks up moisture as soon as you enter a warm building. Powering on a damp laptop can cause damage, so a simple solution came to mind.
Public buildings like malls or libraries could offer a small dry warm up room where people take their cold laptops for ten to twenty minutes. The room would be warm with low humidity so the device can reach indoor temperature without collecting moisture.
Would you use these dry warm up rooms to protect your laptop from water damage during winter?
Just leave the laptop on during winter??
The surrounding cold winds would reduce or negate any potential harm from leaving the laptop on and it wouldn't be cold enough to hurt a laptop in a sleeve/cover.
Also, this would also affect electronics transitioning from a cool/dry room to a hot/humid outside area. Such as going from cold hotel room overnight to the blazing hot outside in asia in the summer.
Laptops are pretty rugged, but with more sensitive stuff like prototypes or test equipment, the easy solution is to put it in a plastic ziploc bag while it's warming up.
Are you sure this is a problem?
Have you encountered / measured it?
I have killed a laptop and a phone because of this but this was in extreme cold when getting down around -40, temps the vast majority of people avoid spending any amount of time in. Despite killing two devices, I don't think it is much a problem and the best way to combat it is to just leave it in your bag and let it warm up slowly.
I've noticed a few drops on the surface of my m3 MacBook Pro after going indoors following a 30 minute walk in the cold.
Not a problem for 99.9999% of laptop owners.
Get a hard case. Rip out the foam and replace it with something more insulation-y. Now you have a cooler, a cooler that’ll keep the cold out instead of in.
First World Problem
I don't know why you keep misusing Ask HN to present us completely disingenuous questions. Do you actually need someone to explain to you why this doesn't exist, or are you trying to leverage this website to validate your own, extremely specific pet peeve?
He’s trying to goad us into asking him why his laptop is getting damp in order to show he’s a big hardo who can’t close his laptop for the duration of a 30 minute walk.