Intel Corp (INTC)

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I've said it before WHr is the only relevant factor. You can see a 43WHr battery in both 3 and 9 cell formats

As a general rule, this is not true. I have not seen any 9-cell PC batteries that are 43WHr. Maybe you have, but they are generally double this size. Most often, capacity scales about linearly with the number of cells, and that can be explained by the fact that there's more industry consolidation and standardization now on battery cell vendors and their respective cell size. While a 6-cell battery won't always be exactly 50% larger in capacity than a 4-cell, that's usually a pretty close first order estimate, and so as a hypothesis, it works for my previous response, unless you can find the actual sizes and make a different claim.

The Sony Vaio T15 is a touchscreen, 15-inch, U Ivy Bridge chip with 43WHr battery. The battery time is actually not from my XPS 12 with much smaller screen and 47WHr battery. The difference is only 10% normalized to battery capacity

I don't get your point. The example here was a 15" laptop with small battery and Haswell CPU getting about 6 hours, while the manufacturer listed 4.5. We can call it a range, but the point is still that relative to the display size and capabilities, along with the relatively small size the battery, the battery life of the system can be easily explained, and really doesn't imply that Haswell systems cannot get the power efficiency improvements that they were designed to get.

If your point is only that vendors can skimp on battery size and offer mediocre battery life on a Haswell system, then that's just a statement of the obvious. Intel cannot force OEMs to put in larger sized batteries any more than they can force them to put in ample sized DRAM or storage. Some OEMs are going to design PCs with crappy specs to hit lower price points, and I don't see why that has anything to do with Haswell, since in addition to all the crappy PC vendors out there, there are good PC vendors as well, and there will be highly capable Haswell systems that are still in a good position to drive a PC refresh this year.

I don't know what there is to debate in all this.