[Zevis]

I'm confused. I easily get 8-10 hours on my Core i7 laptop as long as I'm not at 100% CPU usage permanently. Modern Ryzens also hit this easily. So I don't know why 8 hours screen on time on a tiny screen with an incomparably weak CPU is supposed to be proof of how much we need ARM.

Apple's M1 is in a class of its own, unfortunately.

[PragmaticPulp]

I’m also frequently confused when people refer to Windows laptops as in a different league of battery life. Modern Windows laptops do just fine. M1 is a cycle ahead, but the Ryzen mobile parts are actually very good too.

[rtpg]

Lots of people buy 15 inchers with dedicated graphics etc. Or like... run Linux (which hoses the battery on a lot of stuff if you just use it out of the box without tweaking stuff).

Also really cheap laptops aren't as great about battery life just cuz of reasons. I think there's a lot of selection bias (like people who have a lot of money will buy macbooks in general cuz that's what everyone says to do)

[Roritharr]

I suspect it has todo with getting decked out machines. If you've got the >1tb ssd and the >=32GB RAM model, you will see your OS simply use the ressources for caching and speeding up the machine, which in turn will use more battery.

At least that's my pet theory, running an 4750U with 64GB of RAM installed ;)

[p_l]

It's a reality distortion field and maybe effect of not blocking OSX's default "go to sleep the moment you stop looking at it" policy. Macs were stuck at (marketing) 10h battery lifetime for so long (for comparison - Xeon mobile workstations with few times the power regularly hit 10h on battery without tuning), that M1 feels like huge jump out of nowhere.

[ajross]

Yeah. Consumer CPU power draw is largely a solved problem. Total aggregate processor energy use on a typical Intel laptop is already down to somewhere around 20-30% of what the display backlight pulls. That's good enough, you're just not going to do much better on a laptop form factor.

The M1 isn't really that notable for "battery life", it isn't. All the people raving are people hitting particular edge cases of high CPU utilization that consumers (even developers) generally don't see when browsing and watching. The Apple power magic is all happening in phones.

And the magic of the M1 is that they have achieved desktop-class (nearly market-leading) performance in a chip that still draws like a phone at idle. It's an amazing piece of engineering, but in a laptop it's really just an incremental improvement over what we already have.

[systemvoltage]

> Apple's M1 is in a class of its own, unfortunately.

We want companies to excel and give a stiff competition to their peers. Now that we have M1, it's pushing the entire floor to the next level - pushing Intel, AMD and the entire x86 ecosystem.

Curious, why do you think it's unfortunate? Is it because Apple is a large company?

[duskwuff]

Not the parent, but: it isn't unfortunate that the M1 is so good; it's unfortunate that everything else is so far behind.

[baybal2]

If Samsung just commits to outspend Apple on the node commitment, transistor counts, and size, then the outcome of the race may not be so pre-determined yet.

Transistor for transistor, ARMs latest licenseable cores are not so much far behind.

[dannyw]

Not OP, but Apple doesn't sell their chips to other companies. It's their right to do so, but if Apple sold M1, that'd be great for consumers.

[fulafel]

Does the processor really dominate power consumption in modern laptops so much that the M1 chip largely explains the long battery life in new Macbooks? The data doesn't seem easy to come by with a cursory web search.

[f6v]

I was considering Zephyrus G14 at some point, so I visited the dedicated subreddit. There was a guide on getting it to ~8 hrs on battery. Man, I lost my enthusiasm right away. Custom fan management, getting rid of bloatware...