Apple has really set the standard on battery life - 10-11 hours would be considered on the short end for any modem Mac laptop. My air performs on par with some high end ultrabooks, yet easily does 12+ hours on a single charge. I usually have the brightness turned up quite a bit as well.
It’s stunning how far apple is ahead of the pack right now, I really hope the others catch up
I must be holding it wrong then, my work issued M1 MacBook Pro holds for around 6-7 hours of regular (for me) usage, but can barely do 4 hours in a Teams call (without the webcam!).
With more than a handful of instances, Chrome and Chrome-based apps (Electron/CEF) will eat into battery life to a degree I've not seen of too many other things. I can spend all day working in heavy IDEs like Android Studio and Xcode, doing frequent incremental compiles and still get better battery life than I would with a heavy Chromium tab/app load.
Teams specifically is horrendously badly engineered on top of being an Electron app. Technically speaking it's like the polar opposite of VS Code despite being made by the same company.
My work issue 13" M1 MBP 16G/1TB regularly does 10-12hrs, including 3+ hours of zoom with video.
The only time I have battery issues is if I am working in a tree and a linter gets over aggressive or something like that where the constant load makes the CPU fan spin.
Normally I go an entire day on battery and just don't think about it. Fairly bright screen, Amphetamine running to prevent sleep and display from turning off.
Apple outdid themselves. My 2018 Macbook Pro got only 6 hours away from the wall, and my friends tell me the 16" experience from that era was even worse. Imagining the battery life of those ill-conceived i9 models... just thinking about their idle TDP makes me shudder.
> I really hope the others catch up
When was the last time you tried a Ryzen laptop? Any AMD APU made in the past 5 years should perform pretty admirably relative to the M1.
I had a Lenovo laptop with an AMD APU last years (T14 AMD). It couldn't keep up with a passively cooled M1 performance-wise, the fan would start make noise with a minimal amount of work, and in Windows I'd get 6-7 hours of battery life, in Linux maybe 4 or 5?
I bought the hype and it was miserable. (Not to speak of S3 suspend-resume not bringing back the trackpad half of the time and S3 suspend draining the battery overnight.)
No one will catch up as Apple owns their entire design.
MS has to work with Intel, Nvidia, AMD, etc. Dell the same.
With Apple owning the entire design their results should make it clear communication overhead is what creates the market fragmentation. In order for all the bean counter fiefdoms to be appeased a laptop gets released that is great BUT 9 hour battery life (out of the box, 6 in 12 months), or 1080p screen, or bad thermal design, or nose camera…
It’s hard enough to align goals in one behemoth let alone half a dozen.
A whole lot of tech products then are designed as Beanie Babies looking to capture attention in the short term, boost quarterly sales, earn bumps for a VP.
Apple is the only consumer gadget company taking the approach of linearly designing the entire stack over time. Everyone else is just looking to get through the holidays right now, respond to the metrics in 2023.
Does it actually last 12+ hours? I can't tell, because Apple nerfed the battery life indicator to just give a percentage number. Does my laptop being at 2% mean 2 minutes or 20 minutes? MacOS refuses to tell me.
Load is unpredictable, so it sounds like they stopped showing a number that was always imaginary and now show the only actual data that exists. Sounds like an improvement.
> Linux also tends to be quite a bit worse for battery life than Windows.
With a manual stock distro installation maybe, as the defaults are very conservative. But just install the "tlp" package (the laptop project) and the situation flips. At least that's my experience at work based on Dell Latitude laptops and Thinkpads T before. My battery life is way above my Windows using colleagues, and my fans are mostly off (unless big compilation or test runs) instead of mostly on. Of course it's very likely due to the anti-virus, but that's part of the corporate Windows experience nowadays.
sofixa|3 years ago
kitsunesoba|3 years ago
Teams specifically is horrendously badly engineered on top of being an Electron app. Technically speaking it's like the polar opposite of VS Code despite being made by the same company.
InvaderFizz|3 years ago
The only time I have battery issues is if I am working in a tree and a linter gets over aggressive or something like that where the constant load makes the CPU fan spin.
Normally I go an entire day on battery and just don't think about it. Fairly bright screen, Amphetamine running to prevent sleep and display from turning off.
kyriakos|3 years ago
smoldesu|3 years ago
> I really hope the others catch up
When was the last time you tried a Ryzen laptop? Any AMD APU made in the past 5 years should perform pretty admirably relative to the M1.
microtonal|3 years ago
I bought the hype and it was miserable. (Not to speak of S3 suspend-resume not bringing back the trackpad half of the time and S3 suspend draining the battery overnight.)
none8|3 years ago
MS has to work with Intel, Nvidia, AMD, etc. Dell the same.
With Apple owning the entire design their results should make it clear communication overhead is what creates the market fragmentation. In order for all the bean counter fiefdoms to be appeased a laptop gets released that is great BUT 9 hour battery life (out of the box, 6 in 12 months), or 1080p screen, or bad thermal design, or nose camera…
It’s hard enough to align goals in one behemoth let alone half a dozen.
A whole lot of tech products then are designed as Beanie Babies looking to capture attention in the short term, boost quarterly sales, earn bumps for a VP.
Apple is the only consumer gadget company taking the approach of linearly designing the entire stack over time. Everyone else is just looking to get through the holidays right now, respond to the metrics in 2023.
fragmede|3 years ago
Brian_K_White|3 years ago
elabajaba|3 years ago
Linux also tends to be quite a bit worse for battery life than Windows.
yaantc|3 years ago
With a manual stock distro installation maybe, as the defaults are very conservative. But just install the "tlp" package (the laptop project) and the situation flips. At least that's my experience at work based on Dell Latitude laptops and Thinkpads T before. My battery life is way above my Windows using colleagues, and my fans are mostly off (unless big compilation or test runs) instead of mostly on. Of course it's very likely due to the anti-virus, but that's part of the corporate Windows experience nowadays.