top | item 34401418

Apple Silicon Mac’s have 2-3 times longer battery than PC laptops

128 points| retskrad | 3 years ago |youtube.com | reply

203 comments

order
[+] Waterluvian|3 years ago|reply
I got an M1 for work and my very quick good/bad review:

It kind of sucks how much stuff wouldn't work on it without special install/compile from source instructions. But that's mainly just growing pains that go away.

There's also the issue that WASM multithreading basically does not work on M1 yet[1].

But, I am in love with a laptop that runs for days (of my 3-4 hours per day usage) without needing to be charged. I look at that laptop like my Kindle more than my phone: charging it is this occasional chore, not a daily "must get plugged in." I cannot quite articulate why, but this is such an awesome thing that's changed my behaviour patterns. It just sits there and I pull it up, use it, shut it, and put it down. I'll see "20% battery life" and think, "I'd better charge it tomorrow" rather than "I'd better interrupt everything I'm doing and move to an un-ergonomic location so that I can sit a hotplate on my lap while it charges."

I also love that it doesn't make noise or get hot.

Oh and another curious weirdness: when I open the lid in the morning, the cursor only moves at 30fps until I close the lid and re-open it.

[1] https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=122868...

[+] duffyjp|3 years ago|reply
I got the 16" M1 Max from work and adore it. I do Rails mostly and it's fantastic. We have a Rails based ETL app that pulls data from Oracle into a local Postgres with tons and tons of transformations. The Mac significantly outperforms our production server with Xeon Gold CPUs despite running the app in Rosetta due to Oracle's lack of arm64 support.

I've also never heard the fan, even running 100% load for hours. I'm sure it's spinning a bit but you can't hear it and the machine isn't hot. My Coworkers' Dell laptops sound like a vacuum just running a Teams meeting.

[+] fmajid|3 years ago|reply
I wish mine were slightly less efficient. Sometimes it's nice to have a warm laptop on your lap in winter, not a frigid slab of aluminum :-)
[+] blinkingled|3 years ago|reply
I am wondering why anyone at Intel/AMD/Asus/Dell and Microsoft etc are not realizing that there is low hanging fruit to be had in battery life department on current x86 hardware.

The reviewer makes a decent effort with his more limited capability than PC industry giants to discover that Windows is boosting the single core to its max TDP for single core browsing workloads resulting in very high power consumption. Basically scheduling strategy from desktops and servers used as-is on laptops! And easily fixable in software!

SoC power consumption is the remaining bottleneck - that's not as easy but still if CPU/SoC/BIOS vendors and OEMs came together it would not be all that harder to fix that.

These two fixes would put x86 into a very competitive place in laptop battery life department - it's not ARM vs x86, it's the integration pieces. Mind boggling that nothing is being done by PC makers.

[+] foobarian|3 years ago|reply
It's not that surprising. Have you ever been in a meeting with members from multiple companies? You can hear a pin drop, they are all afraid of spilling secrets or just deferring to management (which is usually also in the room since those tend to be high profile meetings). The only way to get this done is to do it in-house like Apple does. I think MS has sincerely pushed on this with the Surfaces but I don't think they control enough of the vertical below chipset level to match Apple.

Basically Intel and MS would have to merge and on a deep cultural level. That's what Apple has.

[+] duped|3 years ago|reply
> it's not ARM vs x86, it's the integration pieces. Mind boggling that nothing is being done by PC makers.

Intel spent over a decade and billions of dollars to make a mobile x86 chip that could compete with ARM on battery life and they failed. And now they're getting taken to the cleaners by an ARM chip for laptops. I don't think it's the integration that's the problem, x86 is just too inefficient relative to ARM.

When it's more efficient to emulate x86 on an ARM chip than to use a native x86 processor you have to ask some questions about the ISA and design.

[+] rsynnott|3 years ago|reply
> it's not ARM vs x86, it's the integration pieces

Eh, I'm not sure how true that is. There are no doubt improvements that could be made, but, well, compare battery life on an ARM Mac to a related x86 Mac; it is night and day.

[+] nikanj|3 years ago|reply
What the OS needs is a way to tell CPU-hungry applications no. One misbehaving app (looking at you, Teams) is enough to pull the CPU to max power consumption and wreck the battery life.

Just keeping the clocks low and letting banner ads rotate a little more slowly would make for much happier users. Even if I set the priority of an app to minimum, the OS still does it’s best to respond to CPU demands

[+] Kukumber|3 years ago|reply
> Mind boggling that nothing is being done by PC makers.

Correction, nothing being done by Microsoft, they own Windows, they own the software, yet they decided to go full bloatware, for Microsoft, the people who complain are "trolls"

And this video is the result, mediocrity

For some reason, Microsoft always dodge criticism and responsibility, that's what's mind boggling

[+] m_st|3 years ago|reply
I can confirm that various Dell XPS 15 models and Microsoft Surface Book 2 and 3 models are just not usable without the power plug for my software development (and very rare gaming) needs. I also need the power plug for a simple thing like a Microsoft Teams meeting that last longer than one hour.

Compare that to my MacBook Air M1 which runs for a full day easily. Also, standby works.

With Dell I learned it's better to always shut down.

[+] ubermonkey|3 years ago|reply
It staggers me that this is still a problem, because *more than 20 years ago* I switched from Win98 on a ThinkPad to a G3 Powerbook partly because of sleep.

I was working almost exclusively in Office docs back then, and the Mac and Win suites were (then as now) file-format compatible. What coding I did was on *nix servers I could SSH to. And I got real, real tired of often-crashing, slow-booting, sleep-sucks Win98 on a laptop.

Then I noticed a colleague who'd come into the consulting group from the design side, and kept his Mac. He could just open it, do something, and close it. And then open it again, and have it wake up normally. It crashed marginally less often than Win98 (this is pre-OS X), but the boot time was MUCH faster, so the crashes were less annoying. I bought a Mac and have been here ever since.

And you're telling me that even today, in the Year of Our Lord Two Thousand Twenty Three, that sleep still doesn't work for shit on big-name Windows laptops? That's bananas.

[+] wlesieutre|3 years ago|reply
Sleep mode is really bad. I had a Surface Pro 3 which was the first iteration of "connected standby" and it would run the battery down while sleeping in less than a day.

I was borrowing a newer Surface Pro from work more recently and hoped with the additional years of development they would have managed to fix it. Sadly not.

[+] PlutoIsAPlanet|3 years ago|reply
> Compare that to my MacBook Air M1 which runs for a full day easily. Also, standby works.

Huge credit to whoever wrote the standby/sleep code for Darwin for the M1s, I've never had to close my M1 Airs lid and worry about standby not working or it not resuming.

Windows is a mess and unreliable, and Linux is less said the better, it doesn't even work with secure boot on.

[+] g_p|3 years ago|reply
Suspend/sleep mode on (recent) Windows laptops seems very hit-or-miss, since everyone started to move away from "proper" S3 sleep, and towards what Linux calls "s2idle" (modern/connected standby on Windows?)

It seems to be a fairly significant regression in terms of functionality, which nobody really asked for, but which results in significant idle drain, coupled with the risk of a laptop deciding to resume and heat up in a bag, etc.

Apple seems to have a (long standing) positive argument here - to point at how when you put a Mac to sleep, you can resume it days later with negligible battery drain. Windows seems to have lost this in the post-S3 sleep era.

[+] skratlo|3 years ago|reply
Sure, but how will the MacBook hold when it's as old as your Dell?
[+] indymike|3 years ago|reply
I carry an M1 Macbook Air (for xcode) and an LG Gram 17 running Kubuntu for everything else (which is most of what I do). The Gram is probably the best laptop I've ever owned (it replaced an XPS-15) - it's bigger (13" vs 17"), lighter (2oz less than the air) and gets crazy life out of the battery.

When new, the Gram got 11-16 hours of battery (it now gets 8-10 hours) under development load (i.e running a node app, a go app and a Django backend, plus support servers). The Air hasn't been used as hard as the Gram, but it's battery gets similar performance. On the power management front, everything works on the air. On the Gram, hibernate is disabled, and sleep works (I've left the Gram in my bag over a three day weekend, and it was at about 20% on Tuesday when I opened it up). I ran Windows for about a week on the Gram and it did got less than eight hours of battery. No idea why.

[+] rektide|3 years ago|reply
I've had quite good success with hibernate on Linux. It was a long time ago but I accidentally tried it on a laptop ~13 years ago & it just worked. The appeal was immediate- 3-5s boot/sleep rather than near instant but no battery drain!

I had one laptop where the wifi would only come up every other boot, but that did eventually, after many years, get resolved with a new kernel.

It's been really nice having no power drain on personal laptops! Agreed, I too see pretty excellent power consumption on Linux. The new connected Windows stuff looks so awful, unbelievable power drain. I hope it largely remains a Windows problem & doesnt Linux greatly. To be honest, 20% after a weekend is much less than I'd want.

[+] esskay|3 years ago|reply
Absolutely love my (completely base model) M1 Air, and my M1 Pro MBP supplied by work. Both have shockingly amazing battery life.

My work one was replacing a 2016 Macbook Pro which struggled to last more than a couple of hours when I was doing dev work, all whilst trying to reach orbit with its fans. I've never heard the fans kick in on the new one.

As for the Air, I thought I'd be crippling myself a bit by only going fot the basic 8GB RAM model, and other than when I installed a copy of Premier Pro and tried rendering something it's been amazing - even then it rendered fine, just took a fair bit more time than on a pro.

I'm not sure I could go back to an overheating, crappy Intel "Mobile" based laptop - they shouldn't even be allowed to call those things mobile chips at this point, they're utterly shite.

[+] seiferteric|3 years ago|reply
This is actually probably the best comparison Latest Intel Mac MBP to M1/M2 MBP. A lot of discussion here is about windows and OEMs not doing enough. If that were the case, then why couldn't Apple work their magic on intel Macs? They had pretty crap battery life & performance too compared to their new stuff. I doubt they would have gone through the work of developing their own processor if it were just a matter of getting power states and clock boosting right in the software...
[+] arachnid92|3 years ago|reply
Same experience here. I have a 16" M1 MBP for work (mostly Go and Rust development), and it's the best computer I've ever had. It's a beast that can handle anything thrown at it without even spinning the fans up, it's insane. It's closely followed by my personal 16GB M1 MBAir which I am currently basically only using as a LaTeX machine to write my PhD thesis on. The Air in particular has AMAZING battery life, I can go days and days without charging it while using it for several hours a day. It's also faster and more responsive than my previous i7 tower with 32GB RAM, and that's saying something.
[+] joshstrange|3 years ago|reply
I keep having to unlearn years of "Laptop = hot" and "<2 hours of battery if I'm pushing the laptop".

My 2014 got warm but never too hot on my lap but when I got the 2019 i9 it was unbearable to put on my lap without some kind of insulation. Now my M1 Max barely feels warm at all on my lap, often cold and the battery is really something else.

Sometimes I play Factorio sitting on my couch and with my 2014/2019 MBP I HAD to have the power cord nearby. Obviously I could go on battery for a while but as a rule I always plugged it in while using (see also: I LOVE having magsafe back, the 2019 always made me super anxious with only having USB-C for charging). Now with my M1 Max I can go for hours playing without thinking about power.

Likewise when I go up to see my parents/family I can jump on my laptop a number of times for quick tasks (~2-3 hours over a few days) and I never have to think about plugging it in. Maybe it was something I had installed on my 2014/2019 MBP but I felt like those discharged faster when not in use. My M1 Max feels much closer to an iPad where you can leave it unused for days and come back to still having 80%+ battery.

[+] steveylang|3 years ago|reply
For me the worst part was not my lap but my left palm (2013 MBA.) We had carpal tunnel, someday there's going to be a new syndrome that comes from constant heat being applies to your palms while using a laptop computer.
[+] dbg31415|3 years ago|reply
I have a 2019 MacBook Pro with an Intel processor.

I have a 2021 MacBook Pro with an Apple processor.

One is a work machine, the other is my personal machine.

--- Things I love about the 2021...

The keyboard is just spot on perfect. No stupid touch bar. It feels good to type on too.

It has MagSafe again.

It doesn't get hot. The Intel MBP has real heat issues. It sucks to use it on my lap, or lying down. MBPs get really hot on video calls... and I spend all my time on video calls. For comparison, I shut everything down on the two machines and video called one from the other... and the 2019 had over 3x power usage on video calls. Also it didn't heat up!

The screen is "burn a hole in your eyes at night if you forget to dim it a bit" bright. It's amazingly bright.

I thought the notch would be annoying but if anything now the entire top of the 2019 feels like a notch. Meh. I don't care about the notch, it's never gotten in the way. And if anything the consistent black space around the monitor on the 2021 makes me really noticed how the 2019 has more black space on the top than it does on the sides.

The battery can go all day. Like no joke. And what's awesome is when I travel for work I don't even bring the charge brick with me. I know it seems like a small thing, but it means I can just use a smaller "sleeve" style case and it just makes traveling a little easier. One less thing I have to lug around on a day-flight.

--- Things I miss about the 2019...

The case on the 2021 is just flat out ugly and hideous. It's a total square box. It's thicker, it has more "give" and doesn't feel as solid. It feels cheap and shitty and hollow and all the things Apple laptops aren't supposed to feel like. It doesn't have any of the nice graceful curves that make you say, "Man these guys... how did they do all this?!" It's just a big thick ugly box that "thuds" when you tap on it and has visible give when you grab it in certain places. I think they even changed the finish texture on the aluminum. I just hate the way the 2021 feels. It feels cheap and flimsy. I hate the design choices on the 2021 too. Feels like they went back 10 years.

[+] spy888|3 years ago|reply
That is exactly how I feel about the new MBP designs.

So sad to see the terrible new designs. I returned my MBP and now use the MB Air.

Hope Apple can upgrade their design team and move to a new generation of MBP designs soon.

[+] jarek83|3 years ago|reply
Using M1 Macbook Pro for year and a half. It's great, it's quiet, it's not getting hot and the keyboard has been reverted to a great one (comparing to previous model). Silence when I work is something I have been unaware of how precious it is - because none of my previous machines were able to be silent ever before.

Doing a lot of web-dev with docker desktop. I can't think of a flaw - it's not it does not have any (like it could be better for occasional gaming), but compared to other setups available on the market, it's just flawless.

[+] diimdeep|3 years ago|reply
Apple deserve more market share.

"People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XAfTXYa36f4

[+] mikedelago|3 years ago|reply
I would prefer a Linux machine with similar hardware features over a Mac.

Honestly, if they just said "alright, we'll let you install linux and make it easy and the hardware should work fine", I'd probably buy one right now.

[+] highwaylights|3 years ago|reply
Maybe when they stop crippling their already expensive hardware to gouge customers.

Where's my multiple display outputs, Apple? I paid way more than any competing device, every one of which allowed for more than one extra display. I'm not a video editor, I don't want to buy an M1 Max just to get triple monitor support back.

[+] sofixa|3 years ago|reply
> Apple deserve more market share.

If their OS wasn't a dumpster fire of mindbogglingly poor UX hidden inbetween good and shiny UI/UX (if anyone wants examples, not having the option to have different scroll directions between mouse and trackpad even if the UX implies you do, and useless undebuggable error messages such as "A USB device is consuming too much power and has been shut down, reinsert it to use it again" without any indication which device it's talking about, with all of them still working), and if their hardware wasn't utterly unmaintainable I would have shared your opinion, but hélas that isn't the case.

[+] koinedad|3 years ago|reply
Getting an M1 MacBook has been a game changer. Rarely do I have battery anxiety! I just wish I would have got the higher ram in retrospect.
[+] ridgeguy|3 years ago|reply
My M2 MacBook Air is the best computer I've owned, bar none. Can confirm the battery life, easily 22+ hours in my use.

My only known downside to low power consumption: when I wake, I usually lie in for 30 minutes of surfing with the M2 on my chest. It's quite cold. I usually visit a compute-intensive site like Ventusky to warm it up for a couple of minutes.

First world problems....

[+] lr1970|3 years ago|reply
> Apple Silicon Mac’s have 2-3 times longer battery than PC laptops

The title should say "longer battery _life_". And no, the Mac's battery itself is not longer than the PC's one.

[+] breck|3 years ago|reply
I've had my M1s for over 2 years and not a day goes by that I don't think "Thank you Apple, this has made my life better." Absolute game changer. Has helped me do things that were previously impossible.
[+] friedman23|3 years ago|reply
The battery life is amazing. But just as amazing is that my hands don't sweat when using my laptop anymore because it doesn't get anywhere near as hot as other laptops when under load.
[+] itg|3 years ago|reply
And I can keep my non-apple laptops for longer b/c I can upgrade ram and storage and easily put in a a new battery when needed.
[+] geerlingguy|3 years ago|reply
On the flip side, I've sold every one of my old Apple laptops, usually for a few hundred bucks at least after 4-6 years of use. After 4-6 years I can get maybe $100 or a little more for any of the Lenovo and Dell laptops I owned.

Apple laptops depreciate much slower.

[+] toomuchtodo|3 years ago|reply
I am running code right now on my desk (archival ops) on a ~10 year old MacBook Air (MacBookAir6,2 from system report;8GB ram 512GB SSD). Apple replaced the battery for $100.
[+] nicce|3 years ago|reply
We are already in situation that if you buy 32gb RAM for your PC, it is likely that there are other bottlenecks than RAM for the next 5 years. Also the disk requirement is not increasing so drastically anymore, unless you are gamer.
[+] akmarinov|3 years ago|reply
Those are some chonky laptops I assume.
[+] friedman23|3 years ago|reply
I just pay apple for insurance and they replace my battery at no additional cost. And if I ever spill water on the laptop or damage it in any other way that's my fault they replace it for a fraction of the actual cost of the thing.
[+] varispeed|3 years ago|reply
It's not difficult to upgrade ram and storage on M1. The problem is limited availability of memory chips. But if you have pre-balled chips and hot air station (even the cheap ones would do) it's fairly quick to swap them out.

Even if you have used chips re-balling with right stencils is relatively easy.

I think legislators should compel Apple to make chips available to general public so these upgrades can become mainstream.

If general public is not comfortable doing that themselves, I am sure any repair shop would be more than happy to do such an upgrade for the customer.

[+] steveylang|3 years ago|reply
Batteries on Apple laptops have always been pretty easy to replace (if not RAM and storage), just not swappable on the go. No glue, just screws- not sure if that's changed recently though.
[+] D13Fd|3 years ago|reply
This is an increasingly niche need. It’s rare for people to upgrade HDDs or RAM in laptops.
[+] jrochkind1|3 years ago|reply
I have been pretty amazed by how long my new macbook pro battery lasts.
[+] rvz|3 years ago|reply
Of course it does.

No contest on optimized battery life with MacBooks. Or the trackpad, or keyboard, or screen, and performance all in a very lightweight machine that just works.

[+] Mikeb85|3 years ago|reply
It's not exactly a revelation that ARM chips are more efficient than x86...

It would be nice if someone other than Apple put some real effort into non-x86 laptops but here we are...

Of course, I'm still never going to be stuck in Apple's walled garden, my laptop that only lasts 6-8 hours is still "good enough".

Also shoutout to Fedora and GNOME, the "power saver" profile literally doubles battery life without any noticeable difference in performance.