[wwtrv]

> will arbitrarily use 2-3x idle power draw while on battery for no apparent reason

You might be thinking about Linux? IIRC OS X wasn't particularly impressive about that back in the x86 days and high-end Macs had horrible battery life.

[Panzer04]

No, this is Windows. It absolutely can use minimal power, but my experience closely monitoring my laptops consumption is it will regularly spike from 5-6w to 15-20w for extended periods, which obviously obliterates battery life. I've been unable to figure out why.

My particular specimen came with a 97wh battery (XPS), so it would be able to linger on for ~10+hrs if it could maintain its idle power consumption with brief spikes to do work, but in reality it's basically always less than that in my experience (and worse, its inconsistent as hell about it).

The other issue is sleep states, which as another commenter mentions leads to laptops using all of their battery in your backpack so it's dead by the time you actually try to use it :'(

It's made worse by comparison to modern phones, which deliver reliable, consistent power consumption throughout the day - so a laptop that regularly lasts a fraction of the time and doesn't know how to sleep just looks awful by comparison.

[kemotep]

I don’t think I have ever had a Windows laptop last 10 hours without a consistent effort to keep it in low power modes, keeping screen brightness as low as I can, and actively keeping the number of running processes and background programs as low as I can.

Sure 10-15 years ago, we were lucky to get 3-4 hours of battery life so getting 8-9 is great but they advertise these things as having upwards of 20 hours.

Linux not coming close to that is “acceptable” because they aren’t advertising it constantly as the reason you need to buy the latest laptop or get onto Windows 11. Apple is more honest in this regard and it really is the vertical integration that allows them to control the entire system.