[vient]

> building a CPU that doesn't guzzle battery

It may be the software problem as well. On Windows I regularly need to find which new app started to eat battery like crazy. Usually it ends up being something third-party related to hardware, like Alienware app constantly making WMI requests (high CPU usage of svchost.exe hosting a WMI provider, disabling Alienware service helped), Intel Killer Wi-Fi software doing something when I did not even know it was installed on my PC (disabling all related services helped), Dell apps doing something, MSI apps doing something... you get the idea.

It seems like a class of problems which you simply can't have on macOS because of closed ecosystem.

Without all this stuff my Intel 155H works pretty decently, although I'm sure it is far away from M-series in terms of performance.

[illusive4080]

The Mac ecosystem isn’t as closed as you’re alluding to. You can easily download unsigned binaries and run them. Furthermore, if you’re looking for a battery hog, look no further than Microsoft Defender, Jamf Protect, and Elasticbeat. All 3 of those are forcibly installed on my work laptop and guzzle up CPU and battery.

[swiftcoder]

> You can easily download unsigned binaries and run them

It's definitely becoming less easy over time. First you had to click approve in a dialog box, then you had to right-click -> open -> approve, now you have to attempt (and fail) to run the app -> then go into System Settings -> Security -> Approve.

I wanted to install a 3rd party kernel extension recently, and I had to reboot into the safety partition, and disable some portion of system integrity protection.

I don't think we're all that far from MacOS being as locked-down as iOS on the software installation front...

[vient]

> You can easily download unsigned binaries and run them

Of course, but I assume you don't really need to install third-party apps to control hardware. In my case Alienware and Dell bloat came from me setting up an Alienware monitor. MSI bloat came from setting up MSI GPU. Intel Killer stuff just got automatically installed by Windows Update, it seems.

> Microsoft Defender

This one I immediately disable after Windows installation so no problems here :)

On work we get CrowdStrike Falcon, it seems pretty tame for now. Guess it depends on IT-controlled scan settings though.

[cosmic_cheese]

Windows doesn't do it any favors, for sure. Running Linux with with every tweak under the sun for better life still leaves a large gap between x86 laptops and MacBooks, however, and while there's probably some low hanging optimization to be taken advantage of there I think the real problem is that x86 CPUs just can't idle as low as M-series can, which is exacerbated by the CPU not being able to finish up its work and reach idle as quickly.

[vient]

I wonder if Windows and Linux just can't yet work on heterogeneous CPUs as well as macOS does. Intel chose an interesting direction here, going straight from one to three kinds of cores in one chip. I almost never see LPE cores being used on Windows, and on Linux you have obscure soft like Intel LPMD which I tried but was not able to notice any battery life improvements.