[Hellion]

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

[sofixa]

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!).

[kitsunesoba]

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.

[sofixa]

Teams is a shitshow, that we can all agree on. It doesn't work properly on any platform.

However, Chrome is the most popular browser by far. Does that mean that all the people bragging about their MBP's 10+ hour battery lifes aren't doing what probably the majority of users are (browse the web in a Chromium-based browser), and thus their anecdata isn't a representative sample?

[kitsunesoba]

It has more to do with the quantity of Chrome instances (tabs or electron apps) than it does with them running Chrome at all. A small number of tabs or 1-2 well behaved Electron apps will still have a sizable negative impact but it won’t chew through battery life like a heavy tab load or stacks of Electron apps will. The type of sites loaded in the tabs make a difference too; tabs with static documentation aren’t going to make the kind of impact a tabs with heavy web apps. Lots of variables.

That said, it’s not that uncommon for Mac users conscious about battery life to be using Safari where they can instead of Chrome, keeping Chrome instances down to a minimum. From what I’ve seen in discussions across the web, battery friendliness is one of the most cited if not the most cited reason why people use Safari.

I wish Google would pause feature development for a while and focus on efficiency, because that’s easily where Chrome is weakest, but that’s never going to happen so long as it’s the dominant browser. It makes Google more money to instead develop whatever they think will push more people towards Google services.

[InvaderFizz]

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.

[kyriakos]

I get 7 hours on my dell laptop without teams running and 2.5 hours with. I guess you can see where the problem is.

[smoldesu]

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.

[microtonal]

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.)

[none8]

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.

[fragmede]

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.

[Brian_K_White]

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.

[elabajaba]

AMD's 5000 and 6000 series CPUs are much more power efficient (6000 series being near m1 levels of efficiency) than Intel's current offerings.

Linux also tends to be quite a bit worse for battery life than Windows.

[yaantc]

> 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.

[aussiesnack]

Currently f/t linux user, been using it on and off on multiple laptops for 2 decades. Not once, regardless of tlp and other tweaks and many hours of twiddling and forum-reading and keeping stats for weeks on end, has Linux ever approached Windows' battery life on the same machine. I don't know how to relate that to your experience, other than to say that (1) I'm closer to comparing like with like (same user, same machine) and (2) every other linux user I've personally known has found the same as me.

Given the appalling and deteriorating state of desktop OS's, it seems unlikely I'll ever use anything other than Linux again. But I don't believe it will ever catch up with either Windows or MacOS on battery life. I just accept that as something I"ll have to live with.

[bombela]

I concur. On my Thinkpad T14 gen2, I have accepted I maybe get 3h of battery on a good day.

The battery is half the size of the lastest MacBook sure. But much less than half the battery life.

I don't have suspend issues. I am probably lucky.

I wouldn't code on anything else than Linux. But I got myself to enjoy CAD work on my gaming computer running windows. Not that windows is great. It's horrible. But because on windows the GPU and mouse acceleration works flawlessly and feels like an extension of my mind. On Linux somehow it is not as smooth. Mac feels sluggish too. As if there is some lag? But moving the mouse on windows feels just right (and yes I tried same hardware on windows / Linux).

I hate macos. It's buggy and slow. The touchpad is stupidly big. But precision is fantastic. It's an insult to everybody else really. Thinkpad touchpad is an insult of insult. People designing that crap should go to jail for the amount of time they waste on humanity.

[aussiesnack]

Quite. Much does come down to your patterns of use. I'm plugged in about 80% of the time, so while I'd love more battery time it's not a primary concern. I barely use the trackpad. I don't game. Linux is still top notch for software development. But I don't think an ideological insistence that it's better on every dimension than every other OS is either convincing or helpful.