[justsomehnguy]

> My role has significant on-call responsibility. It's nice to be able to take it charged anywhere I could need it and know that for several hours it can handle anything I will throw at it, reliably.

You could do that for years with an extended battery in ThinkPads (and Dell I think, never used them). More so, you could just bring additional charged batteries with you, in case you really needed.

But yes, it took a little more space and weight than M1.

So M1 didn't allowed people on-call to be able "to throw anything at it for several hours", the tech was already there. The only thing M1 did bring is a small savings in the weight and space for the people who needs a glorified terminal with them.

Hint: ultrabooks were a thing long before M1.

[kaba0]

The M-serious brought an absolutely insanely big jump on the performance-energy efficiency graph, and that’s without doubt. Nothing came even remotely close to that before.

Those ultrabooks were insanely expensive and had like 3 hours of battery life.

[justsomehnguy]

If you are on-call then you diagnose and repair some remote system. You don't need the performance for it.

> Those ultrabooks were insanely expensive and had like 3 hours of battery life.

Ah, yes M1 for $300 is surely better!

And no, they didn't had 3 hours of the battery life.

I had 4 hours+ just a couple of days ago on a totally not tuned ASUS TM420 with a 3-cell battery.

> Nothing came even remotely close to that before

Except you needed to adapt your whole workflow for it, but as usual this part is ignored.

Sure, today you can do that way more easily because most (read: webdev, lol) things are done, but...

[kaba0]

Ok, 4 hours vs 10. It is still the difference between not powering off between bringing it from one power source to another and an actually portable use-case.

[prmoustache]

I sold it because I am not on all anymore but my GPD Pocket 2 was much smaller (it would fit in the pocket of my pants) and it would charge on a 20W smartphone usb-c charger.

My wild guess is if you are taking a laptop with you, you are likely to use some kind of bag so having a charger around is no big deal, especially if you are in someone's home. And if you are in a social place, you won't stay connected for hours as it is pretty antisocial, you are likely to have to have several phone calls and you will be asked to leave anyway so you usually fix the problem quickly and if not possible you just pay the bill and go back home.

[justsomehnguy]

I like how you ignored the price, build and battery capacity.

And how ignore where this thread started: "on-call".

There is a lot of things in M-series which are good, but it's totally not the price, not the starting model performance [for anything better than being a terminal] and definitely no 'the autonomy breakthrough'.

[numpad0]

[1] says "AMD 5850U beats Apple M1 in multicore performance by 29% having the same power consumption (15 Watt)", "Nothing came even remotely close to that" sounds like an exaggeration if that was to be believed.

I don't know whether you like that aesthetics of those laptops or whether the price fits in your budget or not, but I kind of feel that getting 3 or 4 hours of battery is price you pay for falling for way too thin flashy white brushed aluminum stuffs. Hardcore roadwarriors like ThinkPad X1 Nano users seem to be reporting 7-10 hours new for their machines.

I'm not saying that I think M-series CPUs are all fad - every datapoints available suggest it's just -fine- , I'm just saying they're probably not like decades ahead of everything else.

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28378263

[wtallis]

Why even bother linking to a comment that was thoroughly debunked at the time? Making a claim about power consumption (ie. a measured quantity) while using a number that represents TDP (a value assigned by the marketing department with no objective connection to reality) may have been an honest mistake for the original poster, but is quite dishonest on your part.

[numpad0]

I wonder what makes you choose such expressions as "thoroughly debunked", but that aside, It's not like 15W processor actually runs at 95W. It's still a close enough number to real power draw, especially when a laptop with "15W" CPU comparable to M1 runs for same 10 hours anyway.