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by seltzered_ 202 days ago
In addition to the other comments, its worth noting macOS started adding developer documentation around energy efficiency, quality of service prioritization, etc. (along with support within its OS) around 2015-2016 when the first fanless usb-c macbook came out: https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Pe...

Think I'm arguing its both things where the OS itself can optimize things for battery life along with instilling awareness and API support for it so developers can consider it too.

2 comments

On top of this, they started encouraging adoption of multithreading and polished up the APIs to make doing so easier even in the early days of OS X, since they were selling PPC G4/G5 towers with dual and eventually quad CPUs.

This meant that by the time they started pushing devs to pay attention to QoS and such, good Mac apps had already been thoroughly multithreaded for years, making it relatively easy to toss things onto lower priority queues.

> so developers can consider it too

Try writing Apple Watch software.

Everything is about battery life.

It's interesting how they still can't get into the same order of magnitude with Garmin then.
I suspect it’s because the processor is a lot heavier-duty.

Right now, it seems like overkill, but not sure what all the health and fitness stuff requires.

As an Apple Watch user for over 7 years, I find this focus on heavy app to be completely stupid. The "smart" part of the watch is mostly useless, I've learned to use it the least possible. It is just rarely worth it to fiddle with such a restricted interface when you have the phone nearby the vast majority of the time.

The health stuff is really the killer app and they should have pivoted to low power high efficiency use case a long time ago. It doesn't make sense to charge the watch everyday for the little utility it provides.