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Comment by grk | Hacker News Reader

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grk·

It has a lower TDP CPU and a slower SSD.

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And a bigger battery. And it doesn't have the second thunderbolt controller to power.

I'd be very disappointed if that controller takes notable power when inactive. The rest is fair.

https://lwn.net/Articles/707616/

"Thunderbolt controllers consume about 2W even when idle"

For a laptop, that's crazy.

This is mostly because Linux can't manage Thunderbolt power states. I would be disappointed if MacOS didn't do it however, since the hardware is supposed to be "integrated" with software.

True, i can't imagine that being the case in macOS. Though, I was still very disappointed to find out that using the ethernet thunderbolt dongle used more battery that using wifi in my 2015 rMBP.

> "Thunderbolt controllers consume about 2W even when idle"

Literally the next sentence in the article: "Apple provides a nonstandard ACPI-based mechanism to power the controller down when nothing is plugged in and I have implemented patches this year to make use of it on Linux."

And later in the paragraph: "The patches improve battery life noticeably: idle power consumption on my MacBook Pro drops from 12.2W to 10.5W when powering down Thunderbolt (with the discrete GPU, and AirPort already disabled). macOS achieves 7W as it supports power management on more devices, such as Firewire."

The SSD speed is the same across the lineup

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