Apple used lower brightness setting for showcasing M1's superior battery life | Hacker News Reader

Apple used lower brightness setting for showcasing M1's superior battery life

apple.com

4 pointsd3mon8 comments

"MacBook Pro with Apple M1 chip: Testing conducted by Apple in October 2020 using pre-production 13-inch MacBook Pro systems with Apple M1 chip, 8GB of RAM and 512GB SSD. The wireless web test measures battery life by wirelessly browsing 25 popular websites with display brightness set to 8 clicks from the bottom. The Apple TV app movie playback test measures battery life by playing back 1080p HD content with display brightness set to 8 clicks from the bottom. MacBook Pro with Intel Core processor: Testing conducted by Apple in April 2020 using pre-production 1.4GHz quad-core Intel Core i5–based 13-inch MacBook Pro systems with 8GB of RAM and 256GB SSD; and pre-production 2.0GHz quad-core Intel Core i5–based 13-inch MacBook Pro systems with 16GB of RAM and 1TB SSD. The wireless web test measures battery life by wirelessly browsing 25 popular websites with display brightness set to 12 clicks from the bottom or 75%. The Apple TV app movie playback test measures battery life by playing back 1080p HD content with display brightness set to 12 clicks from the bottom or 75%."

The screen brightness curves can of course be differently calibrated. But if Apple really wanted to show a fair comparison, they'd have just specified screen brightness in nits directly, instead of using this roundabout comparison.

Laptop screens can easily consume 3-7 Watts of power, which dwarfs the SOC power, and makes up for ~70-90% of the total system power draw for watching videos. So if the brightness settings were really different (in nits terms), this comparison is quite disingenuous on Apple's part.

There is one reason that makes it potentially legitimate to compare screens at different brightnesses when gauging battery life, but not when comparing SoCs. There are screen technologies that adjust color representation and brightness together, to make it possible for a dimmer screen to look brighter (or show up better in brighter light) by sacrificing some color range in a mostly imperceptible range. If you're showing off a technology like that to improve battery life, it's completely reasonable to compare screens at different absolute brightnesses in nits. But if you're comparing generations of SoCs, you should be doing so with exactly the same screen brightness.

Yup. Content adaptive backlight control (CABC) has been around for decades. But I don't think any modern devices use it? Least of all "Pro" devices like the macbook pro which lay so much emphasis on color accuracy.

Your headline is a lie.

You suspect they used a different screen brightness, but you don’t actually know.

It’s easily possible that the different laptops have a different number of clicks in their bightness settings since they use different panels.

I agree that it would be better for them to use a nits value or some other objective measure.

You however don’t know what the value is and so have made a false claim with your headline.

How about updating the headline to a question or a suspicion?

They likely use the same panel and settings, but your request is reasonable. Edited the title.

Doesn’t look meaningfully different to me.

Explicitly stated brightness setting instead of screen brightness.

It’s now ambiguous rather than explicit but you are still creating the same impression.

I know it is your intent to make it seem like they cheated.

You have no evidence for this - only a guess.

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