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Comment by w-m | Hacker News Reader

The AMD versions are much cheaper, and have longer battery life:

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/surface-laptop-4/946627fb1...

    Up to 19 hours of battery life on 13.5” with AMD Ryzen™ Microsoft Surface® Edition processor
    Up to 17 hours of battery life on 13.5” with Intel® Core™ processor

    Up to 17.5 hours of battery life on 15” with AMD Ryzen™ Microsoft Surface® Edition processor
    Up to 16.5 hours of battery life on 15” with Intel® Core™ processor

The 13" AMD version only seems to be available with 16GB RAM and 256 GB storage, while the Intel versions go up to 32 GB and 1 TB.

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If the past Surface Laptop's are to be our reference then expect 30% less than the numbers stated by Microsoft.

Isn't that pretty much SOP for most laptop battery duration marketing?

Microsoft seem to be exaggerate more than Dell, HP, Lenovo and Apple in my experience.

Shockingly with the M1 Apple's battery life claims were quite conservative. I have been able to get an hour longer than Apple's claims without having to resort to any extreme measures.

Just my tidbit, as a salty owner: The battery life on the 13' MBP is poor, and does not come close to what is advertised with any sort of moderate use (email, chat, couple browser tabs).

The M1 MBP? That is what I am using (1TB/16GB model) and I easily get the 17 hours stated for web use. Even doing development in Xcode I can go 13-15 hours. It is the most impressed I have been with a laptop since the introduction of multi-core mobile CPUs.

What display brightness are you using? When I bought my M1 MBP it had a setting that made the display darker when I am not plugging it, but in reality when I'm outside on the sun, that's when I really need it to be bright. Still, even if I get 10-14 hours, I love it (also the fact that I can use 1 charger for almost all of my devices).

I am usually around 50-60%. I don't work outside though so never need to crank it up. I find it automatically adjusts it fine.

Intel based* sorry did not make the distinction.

If you have any electron apps that are still running through Rosetta (seems possible with chat apps), those are known to chew through battery like crazy. It may be worth keeping those in a browser tab until they get ARM native builds.

My M1 Air can easily go 12 hours on Xcode with several iOS simulators open. My friend with an M1 Air also gets similar battery life.

I'd strongly recommend resetting the system, and perhaps getting a warranty replacement if you continue to experience poor battery life with email, chat, couple browser tabs. That absolutely should not be happening.

My M1 Air tends to get 7-8 hours of "real world" use (when configured with all of the programs I have on my Thinkpad). Considering that my Thinkpad gets 5-6 hours, with a better screen/GPU/keyboard to boot, I don't reach for the Macbook as often as I'd like. Especially when I'm doing real work.

What is "real work"?

Not delegating things but doing things your own. That mostly involves a sane keyboard.

Interesting. What is "real world use" for you?

I bought my daughter an M1 Air for Christmas, she is a university student that mostly does written work in Word, research (so mostly web and PDF stuff) and obviously video conferences right now. She has no trouble getting 13-15 hours of uni work done (a little less if a lot of video calls).

Compared to the 2018 Air it replaced she says it is "insane". Although battery life is great it isn't a huge deal for her. The thing she loves the most is no fan noise when on video calls. This was actually the reason I bought it for her as she constantly complained about how loud the old Air was as soon as Zoom started up.

"Real world" for me is working on lightweight container tech and it involves a couple VMs at a time. I also normally keep Spotify or Discord open, and I also have Nextcloud open since it doesn't natively support syncing to it. Combined, this workflow is a disaster for ARM. My $300 T460s actually manages to stay cooler on the same workload.

Ah yes that makes more sense. Are these containers and VMs native or running under Rosetta 2?

I use VMware Fusion a lot on my Intel MBP but haven't had a look at virtualisation on the M1 just yet. Waiting for it to mature a little more.

They're all native, to the best of my ability. Obviously Docker and ARM go together like toothpaste and peanut butter, so it's not I went into this expecting good performance (don't even get me started on stability though...)

Very interesting. Thanks for taking the time to reply, I am always interested to hear different use cases to my own.

Hopefully things improve as Apple Silicon becomes better supported over the next few months.

Ah... containers (if you mean Docker) is the one area where M1 doesn't really excel.

You got all the virtualization and all the emulation.

On Windows side... uhh I am not sure what is Docker using, if WSL or WSL2, or something else. But will probably be better for that usage.

So over 12 hours of battery life for the 15” sounds right?

I'd still expect the AMD version to have better battery life because the numbers are probably 30% lower across the board right?

It's the same for Apple M1 Macbook Pro after I set it to the maximum 500 nits outside, but for the Surface Laptop they don't specify the maximum diplay brightness.

It puzzles me why there are no Ryzen 5000 variants in this list. Microsoft used to collaborate with AMD tightly in recent years.

I think they’re on a tight squeeze right now at the fabs.

The thing that really got up my grill was that apparently the ram was also clocked slower for AMD.

What the hell Microsoft?

> Up to 16GB (AMD, DDR4, 2,400 MHz), up to 32GB (Intel, LPDDR4, 3,733 MHz)

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/microsoft-surface-laptop-4...

Microsoft <3 Intel

This is just horrible. AMD APUs can easily lose 20-30% of GPU performance with 2400 memory.

> The 13" AMD version only seems to be available with 16GB RAM and 256 GB storage, while the Intel versions go up to 32 GB and 1 TB.

For the 15" you can only get 16 GB ram too, but the ssd goes up to 512 GB.

Why is the AMD version limited to "just" 16 GB of RAM? That's sadly not enough for modern development environments.

Yes this quite outrageous, probably intel is paying to have the "highest" configuration sadly. And this 16G is also soldered, so cannot be replaced afterwards...

Seems like a deal with Intel to carve out some reason to buy an Intel model. AMDs are much faster, cheaper and consume less power, so the conspiratorial explanation is that Intel bought the high-spec exclusivity. It's been the same with other laptop manufacturers too.

Yeah some configs only allow you to get 3080 GPUs on mobile with intel. That doesn't mean there aren't any with AMD though

19 hours on 47.4WH battery and x86 CPU seems incredible. Almost unbelievable.

M1 Macbook Air has larger, 49.9WH battery, and only boasts 18 hours as maximum battery life.

Haven't checked, but screen resolution might helps to explain.

Windows laptops usually overstate battery life, we’ll have to see if it’s reproducible.

As I first saw noted on an Ars comment, it is unbelievable because their testing regimen has no reflection with real world testing, and I'm sure significantly different than Apple's, which I believe doesn't include 'standby' testing included in usage:

"Testing consisted of full battery discharge with a mixture of active use and modern standby. The active use portion consists of (1) a web browsing test accessing 8 popular websites over multiple open tabs, (2) a productivity test utilizing Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, Excel and Outlook, and (3) a portion of time with the device in use with idle applications. All settings were default except screen brightness was set to 150nits with Auto-Brightness disabled. Wi-Fi was connected to a network. Battery life varies significantly with settings, usage and other factors."

[0]https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/surface-laptop-4/946627fb1...

As they doubled down on video calls, I wonder how long it’d take MS teams to burn through the battery. On my 2019 i5 MBP I’d loose at least 40% of the charge over 1 hour.

Does any know how they are getting this numbers when it took Apple to move to a different architecture to improve the battery life?

From the footnotes

> Up to 19 hours of battery life based on typical Surface device usage. Testing conducted by Microsoft in February 2021 using preproduction software and preproduction 13.5” AMD Ryzen™ 5 Microsoft Surface® Edition processor, 8GB RAM device. Testing consisted of full battery discharge with a mixture of active use and modern standby. The active use portion consists of (1) a web browsing test accessing 8 popular websites over multiple open tabs, (2) a productivity test utilizing Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, Excel and Outlook, and (3) a portion of time with the device in use with idle applications. All settings were default except screen brightness was set to 150nits with Auto-Brightness disabled. Wi-Fi was connected to a network.

I think the key in there is "modern standby." What is the ratio of standby to active use? That and 150nits brightness, though that is common for a lot of battery tests. (I personally like 250-300 even indoors.)

AMD has left Intel in the dust on efficiency as well. It's mostly due to process tech: Intel is stuck on an advanced 14nm node, AMD is on TSMC 7nm, and Apple has bought out TSMC 5nm.

The Intel chip in the Surface 4 is a 10nm chip. Theyve been shipping since last year.

Been unable to get 32GB of RAM with a Ryzen processor instantly rules them out for me.

My (now older) T470P personal laptop has 32GB of RAM and it's coming up on 4 years old.

Wintel is alive and kicking it seems.

With a 4:3 display, it's obviously aimed at developers - yet they have a pointless 8GB option, and the AMD configs max out at 16GB?! It makes no sense!

My 5 year old HP Zbook has 64GB of RAM (I do occasionally use up to 48GB), but realistically 32GB is enough.

I'm in the market for a new dev laptop, and this looks like... except for the RAM that makes it a deal-breaker :(

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