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Comment by satysin | Hacker News Reader

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

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.

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?

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