I have a MacBook Pro with M1 ARM chip, and I love it, it’s extremely power efficient, I don’t really have to think much about charging it. It wouldn’t be possible if NVIDIA could force its chips on Apple.
If anyone is curious, third parties can license specific designs and drop them in their chips, or architecture licensees can design their own chips, like the M1, based on the instruction set architecture. There are around a dozen or so companies with an architecture license.
If they have to renegotiate with NVIDIA to get access to ARMv10, it would be quite nasty if NVIDIA decided they wanted a bigger piece of Apple's pie, especially if Apple has developed competitive GPU technology that made NVIDIA's somewhat obsolete.
Each generation of ARM ISA, e.g ARMv7 and ARMv8 are treated as separate license, mostly because they are incompatible. ( Possibly with the exception of ARMv9 which is really a ARMv8++ ) You dont get future ARMv10 work just because you keep paying. ARM's extension are a different matter.
The official number is 17 hours, bu I never had to test it in real life. The crazy thing is charging to 50% in 30 minutes, and 50% is enough to get me through my trips.
For battery longevity, in general I would charge to 90% and then use it until 20%, then recharge to 90% again. This makes the most out of the battery charge cycles, and avoid the increased stress of close-to-0% charge (bad if there for longer time) and close-to-100% charge (less bad but still better not to go there often). But maybe M1 battery system is different for some reason, I don't know.
A more reliable solution is to manipulate pmset directly, or use something like AlDente which handles it for you (the paid version has lots of extra features but the free one suffices to avoid charging above 80% by default).
Obviously when charging time arrives you need to realise yourself and plug in somewhere between 20 and 40%.
The only annoyance is the magsafe’s LED remains amber even when the mac stops charging at 80%.
On my m1 air I’ve only known it to charge to 80% after a period of several weeks where it was docked. As soon as I started using it away from power for significant amounts of time it went back to charging to 100%.
I just checked what happened last time. I went to bed around 2300, it quickly charged to 80% (getting there a bit after 2400), then stayed there until 0200, at which point it decided to charge to 100 which it had reached by 0400.
As it does every workday, and has since before I had that specific phone (which is 2 years old), the alarm woke me at 0600.
So over a 7h night it managed to spend more time at 100% than it did at 80. I’m not going to say I’m impressed, because I’m not. Based on usage pattern I could see it fail to reach 100% by 0600, but I don’t think I’ve woken at 4 once in the last 3 years.
There is zero crazy about that part, it's just 1C charging which is not even extra hard on the batteries.
These things are very power efficient while actually computing, but they are extremely power efficient while idle. The whole SoC uses a couple dozen milliwatts while in active idle state (e.g. screen off, machine up and responding to pings via WiFi).
For reference, the last zoom call I was on (2 hours) with nearly max brightness only drained the battery ~5%. My Intel MBP would’ve been down at least 20%.
I’ve had a range of MacBooks (2013, 2016, 2020, 2021) and it just isn’t a competition. The M1 is head and shoulders above the other models in battery life.
(Important, not just trolling)
For whom ?
Although I imagine the problem with a lot of newer crap will be draconian DRM measures freaking out at being ran in Parallels. Which are games I will never buy.