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Comment by vbezhenar | Hacker News Reader

M1 is overrated. I own MacBook Pro with M1 Max. It’s fast, but it’s not something that helps in day to day use. And ARM compatibility issues not really helping. Battery is not that amazing either. I spent 30 minutes in discord and battery was at 91%, 5 hours is not something unique. It’s good, fast and expensive laptop. But not something that I could call mind breaking.

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Discord in particular is a horrible battery hog—we used it a lot over the worst stretches of the pandemic in my social group, and it was constantly killing laptop batteries that could reasonably last 8+ hours, in like 3 hours flat. I've always had to avoid Electron (and leaving enormous web-apps open all the time, like Gmail) and use Safari to achieve (or sometimes exceed—they're relatively conservative about it) Apple's battery life claims. Unfortunately, a handful of common programs seem to be the equivalent of having your computer to find more digits of Pi constantly, on all cores, while what they're actually doing justifies maybe 10% of their actual power use. Mostly, it's webshit doing it.

Try the Discord PTB which is native to M1. https://discord.com/api/download/ptb?platform=osx

> And ARM compatibility issues not really helping

There were two things I wanted to try on my MBP w/ M1 - compiling an Android app that has some C code, and also to run Fidelity's Active Trader Pro program (not that I would use it that actively). I also installed the Rosetta stuff it prompted for.

The Active Trader Pro program would not run.

In Android Studio, the production version can not compile with CMake as it can on Intel-based Macs yet ( https://github.com/android/ndk/issues/1299 ). They say there is stuff in the beta/alpha/canary branches where it is working, but I am not in a rush and will wait for that to make its way into production.

> It’s good, fast

Yes, I did see the speed, especially with a normal Kotlin/Java Android Studio compile, on 16GB RAM.

My regular M1 MBP is comfortably managing 18 hours of normal use (non-video browser and terminal) or 12ish hours of more intensive use (video and Slack). Sounds like putting the M1 Max in a laptop form factor is a bit of a waste, as I've never even strained the base level processor.

Hmm, I have the air with m1, and my battery life is insane. Like 20 hours, even with a parallels vm running some of the time.

I do however have no idea what discord is. Isn’t it some kinda forum?

Also using safari when on battery doubles your life, fwiw.

Discord is like Slack, with video calls. I’m using Safari.

Slack has video calls… they’re Shite though ;)

> I do however have no idea what discord is. Isn’t it some kinda forum?

Budding Slack competitor that started with a focus on gaming. If you couldn't guess from the context of its eating battery like crazy, it's a webtech "application".

Now using a Macbook Pro with the M1 Pro chip with 16gigs of RAM for fullstack development. Best laptop I've ever used (that coming from a linux aficionado). Battery life is about 10 hours with Chrome, qutebrowser, Slack, Apple Music, Ruby and node processes for coding, and Neovim. Laptop basically never stutters or freezes. Screen, keyboard, speaker, mic, camera are all on-point.

My only complaint is that the window manager I use (Yabai) is acting buggy, and I miss i3wm.

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