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Comment by dvt | Hacker News Reader

Some back story: I bought a top-of-the-line X1 Carbon ThinkPad for ~$3,000 3 years ago. Within 1 year of owning it: the USB-C charging port broke, the fans started whining, so I had to open/adjust the case, Windows Hello never worked (?), the fingerprint sensor was wonky, and the battery ended up lasting around 5 hours with a realistic workload. This was after owning just about every top PC laptop brand out there: Alienware, Razer, a nice ASUS I had when in college, etc.

I bought my M1 MBP around a year ago. It's now 4:30pm, and I've been using it since 10am, sitting at 50% battery without plugging in at all. Everything just works. I even installed Steam and can play some games on it. I hated the idea of owning a Mac and have fought tooth and nail until I finally bit the bullet. It's literally the best laptop I've ever owned and I am never going back.

My gaming rig is a different story, but for productivity on-the-go, there's no comparison.

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I wish I could buy a new Mac and run Windows on it. But I really dislike macOS. I've tried to like it, but it just feels like a crippled OS compared to Windows. I hate the lack of support for true fractional scaling, the comically bad window management (Windows 7 was miles ahead of where macOS is today), the shitty text rendering, the lack of configurability, the half-assed attempt to bring the iOS security model (which is not itself bad) to macOS, etc. etc. etc. The dock used to be better than the taskbar, but the Windows taskbar has been strictly better since Windows 7 too.

Depends what you mean by “run Windows”. I run Win 11 on my M1 Pro MBP with great results. Even played a little Dark Souls last night.

I would like to have a MBP that just used Windows as an operating system, not in a VM.

Fair enough. This ain’t it then.

Agree 100%, this was what kept me away from a Mac, and why I was happy to let go the old MBP. I've been at it for months now but still hate the scaling and window management. I believe there's some third party tools that handle this and it's time to look into them.

The build times for a M1 are so fast that it's still a requirement for me though. The battery life for a MBP is amazing - it's almost a whole work day even on full compiling. So it's not really a choice.

> I've been at it for months now but still hate the scaling and window management. I believe there's some third party tools that handle this and it's time to look into them.

Don't know about the scaling, but for window management I find the Rectangle app quite helpful.

I am not sure what's wrong, but I've been underwhelmed with my 14" MBP's battery life.

I was super excited to get one for work solely because of all the buzz about battery life. But here I'm getting 5 hours or so. Firefox and Chrome are by far the biggest offenders, but I don't do anything special.

Just wanted to give another anecdote.

I doubt it’s the only issue, but I switched to Safari for most things years ago, back when I had an Intel Mac. It significantly extended my battery life.

Try with Safari and install an ad-blocker, both firefox and chrome keeps letting ads continue to animate (GPU) and use WebWorkers in the background, Safari basically freezes tabs that are not in use and don't drain the battery.

I try to use Safari as much as possible, but I need something that works on Windows as well.

Firefox with uBO [0] and Auto Tab Discard [1] is pretty good on the battery. I often go 10h without a charge on my M1 Air and usually there's still a bit to spare.

[0] https://ublockorigin.com/ [1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/auto-tab-disc...

Thanks for the recommendations, but I have both and some more. I wish there were an easy way to drill down on what exactly is consuming power.

Have you looked into the about:performance page? It might give you clues.

I have, but nothing stood out. I even tried Firefox Profiler (which is pretty good btw, kudos to the team), and it looks like DOM processing and renderer both spend a lot of CPU. But alas I'm not a frontend developer and have no incentive to dive deeper :)

It could be specific websites. Google web apps are notoriously hostile to Firefox.

I leave Javascript off by default on uBO and only allow it selectively when I have something to gain on each website.

Do you miss a touchscreen?

I use a surface laptop 4 as my mobile workstation, and I like it overall, but the battery life leaves a lot to be desired. I'm OS agnostic, so the M1s caught my attention, but I use the touchscreen so much I'm not sure how happy I'd be with it unavailable to my workflow.

I’ve realized that the only reason I desired a touch screen on windows notebooks was because windows trackpads are so awful. Even on high end $3,000+ machines.

The Mac trackpads are so responsive that they feel every bit as good as having a touch screen.

I've switched to using an iPad pro for all of my productivity and media consumption needs. With stage manager and an external monitor, it's going to become a very capable workstation, as it already is for me.

I have an XPS with a touchscreen and I always forgot it’s there. UI elements are just too small for my finger

Yes there is comparison, but not with Lenovo, Lenovo is crap.

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