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Comment by aliqot | Hacker News Reader

Congrats! There's not a whole lot left, is there? Audio via the speakers I think was the last one I was concerned about. Maybe brightness?

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USB4, Thunderbolt, audio over Thunderbolt, DisplayPort, TouchID. I'm not sure mike and camera work.

Also various accelerators: video decoder, video encoder, neural engine.

Unless I'm mistaken all of it is in progress, but not yet ready.

> audio over Thunderbolt

I'm not sure why this rates a separate mention, or even what exactly you're referring to with this one. Did you mean audio over DisplayPort or HDMI? I don't think there's any standard for audio over Thunderbolt like there is for audio over USB, and if there was then it would automatically start working when Thunderbolt itself is supported.

Yes, I mixed it up, sorry.

Deep sleep, currently they have a s2idle state that eats a bit too much battery.

This is a big one — when you close the lid on your laptop, the laptop stays on. When you open the lid again, the battery will be drained, because it stayed on the entire time.

Depends on how low your battery was. Here's a quote from their november update:

"CPU frequency scaling, device runtime PM (for select devices), hardware auto-PM… even prior to this release, users could already get 10+ hours of idle runtime. With DCP and proper display DPMS, that now goes as high as 30+ hours (powered on, screen off)!"

[...]

"While s2idle does work, it’s in its infancy and we haven’t debugged all driver issues yet. Here’s what works:

    NVMe is shutdown
    WiFi goes into S3 mode
    Display (DCP) goes into DPMS (backlight & screen fully off)
    DARTs power gate & restore state on resume
    CPUs stay in shallow idle
    Some misc devices (i2c/spi/etc) power off
    Wakeup via power button or lid open

So they report 30 hours of battery life with display off (not sure if it was in s2idle or just normal screen off operation). So if you close the lid overnight, it should eat <30% of the battery.

Display controller stays on. It's battery-hungry. This should change, now that DCP driver is available.

s2idle will be pretty resource-light once all peripherals can be put into sleep. CPU by itself is not consuming that much power when idle.

Unfortunately, that's also a problem with like 90% of new computers out there.

This has been a problem as long as laptops have existed. I had a Dell in like 2006 that I would close and throw in my backpack at the end of the day. When I got home there was a 50:50 chance it would be about 5000 degrees with the fans blasting because it never actually went to sleep.

The fact that this still routinely happens 15 years later despite the insane progress of technology is kind of hilarious.

This is a widespread recent problem due to Intel pushing for S2 sleep.

The remaining 10% are the mac, I suppose? It's one of the better things about macs, and has been working mostly flawlessly for at least 15 years, strange that the other platforms still struggle with it.

There are a few non-Mac vendors that still support S3 sleep mode. I think Thinkpads still work. The problem is that it requires vendors to support it in the BIOS. Windows no longer supports S3 sleep mode, so vendors aren't willing to add that feature just for Linux users.

Previous discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33846437

My 2019 Intel Mac Pro is really flakey about actually going to sleep when I close the lid. It seems to require me to reset the PRAM occationally to get it to work again.

I'm glad they moved to their own chips because these Intel Macs are the worst hardware I have ever owned.

My Thinkpad works fine under Linux, I didnt need to do anything to get great battery life and perfect sleep.

For what it's worth, my MBP is also a coin toss if it manages to get to sleep or not. Oftentimes even if i explicitly click Apple -> Sleep it just flashes and stays awake.

A very, very, very, long list of features.

There's actually a humongous list of peripherals, power states, and the speakers which don't work at all, to support.

Brightness is working already, as well as suspend. But there is a _lot_ of stuff to work out

Only on M1 devices, excluding the Mini & Studio: https://github.com/AsahiLinux/docs/wiki/Feature-Support

https://github.com/AsahiLinux/docs/wiki/Feature-Support

The important parts are working.

There might be different definitions of "important stuff" between you and others...

The base components are working, thats what I meant.

That definition still varies between you and others. I personally consider sleep to be a "base component."

Base is a component that's needed to the other components, such as the GPU, or a driver for the screen, and similar. A sleep function isn't a base component, since it's rather a feature.

That definition is obviously subjective, and depends on the user.

Some users (like myself) don't need a GPU for anything, and thus a GPU is not "base." It's a frivolous addition for playing games. You can run a whole desktop environment on CPU rendering with no problem.

But going to sleep is necessary for unplugging a laptop and taking it on a trip, which is a basic feature for many users, like myself, and a basic component of having a "laptop."

Sleep is also a necessary for the "battery component" to hold a charge while it's unplugged and unused.

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