Apple Silicon Mac’s have 2-3 times longer battery than PC laptops
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It kind of sucks how much stuff wouldn't work on it without special install/compile from source instructions. But that's mainly just growing pains that go away.
There's also the issue that WASM multithreading basically does not work on M1 yet[1].
But, I am in love with a laptop that runs for days (of my 3-4 hours per day usage) without needing to be charged. I look at that laptop like my Kindle more than my phone: charging it is this occasional chore, not a daily "must get plugged in." I cannot quite articulate why, but this is such an awesome thing that's changed my behaviour patterns. It just sits there and I pull it up, use it, shut it, and put it down. I'll see "20% battery life" and think, "I'd better charge it tomorrow" rather than "I'd better interrupt everything I'm doing and move to an un-ergonomic location so that I can sit a hotplate on my lap while it charges."
I also love that it doesn't make noise or get hot.
Oh and another curious weirdness: when I open the lid in the morning, the cursor only moves at 30fps until I close the lid and re-open it.
[1] https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=122868...
You can get it to warm up pretty quickly by running a local instance of Stable Diffusion or any CPU intensive task.
I've also never heard the fan, even running 100% load for hours. I'm sure it's spinning a bit but you can't hear it and the machine isn't hot. My Coworkers' Dell laptops sound like a vacuum just running a Teams meeting.
My third solution, which I promised myself I'd do over the holidays but never got to, is migrating fully over to MacOS so I can stop thinking so much about my tools and get back to thinking about my projects.
[1] https://www.linuxuprising.com/2021/01/how-to-enable-hardware...
I'm transforming Peoplesoft data into something actually usable, so it's more complex than any off the shelf tools I looked at could tackle. It's my third time doing one of these so the code this time around is super clean and maintainable.
The university I work for is switching to Workday next year so when we're actually provided details on that I'll be sure to revisit Kiba. If Workday's DB is cleaner it could be a good option.
Thanks for the tip. ;)
The reviewer makes a decent effort with his more limited capability than PC industry giants to discover that Windows is boosting the single core to its max TDP for single core browsing workloads resulting in very high power consumption. Basically scheduling strategy from desktops and servers used as-is on laptops! And easily fixable in software!
SoC power consumption is the remaining bottleneck - that's not as easy but still if CPU/SoC/BIOS vendors and OEMs came together it would not be all that harder to fix that.
These two fixes would put x86 into a very competitive place in laptop battery life department - it's not ARM vs x86, it's the integration pieces. Mind boggling that nothing is being done by PC makers.
Eh, I'm not sure how true that is. There are no doubt improvements that could be made, but, well, compare battery life on an ARM Mac to a related x86 Mac; it is night and day.
If I turn the screen all the way down so nothing can be seen, I can peg the processor constantly at 100% of my Intel Mac and still get 10 hours of battery life. The only caveat is that it's a 2010 Core 2 Duo, and what it does in 10 hours an M1 can probably do in 10 minutes.
Their iOS devices were also wildly more efficient than Android devices for years (may still be—I haven't had much exposure to Android devices in three or four years) despite both being on the same processor architecture, so it wasn't the architecture per se making them more efficient.
Apple just seems to be the only major vendor that cares much about power efficiency at a software level. There's absolutely a ton of room for improvement on x86—Apple proved it when they were still on that architecture.
Correction, nothing being done by Microsoft, they own Windows, they own the software, yet they decided to go full bloatware, for Microsoft, the people who complain are "trolls"
And this video is the result, mediocrity
For some reason, Microsoft always dodge criticism and responsibility, that's what's mind boggling
Just keeping the clocks low and letting banner ads rotate a little more slowly would make for much happier users. Even if I set the priority of an app to minimum, the OS still does it’s best to respond to CPU demands
Intel spent over a decade and billions of dollars to make a mobile x86 chip that could compete with ARM on battery life and they failed. And now they're getting taken to the cleaners by an ARM chip for laptops. I don't think it's the integration that's the problem, x86 is just too inefficient relative to ARM.
When it's more efficient to emulate x86 on an ARM chip than to use a native x86 processor you have to ask some questions about the ISA and design.
Like, in what way and how much inefficient in 2022? Would it still be that when Intel finally gets to 5nm/3nm? Is the video reviewer lying or mistaken when he says 2 biggest differences that make up for most of the power draw between x86 and ARM are not in the ISA?
Naive is a better word. The question is really, why don't designers (who have a vested interest in making a feature like battery life better to improve sales) take these "obvious" actions to improve their products? The answer is usually because they're not sound optimizations, or at least come with some heavy tradeoffs.
Disabling boost without understanding why its happening is not really a good idea, that's like removing memory because chrome is using too much.
IOW ARM doesn't have some magical ISA level stuff to do more stuff with less power or avoid doing stuff entirely that x86 couldn't replicate.
I wouldn't blame MS for this. Linux has the same, if not worse, state.
It seems unfathomable - maybe there is a valid reason for modern standby, but I've yet to find it. S3 resume is quick on a good laptop with good firmware. Modern sleep seems to drain the laptop battery quickly for some reason, and yet this has been going on for years now.
Maybe standby drain isn't part of the Windows logo requirements and ought to be?
Basically Intel and MS would have to merge and on a deep cultural level. That's what Apple has.
Although iPhones don't really get much better battery life than the best Android devices around, if you compare battery life/perf to the battery size, the amount of battery life they extract out of (comparably) small batteries is extraordinary. The biggest/best Samsung phone is 5000mAh, whereas the biggest/best iPhone is 4300mAh.
You just throw away efficiency at a system level when you design a phone based on another company's design (i.e., Qualcomm, usually, for Samsung). Qualcomm doesn't have appropriate incentives to make a device as integrated/efficient as Samsung/Apple do.
Compare that to my MacBook Air M1 which runs for a full day easily. Also, standby works.
With Dell I learned it's better to always shut down.
I was borrowing a newer Surface Pro from work more recently and hoped with the additional years of development they would have managed to fix it. Sadly not.
But it was really surprising to me with the Surface Pro 3 because for years you'd been hearing "Microsoft can't make sleep work as well as Apple because they're stuck dealing with hardware and drivers from 3rd parties" and it turns out 3 generations into their own hardware venture it still sucked just as much. Connected Standby was probably a large step back even.
When was the last time you had a problem with SSD failure? While I’m sure it happens, I don’t see a lot of complaints from people about their SSD failing.
I was working almost exclusively in Office docs back then, and the Mac and Win suites were (then as now) file-format compatible. What coding I did was on *nix servers I could SSH to. And I got real, real tired of often-crashing, slow-booting, sleep-sucks Win98 on a laptop.
Then I noticed a colleague who'd come into the consulting group from the design side, and kept his Mac. He could just open it, do something, and close it. And then open it again, and have it wake up normally. It crashed marginally less often than Win98 (this is pre-OS X), but the boot time was MUCH faster, so the crashes were less annoying. I bought a Mac and have been here ever since.
And you're telling me that even today, in the Year of Our Lord Two Thousand Twenty Three, that sleep still doesn't work for shit on big-name Windows laptops? That's bananas.
There are bazillion of configurations for Windows compatible laptops.
I had both perfect and awful experience with hardware part of them. Never I misattributed the problems with the hardware to the OS.
>There are bazillion of configurations for Windows compatible laptops.
Your point?
Yes, MS, Dell, HP sucks dicjs not making it work even on a flagship notebook, but that doesn't means what there are no Windows laptops with a working sleep, it just means what you don't hear from the millions the users of thousands of working configurations... and what HP/Dell/MS just suck in the hardware department.
NB there were hundreds of laptops from HP/Dell/Asus/Acer what worked just fine. You just never heard complaints about them, because there were none.
I think it goes back to the unity of control Apple enjoys. Doesn't mean it CAN'T work for Windows, but the vendors would have to work harder to cooperate, and they clearly can't be arsed to do so.
Huge credit to whoever wrote the standby/sleep code for Darwin for the M1s, I've never had to close my M1 Airs lid and worry about standby not working or it not resuming.
Windows is a mess and unreliable, and Linux is less said the better, it doesn't even work with secure boot on.
It seems to be a fairly significant regression in terms of functionality, which nobody really asked for, but which results in significant idle drain, coupled with the risk of a laptop deciding to resume and heat up in a bag, etc.
Apple seems to have a (long standing) positive argument here - to point at how when you put a Mac to sleep, you can resume it days later with negligible battery drain. Windows seems to have lost this in the post-S3 sleep era.
When new, the Gram got 11-16 hours of battery (it now gets 8-10 hours) under development load (i.e running a node app, a go app and a Django backend, plus support servers). The Air hasn't been used as hard as the Gram, but it's battery gets similar performance. On the power management front, everything works on the air. On the Gram, hibernate is disabled, and sleep works (I've left the Gram in my bag over a three day weekend, and it was at about 20% on Tuesday when I opened it up). I ran Windows for about a week on the Gram and it did got less than eight hours of battery. No idea why.
I had one laptop where the wifi would only come up every other boot, but that did eventually, after many years, get resolved with a new kernel.
It's been really nice having no power drain on personal laptops! Agreed, I too see pretty excellent power consumption on Linux. The new connected Windows stuff looks so awful, unbelievable power drain. I hope it largely remains a Windows problem & doesnt Linux greatly. To be honest, 20% after a weekend is much less than I'd want.
My work one was replacing a 2016 Macbook Pro which struggled to last more than a couple of hours when I was doing dev work, all whilst trying to reach orbit with its fans. I've never heard the fans kick in on the new one.
As for the Air, I thought I'd be crippling myself a bit by only going fot the basic 8GB RAM model, and other than when I installed a copy of Premier Pro and tried rendering something it's been amazing - even then it rendered fine, just took a fair bit more time than on a pro.
I'm not sure I could go back to an overheating, crappy Intel "Mobile" based laptop - they shouldn't even be allowed to call those things mobile chips at this point, they're utterly shite.
Seems practically impossible- if not technically then definitely from a business standpoint (why were these potential gains unrealized for so long?)
My 2014 got warm but never too hot on my lap but when I got the 2019 i9 it was unbearable to put on my lap without some kind of insulation. Now my M1 Max barely feels warm at all on my lap, often cold and the battery is really something else.
Sometimes I play Factorio sitting on my couch and with my 2014/2019 MBP I HAD to have the power cord nearby. Obviously I could go on battery for a while but as a rule I always plugged it in while using (see also: I LOVE having magsafe back, the 2019 always made me super anxious with only having USB-C for charging). Now with my M1 Max I can go for hours playing without thinking about power.
Likewise when I go up to see my parents/family I can jump on my laptop a number of times for quick tasks (~2-3 hours over a few days) and I never have to think about plugging it in. Maybe it was something I had installed on my 2014/2019 MBP but I felt like those discharged faster when not in use. My M1 Max feels much closer to an iPad where you can leave it unused for days and come back to still having 80%+ battery.
I have a 2021 MacBook Pro with an Apple processor.
One is a work machine, the other is my personal machine.
--- Things I love about the 2021...
The keyboard is just spot on perfect. No stupid touch bar. It feels good to type on too.
It has MagSafe again.
It doesn't get hot. The Intel MBP has real heat issues. It sucks to use it on my lap, or lying down. MBPs get really hot on video calls... and I spend all my time on video calls. For comparison, I shut everything down on the two machines and video called one from the other... and the 2019 had over 3x power usage on video calls. Also it didn't heat up!
The screen is "burn a hole in your eyes at night if you forget to dim it a bit" bright. It's amazingly bright.
I thought the notch would be annoying but if anything now the entire top of the 2019 feels like a notch. Meh. I don't care about the notch, it's never gotten in the way. And if anything the consistent black space around the monitor on the 2021 makes me really noticed how the 2019 has more black space on the top than it does on the sides.
The battery can go all day. Like no joke. And what's awesome is when I travel for work I don't even bring the charge brick with me. I know it seems like a small thing, but it means I can just use a smaller "sleeve" style case and it just makes traveling a little easier. One less thing I have to lug around on a day-flight.
--- Things I miss about the 2019...
The case on the 2021 is just flat out ugly and hideous. It's a total square box. It's thicker, it has more "give" and doesn't feel as solid. It feels cheap and shitty and hollow and all the things Apple laptops aren't supposed to feel like. It doesn't have any of the nice graceful curves that make you say, "Man these guys... how did they do all this?!" It's just a big thick ugly box that "thuds" when you tap on it and has visible give when you grab it in certain places. I think they even changed the finish texture on the aluminum. I just hate the way the 2021 feels. It feels cheap and flimsy. I hate the design choices on the 2021 too. Feels like they went back 10 years.
So sad to see the terrible new designs. I returned my MBP and now use the MB Air.
Hope Apple can upgrade their design team and move to a new generation of MBP designs soon.
Doing a lot of web-dev with docker desktop. I can't think of a flaw - it's not it does not have any (like it could be better for occasional gaming), but compared to other setups available on the market, it's just flawless.
"People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XAfTXYa36f4
Honestly, if they just said "alright, we'll let you install linux and make it easy and the hardware should work fine", I'd probably buy one right now.
The best Linux users can do (for a laptop) is a Thinkpad (as they officially have support from Lenovo) or one of the more boutique brands (system76, starlabs, purism) and at best (my opinion, Thinkpads) they trade blows with Apple hardware.
As far as desktops go, building a computer for Linux is simple and easy and doesn't really have that many problems in my experience.
I think you'd like Apple to provider proper documentation or even their own Linux drivers. That'd cannibalize macOS so I don't see that happening.
If you think Brew should require versioning then open a request.
If you don't think there is enough free windows managers perhaps you should create one yourself or contribute to a non paid project to ensure your wants are addressed.
It appears your problems are with 3rd parties and not Apple.
> It appears your problems are with 3rd parties and not Apple.
No, my problem is that Apple can't be bothered to include basic features in their software, thus requiring endless third parties to fill the gaps pro bono / for money in the hopes Apple doesn't one day Sherlock them.
If I could buy an Apple laptop and then immediately break all my ties with Apple, still being able to use the machine, then I would certainly buy one.
Apple doesn't seem able to decide whether they are offering a service or a product.
And GPU drivers are getting pretty good. The builders of this are pretty amazing.
Where's my multiple display outputs, Apple? I paid way more than any competing device, every one of which allowed for more than one extra display. I'm not a video editor, I don't want to buy an M1 Max just to get triple monitor support back.
In the end, the problem is that the first M1 chips simply didn't have the I/O capacity to drive multiple screens normally like the Intel machines before them could. Higher end and more recent chips have added more I/O (two screens for M1 Pro, four to five for M1 Max, five on M1 Ultra)
DisplayLink, a proprietary protocol that sends video over USB, was never a problem. The quality and performance of DisplayLink is far below DisplayPort, though, because the video needs to go through software and an additional layer of compression to fit within the USB data speeds.
You can see the limitations per model on Apple's website: https://support.apple.com/en-asia/HT202351
https://plugable.com/blogs/news/how-many-external-monitors-c...
When you buy a Mac, part of the deal is that it runs macOS. However, you still own the Mac. You can loan it to others or sell it. You can sleep with it under your pillow.
If you don't like the deal, then don't buy it.
Microsoft’s focus is now Azure, with Windows 11 development only recommended in .NET
If their OS wasn't a dumpster fire of mindbogglingly poor UX hidden inbetween good and shiny UI/UX (if anyone wants examples, not having the option to have different scroll directions between mouse and trackpad even if the UX implies you do, and useless undebuggable error messages such as "A USB device is consuming too much power and has been shut down, reinsert it to use it again" without any indication which device it's talking about, with all of them still working), and if their hardware wasn't utterly unmaintainable I would have shared your opinion, but hélas that isn't the case.
My only known downside to low power consumption: when I wake, I usually lie in for 30 minutes of surfing with the M2 on my chest. It's quite cold. I usually visit a compute-intensive site like Ventusky to warm it up for a couple of minutes.
First world problems....
The title should say "longer battery _life_". And no, the Mac's battery itself is not longer than the PC's one.
https://news.yahoo.com/surgery-under-sappers-supervision-doc...
And it's darwin-based, and there's a linux implementation.
Welcome to 2023!
Apple laptops depreciate much slower.
Edit: throwing away laptops after 5 years won’t help us to live more in a more environment friendly way don’t u think?
I’ve administered several hundred Macs for a few years, and when they do break you’re at Apple’s mercy for turnaround. The business I worked for had surplus, so not that big a deal, but it would be a bitch for my personal business and life.
If all I need is parts then it’s a day max, or I can switch to whatever can run Fedora halfway decently.
I hope to delay a year or two the inevitable of having to buy a nicely specced Macbook, now that even the disk can no longer be upgraded, if I understand correctly.
Even if you have used chips re-balling with right stencils is relatively easy.
I think legislators should compel Apple to make chips available to general public so these upgrades can become mainstream.
If general public is not comfortable doing that themselves, I am sure any repair shop would be more than happy to do such an upgrade for the customer.
For all intents and purposes, for basically everyone, memory and storage are non-upgradeable in the M1 Macs.
And then the charging circuit went on the motherboard, for which only a like-for-like replacement was permitted. I had hoped to purchase one with more RAM, so I bought a Thinkpad instead of fixing this one.
No contest on optimized battery life with MacBooks. Or the trackpad, or keyboard, or screen, and performance all in a very lightweight machine that just works.
one is not like the others
The modern (2020+) Apple laptop keyboards are excellent for the profile.
Though nothing will compare to thicker keyboards, like the 2010's era thinkpads and elitebooks.
That keyboard was probably too thick for the modern era though.
It often feels like there are two factions working against each other in Apple.
One faction believes they know best, and have a specific aesthetic in mind when designing products (for example that Magic Mouse that charges on the bottom, which was a design decision to prevent people using it as a wired mouse).
Another faction seems to try to bring what humans actually want to technology.
Everyone says they want a fast computer that can compute half the galaxy, yet, when they have such a machine they become jailed to their desks in a semi-portable manner.
Everyone says they're fine with 5-10hours of battery life, but when you give people 18hrs suddenly everyone talks about being "free", which is something I experienced myself.
It's hard to reconcile, since some people seem to hate apple almost as a religion, and they have some really great points! But nobody seems to be competing with Apple on the same terms. There is no other manufacturer of computer equipment that has a whole package which isn't a letdown in most areas, usually beating Apple products in 1 or 2 categories.
Whether that be chasing the numbers (i9 5GHz!, 128G OF RAM!), some feature which is pretty good but not really fleshed out fully or "being a brand" and the aesthetics that go with it (Sony Vaios, for example).
Very true. For the last 10 years, I've been looking at alternatives to Macbooks in the Windows ecosystem: there is none that gets the whole package well. With every alternative I've considered, there is always something they get wrong and Apple gets right. There is a lack of care for the end-to-end user experience which is quite fascinating. The closest I've found are the Surface laptops.
This is actually not an issue at all. The surface of the mouse gets really close to the surface so fitting a charge port isn’t easy.
The os tells you the battery level so I’ve never had one die in over 10 years of use (same back when I had to put in AAs). So I just plug it in at night and it’s fine by the morning.
It would be nice if someone other than Apple put some real effort into non-x86 laptops but here we are...
Of course, I'm still never going to be stuck in Apple's walled garden, my laptop that only lasts 6-8 hours is still "good enough".
Also shoutout to Fedora and GNOME, the "power saver" profile literally doubles battery life without any noticeable difference in performance.
Edit - Apple's lockdown is getting worse when it comes to APIs and there's definitely no guarantee macOS won't become as locked down as iOS...
I kid. I use a Mac for work and it's okay. I prefer Linux, but it is what it is.
Battery life, for a portable device, is probably the most important metric.
There are some interesting cases; running Docker drains the m1 (only ARM images) faster than the x220 and doing typescript work drains the x220 faster than the m1.
I have a 14" M1 MBP that was doing just dandy until Ventura came along and now my battery life is a joke. It drains a ton from just light coding sessions (I'm talking 30% in 90 mins or so).
I've also had to manually fix permissions problems on directories that in the UI do not show as granted, but are actually enabled and allowing file reads/writes (the UI is just showing that permissions haven't been granted when they have, which is incredibly dangerous).
However, I've really enjoyed Ventura, because of the following (non-exhaustive list):
* As a Mac admin: enterprise managed updates actually work compared to Monterey!
* As a Mac developer: SwiftUI graphics rendering is significantly faster, closing in on AppKit levels of performance with no changes required!
As a regular user:
* A battery life leak that I noticed with Monterey 12.6.1 was fixed and my battery life became much better
* The Weather app is absolutely amazing
* Live Text is even better than before
One issue that's been irking me is that I've had a lot more accidental Siri triggers while talking to other people, and even while watching movies and videos through the speakers. I'm going to re-do the Hey Siri set up to see if it fixes the issue.
Apple really needs another 10.6 "Snow Leopard" style release: no new features, just stability and speed.
this is one of the areas where Apple is really bad. no security updates on the N-1 generation OS immediately after new one is released??
They definitely do ship software updates (and Safari updates), they’re just more selective about it. 0-days and whatever are usually patched.
While I'd love to be able to go back to my Thinkpad Debian life, the idea of leaving the combination of a great screen, superb battery life, large developer ecosystem, and (newly, the butterfly keys were trash) ok keyboard would make me want to cry.
To get my linux fix, I just use Multipass.
The butterfly keys were a brilliant system that was objectively better than the keys they replaced (and were in turn replaced by). Unfortunately, people preferred the "feel" of the old keys (myself included). They also broke constantly and expensively in the early generations (although Apple picked up the tab on this in the end).
I use the HHKB full time now, but if I had to use the stock keyboard, my first choice would the 2016 butterfly keyboard (pre-membrane).
I have large hands and often bottom out on keys/keyboards. I went though three macbooks in two years at my last job. The new macbooks, I have no problem.
Also, Apple has a long and storied history of specification marketing hyperbole, so I am extremely skeptical these chips will get 'real-world' 2x battery life.
I will keep building my cased x86 behemoths and refurbished Thinkpads as long as there is stock available :-) Hmm, where did that rotary phone go...
I've got an i9 MBP, and I've been using an M1 MBP for the last year for work. The M1 I don't even need to plug in, I can work with it for 2-3 days on a single charge, the i9 I essentially run plugged in all the time.
Also the fans never even start on the M1. They run a LOT on the i9 and it throttles and gets very hot often due to my workloads.
Apple may have a history, as you say, and I wish they'd publish more quantitative metrics -- but this thing really works. It's life changing.
It's true that iOS is a walled garden. I suppose if you have serious work to do on a smartphone without a keyboard, then the limitations could feel like a prison. I question how many people need to do this and wouldn't have a laptop handy, but that's just me.
With USB-C (thanks EU!) that's not a problem anymore, you can bet someone else already brought it or the coworking/bar/friends house/whateverplace has a spare one.
in the original question the poster wrote "realistically"
How many laptops are used for 8 hours straight without half an hour of electricity in those situations?