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Comment by davidy123 | Hacker News Reader

I get at least 5h on a Thinkpad T14s (Ryzen 6850U), without tweaking, using "balanced" mode. I know some people think 5h is not enough, but it's plenty for a full day of work. If the System 76 system was Intel based, that might have been the problem, AMD has been way ahead of them for power usage in the last few years.

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Raw battery life aside, I think one big advantage macOS still has is that its power management isn't modal. There is a low power mode like iOS if you really want to eek out as much runtime as possible, but I've never once hit a need to use it.

Outside of that, you lose no performance when running on battery, you get full performance when you need it, and high efficiency when you don't. Needing to manually choose a power/performance profile feels incredibly archaic to me, though I appreciate that some folks may want that level of manual control.

Plugged-in performance while unplugged without torpedoing battery life is what is really special about M-series laptops for me. It’s such a stark contrast with my ThinkPad which becomes noticeably more sluggish the moment it’s untethered in “balanced” mode and eating through battery like candy with “Performance”.

I see your point, but I just leave it on "balanced" unless the battery is critically low. Fan very rarely comes on, everything runs quickly, and I get decent battery life. This was NOT, btw, my experience with Intel laptops.

I have a Thinkpad T495 which is also AMD based. When I 1st got it battery life was atrocious under Linux. Kernel release 5.17 greatly helped battery life. Now it is just horrible even with TLP installed. The battery life under Windows is about double what I get when running Linux. It isn't the only but is the main reason I run Windows and not Linux as my main os on it.

That's more than three generations older than the 6850U I'm using. It predates the M1 release. It's only a few years ago that we could expect decent battery life without tweaking on Linux, probably just after the T495 series. (-: These days, tweaking with TLP &c could yield worse battery life, in my experience.

I guess we have different definitions of "the last few years".

You're right, that's within a "few" years. I should have said "couple."

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