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Comment by mcv | Hacker News Reader

I don't know, but the M3 MBP I got from work already gives the impression of using barely any power at all. I'm really impressed by Apple Silicon, and I'm seriously reconsidering my decision from years ago to never ever buy Apple again. Why doesn't everybody else use chips like these?

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I have an M3 for my personal laptop and an M2 for my work laptop. I get ~8 hours if I'm lucky on my work laptop, but I have attributed most of that battery loss to all the "protection" software they put on my work laptop that is always showing up under the "Apps Using Significant Power" category in the battery dropdown.

I can have my laptop with nothing on screen, and the battery still points to TrendMicro and others as the cause of heavy battery drain while my laptop seemingly idles.

I recently upgraded my personal laptop to the M3 MacBook pro and the difference is astonishing. I almost never use it plugged in because I genuinely get close to that 20 hour reported battery life. Last weekend I played a AAA Video Game through Xbox Cloud Gaming (awesome for mac gamers btw) and with essentially max graphics (rendered elsewhere and streamed to me of course), I got sucked into a game for like 5 hours and lost only 8% of my battery during that time, while playing a top tier video game! It really blew my mind. I also use GoLand IDE on there and have managed to get a full day of development done using only about 25-30% battery.

So yeah, whatever Apple is doing, they are doing it right. Performance without all the spyware that your work gives you makes a huge difference too.

For the AAA video game example, I mean, it is interesting how far that kind of tech has come… but really that’s just video streaming (maybe slightly more difficult because latency matters?) from the point of view of the laptop, right? The quality of the graphics there have more-or-less nothing to do with the battery.

Over the weekend, I accidentally left my work M3 unplugged with caffeinate running (so it doesn't sleep). It wasn't running anything particularly heavy, but still, on Monday, 80% charge left.

That's mindblowing. Especially since my personal laptop is a Thinkpad X1 Extreme. I can't leave that unplugged at all.

Apple quote 18h of Apple TV playback or 12h of web browsing so I will call a large amount of bullshit on that.

Even considering the marketing, best case scenario you would be between 27 and 41% battery consumption for 5h of runtime. The actual number will be lower than that because you probably don't use the MBP at the low brightness they use for marketing benchmarks and game streaming constantly requires power for the wifi chip (video can buffer, hence the lower consumption).

There is no way to say this nicely, but can you stop lying ?

I think the market will move to using chips like this, or at least have additional options. The new Snapdragon SOC is interesting, and I would suspect we could see Google and Microsoft play in this space at some point soon.

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