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Comment by kjkjadksj | Hacker News Reader

Thats hardly untenable. Most computers draw a lot more watts where you wouldn't miss 1.2W imo. Even these "low watt" computers are drawing like 5-7 watts at idle and once you do anything on them its a lot more than that.

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You wouldn't miss the 1.2-1.9W on a gaming laptop with a discrete GPU. But for more mainstream systems with just integrated graphics, 5W is on the high end for idle power and even Intel's latest mid-range laptop parts can get down to about 3W if you don't have Windows doing dumb shit in the background constantly.

Also, on modern laptops you can't trust that components will be powered off when you close the lid, because Microsoft and Intel have been at war with ACPI S3 suspend for years now. So that 1.2W could easily be the minimum power draw of the SSD any time you haven't hibernated or shut down the system.

You got a source for the 3w? Is this for the cpu or measured at the wall? Seems low. I believe intel n100 can get to 7w but only after heavy tweaking of c states and only with some mobo. A lot of users more in practice from my forum searching on this cpu last year when i almost bought it. Macbook can go down to 5w but again thats idle with nothing running. I don’t think many people leave a laptop computer idling like they might their workstation.

Trusting the Thinkpad spec sheet numbers, an AMD T14s lasts >15hrs in one of the benchmarks on a 57Wh battery. That's less than 4W. Perhaps on Linux and with some tuning, it seems plausible to get to 3W?

Trusting battery estimates? I believe apple claims my m3 mac is capable of 15 hours or so. If I’m lucky I will get like 7 hours with a basic documentation webpage open and the terminal connected to ssh.

Third party reviewers seem to say the M3 mac does pretty well:

https://www.tomsguide.com/news/macbook-pro-m3-and-m3-max-bat...

Maybe yours is a lemon and/or should be replaced?

The estimates appear to match what notebookcheck[0] reports on their measurements - 4.4W idle average. With some tuning[1] and turning off unused peripherals, I expect to go below 4W idle.

[0] https://www.notebookcheck.net/Lenovo-ThinkPad-T14s-G3-AMD-la... [1] https://docs.kernel.org/admin-guide/pm/amd-pstate.html

My laptop (a Dell Latitude 5490, i5-8350u) with the screen backlight off and at idle goes down to 2.5w power consumption according to the battery statistics. An SSD idling at 1.9w would nearly double it!

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