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Comment by jwells89 | Hacker News Reader

This is a highly intriguing device, but if it's to replace a MacBook or especially an iPad, battery life is going to have to be a great deal better. I'd be willing to sacrifice some raw muscle if that's what it takes to achieve that – even if it "only" performed as well as the original M1, that'd be more than enough if that meant also life north of the 12 hour mark.

Though it's not mentioned in the review, good standby time is also important. Not only is it irritating to find one's tablet/laptop dead when pulled out for use, the sleeping battery drain typical of x86 laptops since the advent of "modern" standby runs through your battery's cycles much more quickly than necessary.

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It would be great to have more ARM devices which support linux, but until there is a common ARM boot process that everyone follows and the situation with device trees and propriety driver binaries gets solved, x86 is going to have to be the way to go for most Linux first devices. With x86 you can basically load any distro you want with ease no matter what the CPU.

Perhaps 2024 is The Year (tm) of Arm SystemReady laptops based on Qualcomm.

Given how Qualcomm is responsible for ARM MS Surfaces being "not really compliant" with even what Microsoft mandated...

... I won't hold my breath for Qualcomm to be bringer of SystemReady. I might end up too blue.

> ARM MS Surfaces being "not really compliant" with even what Microsoft mandated...

2024 Microsoft Surface?

Yeah, there's some bullshit about device trees vs. ACPI.

Maybe Next Year!

Haven't checked 2024 one, but previous ones were borked by Qualcomm essentially missing bits of ACPI runtime handling, EFI variable storage not actually existing at runtime, and Qualcomm papering over it in Windows with drivers that hijacked the proper interfaces.

So Linux-on-ARM-Surface had a lot of magical thinking involving using device tree etc. caused by people hitting the wall with broken UEFI implementation.

For any if the problems mentioned in the parent's post, ARM would not be any any better. Failure to enter sleep is a software problem, usually not a hardware one. If anything it would be worst; note how most of these posts tend to look at firmware sleep modes with rosy glasses.

I remember excited by the brith of ARM desktop capable systems. Sadly the industry chose not to standardise and I have given up on ARM desktop and even Single Board Computers. SBCs have been replaced by x86 boxes. x86 is a breath of fresh air with mainline kernel support, loads of features, support just about every device imaginable and efficiency is quite good on the lower end CPUs.

There is a common-ish boot process, it's just not commonly implemented alas, except sort of in servers.

> ACPI can be used for Armv8 and Armv9 systems designed to follow the BSA (Arm Base System Architecture) [0] and BBR (Arm Base Boot Requirements) [1] specifications. Both BSA and BBR are publicly accessible documents. Arm Servers, in addition to being BSA compliant, comply with a set of rules defined in SBSA (Server Base System Architecture).

https://docs.kernel.org/arch/arm64/arm-acpi.html

There's people in the ecosystem doing good things, but wow been a decade now of ARM ecosystem forever being ever-so-close to doing the right thing & learning from the ways x86 is such an open interoperable healthy ecosystem (Intel wifi chips aside; even the "PCIe" ones no longer work in any other systems/aren't spec complaint).

So here we are a decade later & still ARM is good only in flagship (and 25% of mid-ranged) cell phones running vendor sdks and now some hyperscaler's servers, but literally no one else can use decent modern arm stuff without a bunch of fuss. What's the quote? Chips without drivers are just expensive sand?

> Not only is it irritating to find one's tablet/laptop dead when pulled out for use, the sleeping battery drain typical of x86 laptops since the advent of "modern" standby runs through your battery's cycles much more quickly than necessary.

It really blows my mind that this is the case. If Intel or AMD doesn't want their architecture to be discarded they need to fix this. They should be on full alert working on this problem, yet it seems like nobody even cares. Maybe they deserve the defeat that is coming, though I'd much prefer they learn.

IMHO it isn't an AMD or Intel problem, it is a "every driver and piece of hardware on the machine has to cooperate with low power modes" problem.

Apple owns the stack and iterates slowly.

Most laptops change to some of their chips (wifi, graphics, etc) every year. But it can easily take a couple of years of experience working with a shop and writing drivers for it to fix every power usage bug.

For many years (!!) Microsoft actually kept the same wireless chipset in their Surface machines. Was it the latest and greatest? No, but it worked!

Then or course you have software. For years Firefox had a bug where if any open tab has GPU accelerated content, it would prevent the entire machine from going to sleep.

If Microsoft clamps down on that sort of behavior it'll break someone's software (complaints about laptops going to sleep fall into 1 of 2 camps, it happens too often or it doesn't happen enough !)

I think what we're discussing is "S0 sleep" vs S3 sleep, AKA "machine stays running and pretends to sleep while hopefully saving enough power to be okay" vs "the only thing getting power is RAM and the chip(s) that will wake the machine back up when you hit a button". So yes, largely an AMD/Intel problem; while other hardware parts are somewhat relevant, they're secondary. At least, that's how I think it goes; happy to be wrong. I'm sufficiently behind the curve that all I have is second-hand accounts, including people complaining that S0 sleep doesn't even work right on Windows.

Wow I never actually thought about what is happening at the hardware level during sleep. The thought of a trickle charge going to RAM to keep the data alive while everything else sleeps is really cool.

It can really be anywhere. Intel/AMD probably have done due diligence in ensuring that the SoC itself sleeps correctly, but once system integrators start glueing on external hardware like radios, external graphics, floppy drives ( :P ), things get messy fast. For example, a wireless driver which doesn't correctly power down the radios when the system sleeps will end up firing interrupts at the SoC and dragging it back from S3 constantly. Or maybe the SoC does actually power gate correctly but the external graphics doesn't and so you end up burning a non-negligible amount of power over there for no good reason. And so on and on and on.

Integrators here are really on the hook for validating their configuration and chasing down the appropriate vendor to fix it (be it Intel/AMD or, I dunno, Qualcomm).

this problem isn't entirely windows-related/driver-related either. even with the very last-gen 2020 macbooks with ice lake, they still have a pretty significant amount of discharge while sleeping. and apple is running their own OS tuned to the exact hardware with the ability to get whatever source they want for drivers (and again, the will to perfection to use it).

i would have to measure it but it probably is at least 15-20% a month which is moderately crazy compared to apple silicon. i've picked up a MBA and it instantly woke up and it had lost like 2% in the month or two since I replaced it.

It all comes down to personal preference at the end, but battery life to me is overrated.

The main impact is mild inconvenience: lugging and managing an external battery, babysitting battery when needed or plugging it more than less.

That sucks, but you can deal with it. There's little way to deal with the iPad having a restricted OS with no JIT/compiling/virtualization support, or the MacBook having no touch or pen support.

Yeah, I don't know many people who spend +6hours straight in front of a computer without taking a break. This can't possibly be healthy.

Contiguous computer usage can sometimes be a nice benefit of long battery life, but I believe that for most people the bigger factor is no need to tote chargers or batteries when going out.

Another thing is when combined with good standby time, long battery life means the device will be more predictable and ready to use at any given point without leaving it plugged in all the time or having to remember to plug it in regularly. This isn't as important for a "daily driver" laptop that gets regular/constant use, but for tablets and 2-in-1's that serve more auxiliary purposes it's huge.

it's not that you go 6 hours straight in front of a computer as much as the laptop can't get 2 hours of charge in the 15 minutes I'm inside getting a drink and going to the bathroom.

it's better now that everything does reasonable fast-charging, but this sets up a pretty simple inequality: T(using)/T(charging) <= rate(charging)/rate(using). In other words if I am inside for 15 minutes out of every 2 hours, I have 7 parts using to 1 part charging, so with ideal usage my charge rate needs to be 8x the use rate. if you have an 85W charge rate, that means your average power consumption needs to be under 85/8 = ~10.625W average system power. with the screen and everything included. And in practice an 85W charger does not charge at 85W into the battery - not just system power, but the delivery isn't 100% efficient to begin with (look at your charge rate in system report or with aldente/coconutbattery!), you might get 70W out of that 85W connection to begin with, and 60W goes into the battery after running the laptop.

of course in practice you can accept a little attrition over time, you just need enough excess capacity to last you the day even if it's depleted at the end, but x86 laptops aren't idling at sub-10W with max screen brightness (probably no 1000 nits screen either). that number might be 25W average system power (not just processor!) or more for x86. when you're running an IDE and the screen is all the way up you probably are pulling closer to 17-18 watts even on apple silicon (the "stats" utility is great for showing this, use combined modules on the menu bar). you pretty clearly are going to burn through a large chunk of that battery even with frequent top-ups.

the better argument is "why don't you just pull over an extension cord" but that's the point, it's a quality-of-life change in the amount of charging you need to do and the degree to which you are tethered to the cord. Being able to go outside and run max screen brightness in mid-day while the dogs play in the yard, while running moderate workloads, and basically get like 6-8 hours of actual working usage plus any additional charge I can cram in while I'm inside for a break.

Traveling, traversing meeting rooms. Going on site. There are lots of reasons battery life is important in the corporate world without being present in front of your computer for more than six hours consistently.

Yes and No. You're right that battery life can be way more important for someone constantly running from meeting to meeting, or from site to site.

Then the corporate world has a solution for that for as long as computer existed: there's charging cables in basically every meeting room, every guest desk etc. In the olden days people would also keep around secundary, tertiary batteries to make the day. This would translate to a mobile battery in this days and age.

It's always nicer to not have to rely too heavily on these, but if your job is to be on the go all day long, you can't solely rely on your device battery either way.

I suspect that, if Apple products were able to float in mid-air, people would complain that other products can't float in mid-air.

Yeah, it's an engineering triumph and nice to have, but how important is it really?

It's an excelent point, that Apple used to understand better than most other computer companies: technology for technology isn't worth much, the user needs to be at the center of it.

That's why people moved to macs even as they didn't have the faster processors or better hardware. Specs were only numbers, and macs had attractive user features.

Now we're on the other side, where keynotes heavily rely on performance and technical prowess, and yes I'd totally see them come up with a mid-air floating iPad with absolutely no story behind it, the same way we have an m4 iPad Pro with no software to match it.

And if you have a framework you know you're going to be able to replace by the time it becomes unusable. They already have a more energy-dense version of the original battery. Who knows what the future batteries are going to be like ? I suppose it will only get better.

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