Apple's hardware+software design combo is nice for things like power efficiency, but so in my experience so far, a Macbook and a similarly priced Windows laptop seems to be about equal in terms of weird OS bugs and actually getting work done.
This is out of the box. With obvious fixes like ripping busted background services out, it gets more than a day. There’s no way normal users are going to fire up console.app and start copy pasting “nuke random apple service” commands from “is this a virus?” forums into their terminal.
Apple needs to fix their QA. I’ve never seen power management this bad under Linux.
It’s roughly on par with noughties windows laptops loaded with corporate crapware.
As a point of comparison, I daily two ARM macs (work M4 14 + personal M3 14), and I get far better battery life than that (at least 8 hours of "normal" active use on both). Also, antidotally, the legion of engineers at my office with macs are not seeing battery life issues either.
That said, I have yet to encounter anyone who is in love with macOS Tahoe and it's version of Liquid Glass.
I have macos crash reporting turned off, but crashreport pins the CPU for a few minutes on each ios wallpaper renderer crash. I always have the iOS simulator open, so two hours battery, max.
I killed crashreport and it spun the cpu on some other thing.
In macos 25, there’s no throttle for mds (spotlight), and running builds at a normal developer pace produces about 10x more indexing churn than the Apple silicon can handle.
One of my 'bad' machines is more like 10-100W and i'm lucky to get two hours.
Smaller efficient CPU + low power sleep + not a lot of background activity + big battery = very long run times.
Most of the time I am running StumpWM with Emacs on one workspace and Nyxt in another. So just browsing and coding mostly.
OpenBSD gets close, but FreeBSD got a slight edge battery wise. To be fair, that is on an old CPU that still has homogenous cores. More modern CPUs can probably benefit from a more heterogenous scheduler.