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Comment by jorvi | Hacker News Reader

> Battery life? 20 hours of video playback.

Yeah, they pretty much lied about that. It is only in a special Windows ultra-power saving mode that heavily throttles background tasks, forces the screen to be 30% lower brightness, heavily downclocks the CPU (50%+ less performance!), etc; The MacBook has to do no such tricks.

You're not gonna see Frameworks that equal the perf-per-watt of Apple until they release a model with a Snapdragon chip.

Frameworks have one benefit that other laptops don't: there's only a few parts. So for example for your Framework speakers you can find an EasyEffects / Pipewire (+bankstown?) tune profile that makes them sound better than 99% of laptops on the market. It's basically the Raspberry Pi effect.

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It is well-documented that Panther Lake is highly power efficient. I wouldn’t personally argue against that.

The days of assuming that Apple has the best chip efficiency are coming to an end, especially if the Windows/Qualcomm platform is a workable choice for your needs (maybe someday Linux support will get better).

Apple still has a lead but it’s small enough that it’s not a good reason to choose an Apple system on its own. The M1 MacBook systems got double the battery life of competitors, now 5 years later, Apple systems are at best getting ~10% better battery life than competitors, and some systems like the XPS 14 have Apple beat entirely.

Obviously getting 20 hours in real world productivity use was never realistic, and it’s not realistic on a MacBook Pro, either. I disagree that framework was “basically lying.” They live-streamed the laptop hitting 20 hours, it doesn’t matter that they changed settings to get there. MacBooks have a brightness slider, too. You aren’t getting anywhere close to 20 hours on a MacBook without turning the screen brightness down.

IIRC the MacBook Air/Pro can’t even make it to 20 hours regardless of settings.

The point is that the new framework 13 Pro laptop isn’t a 5-7 hour battery life experience like the previous models. Instead, you can expect 10+ hours depending on what you’re doing it, so it’s a full work day.

As far as I can tell, Framework’s claimed battery numbers require Windows to achieve, which is more than enough reason for many to not consider the FW 13 Pro as an option. If it can’t run Linux without sacrifice compared to Windows there’s no point.

Standby time is likely also a major issue, unless Intel suddenly reversed course and decided to support proper sleep again.

It’s still going to be a respectable performer in Linux. The whole point of the 20 hour stunt was to show that it’s a major improvement and not a small one. Maybe it would have been better to show a default-settings Linux and Windows for comparison but I can understand why they wanted to hit 20 hours for marketing.

Framework specifically has stated that they worked very hard to improve standby time and claim that it’s dramatically better. Being able to use LPDDR5x LP-CAMM2 modules aids in standby time significantly. We’ll find out soon when the first reviewers get their retail units in, probably within a month or so.

For standby time, my current framework 13 has never bothered me. It’s great that Macs have incredible standby but it’s much less of a dealbreaker than I originally thought it would be. I just have sleep to hibernate set up in Linux.

My system sleeps for 2 hours then hibernates afterward. If I am putting my system down for 2 hours I’m likely done using it for the day anyway.

In three comments you’ve moved the goalpost on the 20-hours-of-battery comment multiple times.

Just take the L, dude.

If you can point out where my goalposts moved I’d be happy to entertain the idea, but I’m not seeing it.

To clarify for you, “moving the goalposts” means that I changed my definitions over time. You’ll notice that in my comments I never changed my definition of what it means to have good battery life. I know sometimes turns of phrase are easy to misuse so I hope that helps you out.

There’s no winner or loser here. We’re just discussing technology. I’d appreciate if you tried to add conversation value rather than just dissing me personally.

Panther Lake is an impressive chip. The only MacBook Pro that can achieve 20+ hours of battery life at all with any setting is the 16” model that comes with the largest battery capacity allowed on a commercial airplane. It’s really not framework’s achievement, it’s the chip that’s so good, and that’s great for consumers because you can find a lot of competition on the market that has the coveted “all day battery life” without compromising on performance.

Panther Lake is impressive for x86, but decidedly middling when stacked up against a field including ARM.

The problem is that x86 can (almost) match ARM battery life but at much worse performance, or match the performance at much worse battery life. That's what the statistics don't show you when they show either max performance or max battery life tests.

I repeat it rather often on this site but it's because they're such impressive numbers: an M1 Ultra gets 70% of the performance of an RTX 3090 at 25% of the power envelope, and it beats out a desktop class Core i9 from that era at 30% of the power envelope.

Nvidia, Intel and AMD would commit murder for those kind of perf per watt numbers.

Is there a laptop with super-awesome battery life on Linux? I'll buy one if so.

I'm not sure it's fair to ding Framework specifically for not being able to make Linux battery life as good as Windows. Is that actually something they could reasonably fix?

It’s not about dinging Framework specifically and more about if you want *nix and top tier battery life, MacBooks remain the best option.

My understanding is that the reason why Linux still struggles in this front is that nobody has put in the hardware-specific optimization work to make it happen. There’s also some friction with how the bulk of Linux dev attention is paid to servers rather than portable consumer hardware.

Along those lines, IMO these "spec wars" are not that important. I get that some people want the best bang for their buck, but pretty much everything has more than enough speed and battery life for most practical uses in my opinion.

I am probably not competent to improve linux battery life myself (or at least I certainly don't have the time to get into that). But I can choose to spend my money on hardware and companies that explicitly support Linux, even if they aren't at the very top of the spec sheet. This has the best practical chance of convincing big-money companies and Linux kernel experts to actually spend time and money on this. Meanwhile, buying a Macbook and installing Linux on it is fine, I guess, but also invisible to the corporate world.

On this note, the world where buying a Framework or really any other Windows PC meant getting roughly 1/2 the battery life of a MacBook really doesn't exist anymore like it did in 2020, so long as you do your research and buy the right system.

I think there's a lot of assumption among the group of people who have stuck with MacBooks since the M1 days that shopping the competition means compromising with a huge performance/battery life/value gap, but that reality that existed in 2020 is much different than the current situation in 2026.

If you are in the market for a MacBook Air for the kinds of things that most people use MacBook Airs for, the average user won't notice that the battery life or performance on a computer equipped with a Panther Lake or Qualcomm chip is different from a MacBook Air at all.

Are these chips exactly the same price/performance ratio of an M5? Maybe not. But, if it's close enough, it's close enough.

There are ones with decent to good battery life. There are none with awesome battery life and abso-fucking-lutely none for super-awesome battery life.

That was one thing I never realized I needed until I had it. Having my laptop basically be optional to charge 99% of the time I use it changed my life. I can take it out with 20% left having not charged it in a week and still get a workday out of it. wtaf

Killer battery life is a defining feature of a laptop in my opinion, unless we’re talking hulking desktop replacement workstation laptops or something. Aside from physical attributes, nothing modulates portability like battery life does.

The user of a laptop with top tier battery life isn’t tethered to the wall, doesn’t need to care about availability of power outlets, and in many circumstances doesn’t even need to carry a charging cable and brick (or if they do, they can get by on trickle-charging with a tiny 15w phone brick overnight). This kind of laptop is in its own class of ultraportability.

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