Better than high performance mobile workstations, sure, but I was getting 10-12 hour battery off a macbook air running Gentoo nearly a decade ago. PBP gets 10+ hours. $25 scrap latitude with ~70% peak capacity gets 6-8 hours.

I actually think you're onto something with this. When I run compilation workloads on my M1 MBP, I get 3-4 hours battery life.

VMs and games (crossover) also bring my battery life down to 4-6 hours.

My old intel MBP would get around the same battery life when doing the same workloads (games under bootcamp Windows), it would get worse battery life sitting idle or for optimised workloads (like video playback).

Mixed workloads, I get maybe 2-3 hours more with my M1 laptop. That's not nothing, but it's not the crazy 18 hours battery life in the marketing material

18 hours battery life is mostly marketing. Not even sure how to test that, maybe on 20% display brightness with no programs running, other than the OS...assuming it doesn't take screenlock/display off into account?

I remember reviews on youtube that showed the macbook air/pro M1 playing video (streaming?) for that long. Actually, it kept going for 20h.

https://youtu.be/KE-hrWTgDjk?t=645

Benchmarketing. It has hardware support for video codecs so it can play video efficiently in particular even though people traditionally think of that as something processor intensive.

The question is, what's the battery life when you're doing kernel compiles or GPGPU.

According to "Garry explains" on YouTube, the M1 MBP gets 3 hours of battery life looping kernel (I think) compilations until the laptop dies.

That feels about right to me too. I don't know if I'm usually just doing more computationally intensive stuff than most with my 16" M1 Pro, but I think the only way I could get anywhere near the advertised numbers is if I basically just had Safari open and the display on half brightness.

And not to beat the already long dead horse any more, but toss in some electron apps running in the background, I probably average somewhere around ~7 hours or so. I'm not convinced the 10+ hour lifetime is possible if you've got stuff like Discord/Slack/VS Code open.

But in terms of when I am doing truly evil things to it, I am surprised it lasts as long as it does, be it max CPU compiling or all of this morning when I was toying around with stable diffusion, it gets around ~4 hours or so.

I need to go back and watch the marketing material, but I think everytime they brough up battery life, it was under conditions. Like 20 hour battery life browsing the web. 18 hour battery life with video playback. I don't think anywhere they claimed 20 hour battery life using something like Blender.

Which of course should be expected. My M1 probably gets about 18-20 hours when I am just web browsing. If I am compiling Xcode projects, half that. Messing around in C in Emacs, probably 14-16 hours battery life.

> 8 hours on a M1 Macbook, so that's better than most/all x86 laptops with Linux

It is makes no sense to compare an $1k/$2k M1 Macbook with random laptops. Those laptops exist because people want to run MS Word or Excel for $400. That's the feature.

Various System76 laptops, Thinkpads (among many other laptops recommended by Linux users) give you battery life comparable to macOS on the M1.

> arious System76 laptops, Thinkpads (among many other laptops recommended by Linux users) give you battery life comparable to macOS on the M1.

that is a lie. system76 and thinkpads are nowhere close to giving you a full day of battery life on Linux.

I keep hearing about battery life being just as almost just as good or better on linux (and on Windows too, though that's a more realistic claim). Yet even the latest gens thinkpads are pretty awful w.r.t battery. My friend bought an i5 12xxx Thinkpad X1 and can barely do 5 or 6 hours of screen on time, when the stated capacity is 16h. Lenovo denied a refund, because it's working as intended according to them (and my colleagues with s76 laptops don't even really expect more than 3-ish hours of battery at best). My work provided t14 gen 3, that I like, can't even keep it's charge when unplugged and in my bag for long enough.

And I'm no Apple fanboy, the only Apple device I've ever used has been an ipad 5 years ago and my M1 macbook.

Lenovo’s battery life numbers are consistent generation to generation, but wildly unrealistic. My 2015 thinkpad (since replaced by m1 air) was rated as 12 hours but could do at most half in practice doing very light tasks and typically ran about 4 hours. So when you buy a thinkpad you should assume actual battery life is a third to half of the rated life.

Apple’s numbers are equally unrealistic. They rate my m1 air for 15 hours, but in practice it gets to around 8 hours.

My macbook pro was rated for 18 hours and I find it very easily meets or exceeds that number if I'm working on general tasks.

Of course if its a day where I'm compiling often and have several tasks running its going to be lower, but thats not the usecase they advertise

Eh... I have a T480. It's advertised at "17+" hours. With the 72Wh extended battery fitted, it has a total of 96Wh energy storage. With some small effort tuning (making sure the nvidia GPU is properly powered down etc) I can easily get its consumption down to about 5W - less, with lowered screen brightness and wifi off. 96Wh / 5W = 19h 12 min. Seems legit.

Just a sample size of 1, but my HP ProBook 430 G3 (6th gen i5) could comfortably hit 8 hours of battery life, or beyond 10 on light tasks - before the battery went kaput unfortunately. However it was the “large battery” variant with I think a 40 or 50ish Wh capacity on a 13” screen.

System76 systems absolutely do not have good battery life. The systems the make tailored only to battery life try to be comparable in battery (~14h system76 to ~25h on m2 pro) but obviously x86 vs arm makes this attempt exceedingly difficult. You're going to remove a massive amount of computational power from an x86 system to improve it's battery life like that. However, of course if you're interested in increasing a laptop battery life, it helps to have control over the system if you have the time to put forth on optimizing it. I would imagine an asahi linux (archlinuxARM) system could be made to last much longer than macOS. However, this would require 1) not running any wm, or perhaps a simple one like awesomewm, 2)drastically reducing screen brightness, 3) removing any processes that run in the background continually (you could take this rabbit hole far - perhaps even to NTP requests and such), etc. MacOS doesn't have as much configurability like this, so it's variance in battery life is much less - probably a range of 10h-37h if you really push it. Linux could probably take that to 20min-8days if you tried.

I had a ThinkPad T14 AMD and the battery life on Linux was very mediocre, even after tuning with powertop. It was usually 2-4 hours, on Windows more like 8-9 hours.

Conversely, I'm on a Gen 8 X1, and on Silverblue with tlp replacing power-profiles-daemon, I routinely get 8-9 hours. Anecdata and whatnot, but I'm pretty happy with modern linux + modern hardware. That's not to say I wouldn't love to get my hands on an M1 macbook to see the difference though...

It's almost as if "Linux" said very little about what software people are running, in what configuration.

Right, and that is the issue. If I buy a Mac and run MacOS I can be sure that I get long battery life. If I get a PC laptop and run Linux, it's a random crapshoot if the random combination of hardware, kernel version, etc. (I also used Silverblue and Fedora) of whether you get a good battery life.

Maybe Asahi Linux will improve things, since they only target a very small number of hardware configurations.

That hasn't been my experience... If anything System76 are much much worse, and Thinkpads mediocre in that aspect

My Lenovo X1 carbon was giving me more than 10h 6 years ago (after powertop tuning), so high quality laptops have been providing similar battery life for a long time.