I know all of this of course (but nevertheless thanks for spreading useful information) :-)

What I'm saying is that I would really like this type of announcement to not take shape of absolute performance increase but at least include, if not focus, on performance-per-watt. I honestly don't agree with the "beginners won't care" - battery life is not a difficult concept and battery-powered projects are super common.

And I think it is on Arduino to do this, since the value they provide as a middle-man is to package this BOM up as a product and explain it and their product design choices.

As a sibling points out power efficiency can also vary with other component choices on the breakout board, e.g. the power delivery or included BMS. This is also something Arduino could optimize for and market as they productize. The MCU datasheet isn't everything.

20mA is an equivalent of a typical LED. And if that is too much for you to power a microcontroller you do what you do with a normal LED -- you do not power it all the time and instead you use it when it is needed and put to sleep when it is not.

So I fully agree with the parent comment that for an amateur once you got to this point, further improvements on power efficiency here is pretty much inconsequential. It is not like you are going to be building a watch or a sensor that will have to work for years on a single AAA.

A 20mA microcontroller will be sufficient for pretty much any project an amateur can think of, power usage wise.

"Putting it to sleep" is where a lot of details matter. Different MCUs don't have parity on what sleep states and options they offer and what they mean in practice. Often there are complex tables where certain wakeup schemes are only available in certain sleep states, and to extract minimum idle draw you need to know what you're doing.

The Arduino framework currently offers only minimal abstraction over this. If you use Arduino on an esp32, you have to reach into ESP-IDF API to dial in the details, e.g. set up ext1 wakeup and disable the RTC memory explicitly if you don't need it. Betting this is the same here at launch.

Arduino here is introducing two versions of the same product with widely different BOMs and not addressing this matter at all.

I think it'd be a great enhancement of their productization effort if they started explaining power envelope, showing improvements over time, standardized an API (derived from actual use cases) etc. This would add value over the raw chips and datasheets for their audience of beginners looking for ease of use. Without it this is just throwing some random new breakout boards with the same layouts over the fence - a very crowded market - and banking on ecosystem effects without evolving the ecosystem and tackling new aspects.

As an amateur EE I am looking at Arduino as an entry-level solution for people who want to learn a bit about electronics and have fun getting some results.

Arduino is supposed to be simple and it is a feature, not a bug.

If they start making it more and more complicated, it will just stop being simple and it will stop being what makes it so usable to complete noobs.

There is no shortage of options if you somehow find that Arduino is not powerful enough to you.

Well that's sorta the point - they're making it more complicated here (same name, two completely different BOMs with different behavior). An improvement would be to make power management and low-power projects beginner-friendly (e.g. by expanding the API framework) and a compelling announcement would be showing that off. For me it's still a curious omission.

Nah, two different BOMs isn't making it more complicated. In the end you hold a board in your hand and have to figure out how to get from it to what you want.

Or think in a different way: A board you have in your hand does not suddenly become more complicated because the company comes up with another board with different BOM. Maybe choosing the board becomes a bit more complicated, maybe choosing any addons for the boards becomes a bit more complicated (as you have to navigate compatibility), but using the board -- I don't think so.

The LEDs on these little development boards are typically big sources of current draw too. Like the main CPU can go into deep sleep sipping microamps of power, but the power and other LEDs sit there with a resistor pulling tens of milliamps all the time.