Hardware acceleration is not some binary state these days, there are a ton of specialized bits of hardware under the Apple M chip umbrella.

Additionally, Apple's always¹ been insanely great at power management even pre-Apple Silicon by virtue of (1) prioritizing it more highly than other vendors, and (2) implementing it in a way that takes advantage of the complete hardware and software stack.

¹ https://blog.codinghorror.com/why-does-windows-have-terrible...

>The main reason for bad battery life is hardware acceleration for certain tasks.

I guess this was a typo. MacOS/Apple Silicon (and other CPU architectures) save a lot of power via hardware acceleration. For instance, there are dedicated hardware video decoding blocks that use much less power than implementing video decoding with software.

The MacOS kernel takes advantage of all of these hardware specifics. MacOS also uses a number of other techniques like process wakeup coalescing, dedicated hardware for memory compression, process specific efficiency/performance core choices, ...

Apple is getting a lot of power improvements via codesign of the processor and the OS.

To do the same set of tasks with a similar power profile, Asahi will have to include system hooks that take advantage of all the dedicated lower power hardware functions and do a similar set of optimizations. They have done great work so far and will likely continue, but it isn't the simple tradeoff you are suggesting.

> codesign of the processor

Was very confused for a moment.

Because the linux drivers might not support all the power saving states for all the hardware in the device.

For example: I bought a Dell XPS 9 months ago. With the earlier Fedora 37 kernels, it didn't put the Nvidia card into power saving mode, causing battery life to be less than an hour. Now it seems to work correctly and battery life is 3-4 hours for me.