Apple does usually explain their testing methodology and they don’t cheat on benchmarks like some other companies. It’s just that the results are still marketing and should be treated as such.
Outlandish claims notwithstanding, I don’t think anyone can deny the progress they achieved with their CPU and especially GPU IP. Improving performance on complex workloads by 30–50% in a single year is very impressive.
> HP gave the 13-inch HP Spectre x360 an absurd 22.5 hours of estimated battery life, while our real-world test results showed that the laptop could last for 12 hours and 7 minutes.
> Speaking of the ThinkPad P72, here are the top three laptops with the most, er, far out battery life claims of all our analyzed products: the Lenovo ThinkPad P72, the Dell Latitude 7400 2-in-1 and the Acer TravelMate P6 P614. The three fell short of their advertised battery life by 821 minutes (13 hours and 41 mins), 818 minutes (13 hours and 38 minutes) and 746 minutes (12 hours and 26 minutes), respectively.
Dell did manage to be one of the top 3 most absurd claims though.
Dell and IBM were lying about battery life before OSX was even a thing and normal people started buying MacBooks. Dell and IBM will be lying about battery life when the sun goes red dwarf.
Reviewers and individuals like me have always been able to get 90% of Apple’s official battery times without jumping through hoops to do so. “If you were very careful” makes sense for an 11% difference. A ten hour difference is fucking bullshit.
Okay, but your example was about battery life:
> LIke when they said an Macbook Air would last 10+ hours and third-party reviewers would get 8-9+ hours. All the while, Dell or HP would claim 19 hours and you'd be lucky to get 2 eg [1]
And even then, they exaggerated their claims. And your link doesn't say anything about HP or Dell claiming 19 hour battery life.
Apple has definitely exaggerated their performance claims over and over again. The Apple silicon parts are fast and low power indeed, but they've made ridiculous claims like comparing their chips to an nVidia RTX 3090 with completely misleading graphs
Even the Mac sites have admitted that the nVidia 3090 comparison was completely wrong and designed to be misleading: https://9to5mac.com/2022/03/31/m1-ultra-gpu-comparison-with-...
This is why you have to take everything they say with a huge grain of salt. Their chip may be "twice" as power efficient in some carefully chosen unique scenario that only exists in an artificial setting, but how does it fare in the real world? That's the question that matters, and you're not going to get an honest answer from Apple's marketing team.