Macs have always had great battery life and the Apple Silicon chips took it to another level. It remains to be seen if any Windows laptop can actually consistently achieve their marketed battery life given Windows’ terrible track record for power management and proper sleeping.

Macs were long hindered by Intel processors to have long battery lifes AND/OR good performance. Two examples of MacBooks I had:

The 12" MacBook. Great form factor, bad software (graphics driver code was especially poor), poor keyboard, lousy battery life, slow CPU & graphics. Similar size now with the 13" MacBook Air, but much better.

The i9 MacBook Pro. Too heavy, not enough cooling, extra GPU chip (in the laptop) with lots of power demand, Thunderbolt chips with lots of power demand, CPU with lots of power demand, fans were often on (for example with anything which uses the extra GPU). Now a 16" MacBook Pro with Apple Silicon is virtually silent AND fast.

I currently have a Mac mini with M2 Pro, a MacBook Pro with M2 Pro and the new iPad Pro M4. All are very snappy and virtually silent. They use very little idle power and don't get warm in normal use. The i9 MacBook Pro would produce a lot of heat when attached to an external screen and doing a "simple" video call, due to the power hungry additional GPU needed to drive the external screen.

Yeah, no. Some macs had good battery life. The last Intel MBP was really bad though. (Less than 2h of basic desktop use and lots of overheating after a year)

I don't know how it compares, but my recent AMD ThinkPad uses about 1% of the battery per hour while in "modern standby." I figure I have at least three and up to 4 days of being unplugged before it's forced to shut down.

Pretty sure GP was using their MacBook over the weekend. The MBA is supposed to last something like 30 days in sleep.

Yours is the sort of things I got with my Linux work laptop, and it’s miserable: a few years down the line battery degradation means after a 3 days weekend you have even odds the laptop will have slept itself to shutdown.

I assume they meant unplugged and in regular use, not unplugged and hibernating the whole time.

The system wasn't hibernating, it was just sleeping.

That doesn't change much, I guess. Still very little power usage compared to an actual turned on machine.

My work MBP has been neglected in a bag next to my desk for 2 weeks now. I just opened OmniFocus on my phone and it shows that my laptop last synced this afternoon.

That’s about normal for it.

> Copilot+ PCs support up to

Support? Big "hmmm" energy.

I have serious trust issues when microsoft makes a claim about battery life.

Yeah, I bought past versions of the Surface and the Surface Book. They would often never wake up from sleep or the battery would be dead unexpectedly. Hard for me to trust them after feeling like I wasted money multiple times.

The Microsoft ecosystem seems to invite it.

Even on an old, well-understood, and revered[0] laptop (the ThinkPad T530), I was having an unexpectedly-dead battery when running Windows.

It's a work laptop, and it is pretty much only used for occasional actually-portable computing work like programming of other devices in the field. It spends most of its time in the work truck, hibernated and unplugged -- sometimes, for weeks at a stretch.

I began to accept its increasingly-poor apparent battery health and started to explain it to myself as "Well, it is pretty old."

Or so I thought, anyway: One day it was sitting there on a table, unplugged, and I noticed that it came to life by itself and then hibernated again a few minutes later.

WTF?

Waaaay too much investigation later, I found that a part of an HP printer driver was forcing it to wake every couple of hours...for reasons that I don't care to explore, since none of those reasons could possibly have any positive merit.

Waaaay too much poking-and-prodding after that, I was able to disable the offending thing using powercfg on the command line.

And now, it seems fine. The battery life is not particularly good and never will be, but at least it's not "Surprise! I'm completely dead!!!" anymore.

This kind of sloppiness in software seems to be considered normal in the Windows space, and an abusive HP printer driver doesn't care if it is running on a 9-year-old ThinkPad or a 9-day-old Surface: It will abuse all of them just the same.

[0]: I hate numeric keypads, and gamer laptops, and computers that are built down to a budget as a primary design criteria. The T530 is approximately the last 15" PC laptop that lacks a numeric keypad, and that does not have stupid gamer-glam functions or styling, and that isn't built down to a budget price. It is stoic and plain and black, and both the keyboad and the touchpad are centered on the screen.

I don't understand why battery life in gaming laptops is so incredibly shit even when doing non-gaming tasks. I thought a while back Intel and AMD worked on hardware/software to automatically switch to integrated graphics when you don't need the discrete GPU? Did nothing come of that?

I don't expect the battery life to be as good as non-gaming laptops, of course, but I feel like it should probably last longer than like an hour and a half.

It works like that on most laptops. The GPU selection should be transparent on windows. (And can be done explicitly in Linux)

I know Linux has powertop which can measure energy usage per subsystem. Not sure if windows has something like that to answer your question?

Been like that forever.

Usually gaming laptops prioritize their cooling systems over battery size. And don’t underestimate the high refresh rate panel likely optimized for at least 500 nits.

> And don’t underestimate the high refresh rate panel

Literally one of the reasons Apple added variable refresh rates on their pro phones: if you can vrr down, you save a ton of battery when you run the panel at 1Hz.

I’m pretty sure any MacBook Pro with ProMotion can only drop to 24hz

“the MacBook Pro’s ProMotion display can range from 24Hz to 120Hz.”

https://9to5mac.com/2021/10/19/macbook-pro-promotion-tidbits....

Ah cool, didn't know that, I thought it was only in the phones and tablets.

i hate ios and apple software quality is a total joke.

ill give it up for any actually good things tho, i did try a macbook air during a long trip and the battery life is truly excellent and worth dealing with the downsides