The main power advantage of the apple chips is when the system is mostly idle - under mid to high load power to watt has been comparable for a few years already (at least AMD and Apple, intel was way behind - but I guess they caught up recently). The main reason behind my M3 MBP back then wasn't so much power efficiency - but that I can get it with 96GB of RAM.
It's nice that I can go a full office day without charging - the previous x86 notebook couldn't, but a decent one from the M3 generation probably could as well. But also if I put proper load an that thing the Macbook battery is done in less than 2 hours.
I don't see how? it is a 50Wh battery. Even at 6W that is about 8h of usage? On what OS + workload on x86 are you seeing just 6W usage? Or is it that each day your usage is only 2 hours?
> And I bet you can soon get a ThinkPad with the same intel chip, that should have similar battery life.
Yes you can, speaking from experience. I have the T14 gen 7 with the 75 wh battery, and the 356H CPU, it only uses 4-6w/hour when coding with a lot of browser tabs open, a headless VM running, docker containers and so on, online meetings is about 6-8w/hour, this is under Linux, with default power setting from Opensuse.
It can easily last more than 10 working hours, I limit mine to 80% charge as it's more than enough for when I'm on the go.
I have a M1 Pro from work and it surely won't last that while working. Throw some video calls at it and working outside (so, screen at the brightest level) and at the end of the work day I have to plug it in
With load on it and a bright room (= display reasonably bright as well) my M3 also doesn't always last 8h. But it gets very close. Intel machines are more like 3h in that case.
It’s more about not having to drag a cable + brick around everywhere and not needing to care about the location of the nearest power outlet, potentially for multiple days depending on usage patterns. You can instead leave the charging bits at home or the hotel and charge overnight.
This also means that battery cycles accumulate more slowly and the battery’s lifetime is stretched further.
Also, generally more efficient chips don’t get hot as easily which makes the laptop more comfortable to use and prevents fans from becoming audible unless you’re really pushing the system.
Probably nobody and I remember when a phone battery lasted one week: nevertheless sometimes we forgot to charge and we run out of battery. So a long lasting battery is good, too long lasting is a waste, which maybe it's your point.
However nowadays it could mean running some agents all day long (remote models) and plug in to power only at the end of the day.
Have they? What AMD or Intel laptop with Linux on it can hold a candle to and M4 air or an M4max pro? Genuinely curious, cause I found none...