I have an M1 mac for work and I am seriously impressed with the battery life. I prefer my asus laptop that I loaded ubuntu on for my daily driver (gaming, coding, fun), but man, I can leave my work machine unplugged all day while running the work VPN, firefox & chrome, remote desktop, vscode, slack and mattermost, and finish out the day with above 70% battery. I wasn't planning to like this laptop but I do.
After getting an M1 Pro, I don’t worry about battery life on laptop at all. This is such a huge quality of life upgrade and competition has no answer for this. I switched from Linux because of this.
I used Linux on my desktop for many years and also on and off on my laptop but since I got an M1 laptop at my previous job and since bought one for personal use, the Linux/Windows x86 laptops just can't seem to compete for my use. As you mentioned, particularly battery life is stellar on the M1.
My Lenovo laptop gets better battery life under Linux than it did under Windows, and I've generally found the battery life estimations (for my use cases anyway) to be complete bullshit even under MacOS.
I'm excited to be able to upgrade to the M1 series Mac's as it sounds like I might actually get battery life, though I have the 2019 16" Pro and can't justify the upgrade just yet, even if that thing overheats with just a Slack video.
My wife has an ~year-old Intel MBA. I have an M1 MBA.
Her battery's dead after 2 hours on Zoom or Discord or any of those battery-hungry web tech multimedia apps.
I've not tried taking it that far, but judging from where the battery on my M1 MBA gets to after a couple hours, I could probably do 6ish hours under that load (it's very dumb that some of these "productivity" programs are high-load and eat battery like crazy, but that's where we are).
If I avoid the webshit (Slack's unavoidable, for me, but I can ditch most of the rest, at least temporarily) I can work a whole day plus another half a workday on battery, no problem.
[EDIT] oh, and it feels faster than my hex-core AMD desktop with the badass graphics card and 64GB of memory does, under Win10 or Linux. Jank, jitter, and pauses galore, when doing basically nothing. Not so on the M1, unless I really abuse it. Granted that's largely the software's doing, but it doesn't really matter why it's better, in the end.
You will not get the battery life on Linux until GPU drivers are finished at the very least, and a bunch of other stuff.
If it's non-negotiable for you, I would suggest alternative options. There are now laptops with similar CPU performance and better GPU performance, with comparable battery life (I get 12 hours idle or browsing websites that aren't too demanding). It doesn't make sense to go with an M1 Mac as a Linux machine unless you really need it to be ARM.
I get about 4 hours productive use out of my work Macbook M1 pro (32 GB RAM, 1TB NVMe) on battery. I get about 3.5 hours productive use out of my Zen2 HP Omen laptop (64 GB RAM, 3TB NVME). Though I have to reduce the brightness of the Zen to get better lifetime.
I am a bit of a power user, running large builds, analytics, and other things, so its not surprising to me that I get less than others. I would like to see an all-day battery laptop for people like me, though I suspect it will be a few more years.
Oh, and the original work windows laptop I had (fully corporate controlled) with 32GB RAM and 500GB NVMe barely lasted an hour on battery. And it BSODed frequently.
I'd still prefer a Linux work laptop, but the Mac is at least a poor-mans version of it. Windows, even with WSL2, was horrible.
I have an M1 but never use it at home, the battery is only really useful if I need to spend a few days on the road away from power.
My daily driver is an Intel 1185g7 based Laptop which I can work a whole day without charging if needed (tops out at about 10 hours), and anymore than that doesn't really add any value. If Linux support gets better on the M1 I think I would consider switching but honestly when I put them side by side I don't notice a big performance difference. The M1 just uses a lot less power to get that performance.
It is a good battery life for a PC laptop but it is still significantly behind of M1 based Macs while also having significantly lower single core benchmarks compared to M1. And the performance difference is even bigger when both laptops are on battery power.
My Thinkpad T480 with high capacity battery gets about 10 hours of run time under Linux, running an editor, browser with a million tabs open, docker containers, and the occasional video playback. That’s enough for me, and I’m not convinced that a Mac would have meaningfully higher battery life with the same workload (especially running Docker, which is a hog on MacOS).
That's true. I can easily get more than a day's worth of work (coding + reading + browsing for reference) out of the M1 without having to reach for my charger. Of course I mostly use vim for coding, so YMMV if you're using something heavier like VSCode, Intellij, etc.
My work laptop is a mbp 2018 (i9, 32GB). The battery life is abysmal. I typically get a little bit over 2 hours. I'm not going to lie though: I'm always running Atom or VSCode and there's lots of opened tabs in Chrome.
I'm seeing incredible battery life in firefox on my M1 macbook air. Although maybe I just don't have high expectations after my linux based lenovo before this.
Can anyone comment on how battery life compares when running Linux on M1/M2? (I haven't been a mac person in many many years but I do love the Air and would consider getting one now that I wouldn't have to use their os)
I'm wondering if an M1 MacBook would actually have such a good battery life on linux. The processor is very power efficient, but I'd (naively) assume that MacOS's power management probably has a big influence too. In the same way that Linux laptops usually have a bad battery life compared to the same hardware on Windows. How good is Asahi when running similar workloads? And is it possible that it could reach parity with "stock" MacOS?
(I'm sure linux is in theory just as power efficient as MacOS or Windows, but distros are just usually not very concerned or capable of tuning it well enough.)
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