I carry an M1 Macbook Air (for xcode) and an LG Gram 17 running Kubuntu for everything else (which is most of what I do). The Gram is probably the best laptop I've ever owned (it replaced an XPS-15) - it's bigger (13" vs 17"), lighter (2oz less than the air) and gets crazy life out of the battery.
When new, the Gram got 11-16 hours of battery (it now gets 8-10 hours) under development load (i.e running a node app, a go app and a Django backend, plus support servers). The Air hasn't been used as hard as the Gram, but it's battery gets similar performance. On the power management front, everything works on the air. On the Gram, hibernate is disabled, and sleep works (I've left the Gram in my bag over a three day weekend, and it was at about 20% on Tuesday when I opened it up). I ran Windows for about a week on the Gram and it did got less than eight hours of battery. No idea why.
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 use daily both an MacBook Air m1 and x220. I have the 9 cell for the x220 and run Linux on it. Battery life for the most work (I do) is similar on both.
There are some interesting cases; running Docker drains the m1 (only ARM images) faster than the x220 and doing typescript work drains the x220 faster than the m1.
Not as much anymore. But I use to travel a lot as a consultant and I still travel with my wife quite frequently - I work remotely.
Seriously honest question as someone not too deep in the x86 ecosystem anymore. Which of these that are listed as having the best battery life would be comparable in performance to the latest MacBook Airs?
Picked up a refurb 16GB air just last week. I'm astounded at the battery life. It's my dream laptop. I wanted to buy a framework for the repairability, but I make some iOS apps and also really wanted the battery life. I've been floored by how long it lasts, even running npm installs and compiling Angular applications, things that used to burn my lap and drain the battery in 4-6 hours on my Intel air.
Most recent Thinkpad was X1 Carbon with Kubuntu, running intellij / browsers / docker would last around 3 hours or so. M1 Air is 15+.
I also have a Anker 737 battery, with it I can double the macbook's battery if fully charged. The Thinkpad would only charge partially, so wouldn't even double.
The 13” Macbook Air is advertised to get 15-18h and 14” MBP 15-22h, and real world numbers with light-to-midweight usage is pretty close to that. My work/personal 16” M1 Pro/Max MBPs can end a day of work in Xcode and/or Android studio with 40-50% battery left. They do this out of the box with zero tweaking and have zero performance difference between plugged in or unplugged (no throttling).
My ultraportable (ThinkPad X1 Nano Gen 1) gets 5-7h on a good day with the system set to “power saver” mode, with little difference between Windows and Fedora. If I’m juggling several tabs or doing anything slightly more intense it’s going to be lower.
The best x86 ultraportable option I’ve seen from current gen offerings is probably the HP Dragonfly G4, which if configured with the 1920x1280 screen and lowest-TDP CPU can manage around 14h which sounds ok, but efficiency still isn’t as good as with the MacBooks because it’s only capable of that with light usage because it has a 16Wh larger battery than a Macbook Air, has a lower resolution display that’s about half as bright, and has to be in power saver mode.
I use an M1 Air for my daily development, and under full CPU load the battery lasts about 2.5 hours, while under no load and low screen brightness it will last for 15-20 hours.
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.
The M1 Air has a ~50 Wh battery, ~2 % over ~six hours is ~0.15 W total system power. For comparison, I'm getting ~0.9 W total system power under similar conditions on a five year old laptop (i5-7200U, 16 GB non-LP DDR4, no memory DVFS, MX500 SATA SSD, 1080p IPS screen).
But you'll likely find that the screen/display system is the biggest power hog in light use. For the laptop above just turning the screen on at a low brightness requires around 1.3 W (for a total system power of around 2.2-2.3 W).
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.
I've been running Asahi for a full year on my m2 air. The battery life is quite good. Yes, I think macOS has batter battery optimizations than linux, but compared to other laptops running linux it really is quite good.
XCode works amazingly well - compiling a small project, live preview and running the simulator just feels fast, not like waiting for a machine with too few resources to do something. The Air lasts roughly 10-12 hours on one charge.
Docker and PyCharm are also working well, but the Air only lasts like 7ish hours before it needs to be plugged in again.
Parallels VMs (Debian) work, but drain the battery and feel a bit more sluggish than I am used to. Something I hope will improve once Parallels officially supports the M1, not just in a tech preview.
I did not encounter any problems with any of the tools I use (Fork, Paw, iTerm) and last I checked most have support for the M1 (I try to use as many native apps as possible).
I used my M1 MacBook Air last weekend with Asahi and GNOME on train ride for roughly 4 hours (browsing the web, fiddling with a server over ssh, writing a blog post) and when shutting it down, it was still at 78%.
This used to be different when I first installed Asahi, but the GPU driver and other improvements have made battery life something I don't really worry about anymore.
When new, the Gram got 11-16 hours of battery (it now gets 8-10 hours) under development load (i.e running a node app, a go app and a Django backend, plus support servers). The Air hasn't been used as hard as the Gram, but it's battery gets similar performance. On the power management front, everything works on the air. On the Gram, hibernate is disabled, and sleep works (I've left the Gram in my bag over a three day weekend, and it was at about 20% on Tuesday when I opened it up). I ran Windows for about a week on the Gram and it did got less than eight hours of battery. No idea why.
reply