this post was submitted on 28 Oct 2023
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That's not my experience. I can play demanding games (CPU/GPU flat out) for several hours on battery on my Mac, and it only has a 50Wh battery.
With "normal" use I get about 18 hours on a charge.
I generally charge it overnight, like a phone, except I don't do it every night. I often don't even have access to a charger for days at a time, a laptop charger isn't part of my normal travel kit. If I notice the battery "running low" that means I need to find a charger in, like, five hours time.
The high end MacBook Pros, with a 12 core CPU and 38 core GPU... yeah those can draw a lot of power. In fact they even drain the battery while plugged into a charger if you really push them. But I don't think of those as "proper" laptops. They're more like a portable desktop.
A demanding game on a macbook air m2 will still draw close to 30 watts and while that is actually still good for a laptop relative to what the output is, and you can probably do things to improve that by tweaking in game settings, it's still going to suck power out of a 50Whr battery.
Steamdecks also run an efficient ryzen apu that lets them play games for 2-8 hours depending on how things are tweaked. Likewise on my 39Whr ryzen thinkpad(intel got a 59whr battery dont get me started on that nonsense) I can get 8-12 hours depending on usage normal browsing as well.
This isnt to take down the m1 & m2. They are definitively more powerful, theyre definitively more efficient, I'm not disputing that. But the gap isnt as huge as it was when the m1 launched.
I'm on an M1 MacBook Air - Anandtech measured between 11 and 17 watts with an M1 Mac Mini.
However, the Mac Mini has an excessively large cooling system for the chipset it runs (before Apple Silicon, they sold the same Mac with an Intel i7 that turbo boosted to 4.6Ghz).
The MacBook Air has basically no cooling at all and it definitely throttles under high load. It's still fast enough to get 60fps with good graphics settings while throttled for the games I play - I'd say it's about on par with my gaming PC that has an entry level Nvidia GPU, but there's no way it's drawing as much power as in Anandtech's testing on an actively cooled chip.
Based on the battery life I'm getting, I'd guess it's drawing somewhere around 8 watts on average while playing games. It's a very efficient chip... it draws 0.2 watts while idle according to Anandtech testing. Remember, this family of chips started life on devices with a 10Wh battery and the MacBook Air isn't much faster than an iPhone.
You are absolutely right about efficiency. Even the (less efficient) M2 is way better than the 6800U for example under single-threaded load. It's ~5W vs ~15W, around 3 times as power hungry as the M2, while performing slightly worse.
The M1 is around 25% more efficient than the M2.
No that's not right. The M2 is far more efficient. Third party tests report he M2 MacBook Air lasts up to 3 hours longer than the M1.
Yes, it draws more power under peak load... but it more than makes up for that with better performance allowing it to return to an idle state more quickly. Give an M1 and an M2 the same task, and the M2 will draw less power to get the task done.
Your original discussion with @lemillionsocks@beehaw.org, was about power usage while gaming, and the corresponding worst-case battery life. I was referring to this as efficiency.
I understand now that the term was misleading The M1 is 25% more frugal than the M2 under worst-case load.