> As for battery life, Copilot+ PCs support up to 15 hours of web browsing or 22 hours of local video playback. The MacBook Air models offer the same 15 hours of wireless web browsing, but only 18 hours of local video playback.
This is so underrated. I got a new macbook air as a temp while my m1 max gets repaired and it blows my mind how I had it unplugged for 2 days over the weekend and the battery is still going.
It's like range anxiety in cars, not worrying about hunting down my usb-c charger I left in some random room is nice
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Very excited to see this. Microsoft Windows was always a bottleneck for us when it came to ad content delivery to Windows users. With this incredible performance of Surface Pro, we will deliver ads to those users at a speed they have never see before. By the time you close one ad, 3 others are already open. Thank you Satya for making this happen.
> As for battery life, Copilot+ PCs support up to 15 hours of web browsing or 22 hours of local video playback. The MacBook Air models offer the same 15 hours of wireless web browsing, but only 18 hours of local video playback.
I don't know how good the Linux support for this hardware is, but, if it works well, the reason of buying Macs for their battery life gets blown out of the water.
The track record is important: PCs have a track record of reducing the battery life to 15 minutes within 2 years through simple Windows updates; It’s probable that it will take 15 years to overcome people’s assumptions.
Windows battery benchmarks have always been wildly overoptimistic on Surface products. Factor of 2 to 4 in my experience. Various bugs and bloat cause them to run hot when idling, or in the case of my most recent purchase, when sleeping! In both cases the device had these problems from day one.
As for performance benchmarks, I don't care what numbers they get if it takes a full 8 seconds to open a context menu when I right click something. I'm even less enthusiastic if I'm forced to use Windows 11 and put up with ads.
Surface hardware is amazing, but if Windows doesn't lose all of this bloat then I am done with it.
I've always wondered this. For example I can't imagine how they ever achieved their quoted battery benchmarks with system processes running in the background, like indexing. These regularly consumed >50% CPU resources on my older Surface pro even on battery and were not easy to disable (I never did because doing so would cause other problems). But I can't see how you would achieve the quoted battery life without doing so...
If they do disable these things in their test, then that's super dishonest.
Possibly, but it would have to be way better specified. You have dimensions like the OS, conference service, camera quality, browser, etc. that all affect it.
Yet it runs Windows which automatically negates any hardware advantage. Surfaces and other windows laptops have always had "good" hardware, but the software is just garbage.
Very interesting developments. I wonder how good X Elite's performance per watt is compared to the M3. Then again, Apple will soon restock all Macs with M4-level processors (reported, take it with a grain of salt). M4 beats the X Elite, but its not really a fair comparison since the X Elite is meant to compete with the M3. It seems like the X Elite is close to M3, but uses much more power [0].
> Then again, Apple will soon restock all Macs with M4-level processors
Probably not soon. They just refreshed the macs with M3s, and put the M4s in the ipads pro, I assume due to TSMC yield issues with a bleeding edge process (yes, ipads outsell macs, but not the ipads pro, which is a low volume "halo" product).
The power efficiency numbers in that link do not appear to be derived from anything; definitely not actual measurements. The score out of 100 is almost certainly complete bullshit, and the site as a whole probably is worthless.
Do they say that when they developed it or after when they find out they cannot beat the M4
that they are not competing with something they cannot beat?
Those chips are in the pipeline for years. There's a chance M3 wasn't even out by the time they had the mostly finalised design for this processor. They definitely couldn't aim for any comparison with M4 at any point of that process.
Readit News
This is so underrated. I got a new macbook air as a temp while my m1 max gets repaired and it blows my mind how I had it unplugged for 2 days over the weekend and the battery is still going.
It's like range anxiety in cars, not worrying about hunting down my usb-c charger I left in some random room is nice
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.
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.
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.
I know Linux has powertop which can measure energy usage per subsystem. Not sure if windows has something like that to answer your question?
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.
That’s about normal for it.
Support? Big "hmmm" energy.
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
Deleted Comment
I don't know how good the Linux support for this hardware is, but, if it works well, the reason of buying Macs for their battery life gets blown out of the water.
As for performance benchmarks, I don't care what numbers they get if it takes a full 8 seconds to open a context menu when I right click something. I'm even less enthusiastic if I'm forced to use Windows 11 and put up with ads.
Surface hardware is amazing, but if Windows doesn't lose all of this bloat then I am done with it.
Assuming that’s accurate, isn’t that just straight consumer fraud?
If they do disable these things in their test, then that's super dishonest.
Deleted Comment
Desktop apps are increasingly moving to the web not the other way around.
[0]: https://nanoreview.net/en/cpu-compare/qualcomm-snapdragon-x-...
Probably not soon. They just refreshed the macs with M3s, and put the M4s in the ipads pro, I assume due to TSMC yield issues with a bleeding edge process (yes, ipads outsell macs, but not the ipads pro, which is a low volume "halo" product).
Dead Comment