That's fine and I appreciate this progress, but right now performance is way below energy efficiency to me when choosing a laptop. My major question is, how long will the battery last between each charge. I just don't want to worry anymore about charging when travelling for a few hours.
I’ll echo that. Laptops have been “fast enough” for a long time, which is why I can break out an Core 2 Duo laptop from 2008 and still get a lot done with it, but somehow despite far better process nodes and battery tech, battery life is on average worse today than it was in 2014, which is just goofy.
> but somehow despite far better process nodes and battery tech, battery life is on average worse today than it was in 2014, which is just goofy
Not trying to make excuses for shitty laptop vendors but the CPU power usage is just a fraction of a laptop's power envelope. The GPU, RAM, controllers, storage, and display (including driver circuitry) all eat up power. Their usage is exacerbated if the OS can't sleep or otherwise throttle those components during times of low demand.
Apple's pretty good about managing whole system power. It's gotten "easier" for them with Apple Silicon since everything is a SoC that they control. On x86 machines the vendor is just leveraging the components they get from Intel or AMD. The vendor's control is limited to what the drivers expose.
Often times different components' behavior or stability can change with different power modes. Vendors will just lock the device to high power mode to avoid those pitfalls at the cost of battery life for the user.
