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bigmadshoe parent
5 hours seems a lot worse than the ~10 hours I get on my M4 Air.
threatripper
I get like 3 hours on my MBP when I use it. MacBooks have better runtime only when they are mostly idle, not when you fully load them.
baq
Can confirm, when developing software (a big project at $JOB) getting 3h out of a M3 MBP is a good day. IDE, build, test and crowdstrike are all quite power hungry.
mbreese
I wonder how much of that is crowdstrike. At $LASTJOB my Mac was constantly chugging due to some mandated security software. Battery life on that computer was always horrible compared to a personal MB w/o it.
yalok
Exactly. Antiviruses are evil in this sense - crippling battery life significantly.

Wherever possible, I send “pkill -STOP” to all those processes, and stall them and thus save battery…

mbreese
The firewall on that computer killed the battery (with repeated crashing). It also refused to work with a USB Ethernet adapter so I could only use wifi. It was clearly a product meant to check a security box, written by a company that knew nothing about Macs, bought by Enterprise Windows admins. It was incredibly frustrating. (The next version of MacOS moved firewalls away from in-kernel to extensions. I like to think it was my repeated crash logs that made the difference.)

I half wonder if that’s part of the issue with Windows PCs and their battery life. The OS requires so much extra monitoring just to protect itself that it ends up affecting performance and battery life significantly. It wouldn’t be surprising to me if this alone was the major performance boost Macs have over Windows laptops.

musicale
> crowdstrike

It is incredible that crowdstrike is still operating as a business.

It is also hard to understand why companies continue to deploy shoddy, malware-like "security" software that decreases reliability while increasing the attack surface.

Basically you need another laptop just to run the "security" software.

baq
Allegedly, crowdstrike is S-tier EDR. Can’t blame security folks to want to have it. The performance and battery tax is very real though.
swiftcoder
Ever since Crowdstrike fucked up and took out $10 billion worth of Windows PCs with a bad patch, most of the security folks I know have come around to the view that it is an overall liability. Something lighter-touch carries less risk, even if it isn't quite as effective.
zillow
there's a few different reasons: - its pushed by gov (it gives full access to machines, huge backdoor) - its not actually the worst of its kind, sadly - their threat database is good (ie it will catch stuff) - it lets you look at everything on the machine (not the only one, but, its def. useful) - its big - cant be faulted for "we had it and we got pwned" - yep, sad as well

If operating systems weren't as poop as they are today, this would not be necessary - but here we are. And I bet you major OS manufacturers will not really fix their OSes without ensuring its just a fully walled garden (terrible for devs.. but you'll probably just run a linux vm for dev on top..). Bad intents lead to bad software.

koiueo
I concur.

The only portable M device I heavily used on the go was my iPad Pro.

That thing could survive for over a week if not or lightly used. But as soon as you open Lightroom to process photos, the battery would melt away in an hour or two.

Delk
I get 8 to 10 hours of light use on my personal ThinkPad. Or ~6 h of Netflix at 50% screen brightness, despite the lack of hardware decoding for DRM encrypted video on Linux. All of these are with a max charge threshold of 80%. 5 hours of battery life sounds rather limited to me, too.

But then the numbers are hardly comparable without having comparable workloads. If I were regularly running builds or had some other moderate load throughout a working day, that'd probably cost a couple of hours.

bigstrat2003
At a certain point it's not like it matters. If you're working for 5 hours, let alone 10, you will almost certainly be able to plug in during that time.
ManBeardPc
It’s true for me. I need a portable workstation more than a mobile laptop, as long as it survives train travels (most have power outlets now), moving between buildings/rooms or the occasional meeting with a customer +presentation it is enough for me.

But I can imagine some people have different needs and may not have access to (enough) power outlets. Some meeting/conference rooms had only a handful outlets for dozens of people. Definitely nice to survive light office work for a full working day.

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