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I don't know if buy that Apple would do this for battery life. In certain use cases, we already get 8-10 hours out of their laptops. Of course, running certain

I don't know if buy that Apple would do this for battery life. In certain use cases, we already get 8-10 hours out of their laptops. Of course, running certain apps or heavy loads will shorten that to 2-3 hours, but I can do the same thing on my iPhone, certain apps will chew the battery up in no time. Won't the same thing happen with an ARM MacBook Pro?

k3liutZu 7y ago
Improved battery life is a nice bonus. But yeah, they are going to do this to have control as Intel has not been a reliable partner in the last 5-10 years.
Zenst 7y ago
Part of me wishes it is for battery life, yet sadly in many area's like this when we gain battery life we find that offset with a smaller battery and the marketing of how it is now lighter prevails. Which is fine if can do a whole day, which seems to be the target most aim for. I'd love a few days, heck I recall the days of mobile phones that ran for a week of usage. Alas over the decades we have seen faster and faster CPU's and equally we have in many area's seen sloppier and sloppier code. After all if it runs fine on the latest kit, no apparent need to optimise something that could run much better and by that, use less of the available CPU and less battery. Hence many applications that could run upon less resources - just don't and that's the real shame as whatever gains we make in one area's are eaten up in another when they don't need to be.
- jp555 7y ago
  "I recall the days of mobile phones that ran for a week of usage" do you mean talk time or standby? Because I do not remember this. Seems much more likely we just used our "single-app" mobiles WAY less. Maybe you were on cellphone calls 4-6 hours a day? But I do not remember any cell phone in the 90s and early 2000s that had a 30+ hours talk-time (plus 150 hours of standby).
  - iamben 7y ago
    Standby. I'd get a week (at a push?) out of my phone at university in the late 90s/early 00s. I don't think 3-5 days was at all unreasonable back then - for me that would be multiple text messages, a few games of snake, and a handful of calls a day. I get a day (at very best) out of my phone now if I don't touch it at all.
    - Hamuko 7y ago
      I charge my iPhone 11 Pro every other day now because not leaving the house means that I'm using it way less now. I think I got about 3 days of standby when I really pushed not charging it. I don't think getting 3 days standby out of a current smartphone would be that impossible. It's just that no one uses their smartphone so that it just sits there, not doing anything.
      - piva00 7y ago
        Staying home has seen my phone usage drop to 1/3 of the normal, my XS Max has been lasting around 3 to 3.5 days on a single charge. My usage report shows about 2.5 hours/day of screen time, makes sense as I'm using my phone only in the mornings and late evenings. Pretty good battery life when on low usage, I feel like trying turning on low battery mode from full charge and see how long it would last.
      - nicoburns 7y ago
        Indeed. Samsung phones (I have the S7) have an "Ultra power saving mode" which enables a bunch of power saving features including throttling, reducing display resolution / brightness. But the thing that makes the biggest difference is disabling background data. I once got 4 days of usage at a festival in this mode. And I was using it to keep in touch with people and as a camera (I probably took ~150 photos). The trick was to use it as little as possible, and keep in airplane mode unless I was specifically expecting a message (I would periodically take it out of airplane mode to check for messages).
    - jp555 7y ago
      That's odd, my 6S can last a couple days at least on standby if I don't touch it (something I recently discovered in being stuck at home surrounded by PCs and iPads, not needing my iPhone much). And my unit is a total lemon, turns off randomly and I get max 2 hours actual use out of it (although the replacement battery health says 85%).
- mjlee 7y ago
  Apple has rolled back a little on the battery/weight tradeoff on the "pro" linuep recently. The latest 16" MacBook Pro has a 100Wh battery (which hits the limit for being allowed in an aircraft cabin).
  - bluedino 7y ago
    The 2012 MacBook Pro had a 95Wh battery
- rsynnott 7y ago
  > Part of me wishes it is for battery life, yet sadly in many area's like this when we gain battery life we find that offset with a smaller battery and the marketing of how it is now lighter prevails. While Apple did definitely go down that road in 2016, since then MBP batteries have grown year on year back to the maximum (any bigger and they wouldn't be allowed on planes).
  - ordinaryradical 7y ago
    Heading it put this way gives me the sinking feeling they were planning this upgrade path all along so that they could say “improved battery life” with each new product update.
    - rsynnott 7y ago
      Nah; the increases 2016 to early 2019 were minor, and they never really talked about them (or quoted different battery life figures). The early 2019 to late 2019 change coincided with the laptop getting thicker and heavier.
- Analemma_ 7y ago
  > Part of me wishes it is for battery life, yet sadly in many area's like this when we gain battery life we find that offset with a smaller battery and the marketing of how it is now lighter prevails. The iPhone has gotten thicker and heavier year-over-year for every year since the iPhone 6, mainly due to monotonically-increasing battery capacity, and the new MacBook Pros are also thicker, heavier and with a bigger battery than the outgoing ones too. I'm not sure where this "they always make it thinner and cut battery capacity!" meme comes from.
detaro 7y ago
I could see it if "connected standby" type things were their target, but I doubt Apple wants that for Macbooks, given iPhones exist. So I think battery life improvements might be a nice to have, but not motivation alone.
rsynnott 7y ago
I'd expect that realistically it will largely be about cost. Intel OEM prices for their higher end chips (and anything in any Mac is towards the high end these days; even the cheapest chips used in Macs are over $200 on a thousand order basis to OEMs) are very high.
- twoodfin 7y ago
  Cost & control. Apple can (and does) reliably ship SoC’s for phones with exactly the features and cadence they desire. Even the closest relationship imaginable with Intel can’t give them that.
  - acdha 7y ago
    That seems like the key part: Intel delays held up multiple product lines in recent years and they have a long memory about those delays. They were able to fix other problems by pushing Ives out of the blocking path but they can’t do that to another huge company.
- delfinom 7y ago
  Hah, I see it about further killing repair. Now they can add full hardware locked components. You won't even able to exploit software to bypass any hardware locks. That and hackintoshes are becoming more common. You can't maintain your profit margins if they become too normal.
  - rsynnott 7y ago
    > Hah, I see it about further killing repair. Now they can add full hardware locked components. Who's replacing CPUs on Macs? Or practically any laptops, these days either? > That and hackintoshes are becoming more common ... They are?! I'd have thought less so if anything.
dx034 7y ago
Slack will be able to drain a battery within 2 hours no matter what chip they choose..
kall 7y ago
It's a bit sad that "8-10 hours" is now great for an Apple laptop. They used to sell a macbook air that had 12 hours listed battery life and could run for like 14. I assume the reason we cannot get that anymore is retina screens?
- AgloeDreams 7y ago
  That and people want brightness. The legacy MBA that set that benchmark had like a 250nit display. Now the 400nit model on the new MBA is seen as 'dark'. The iPhone 11 Pro nears 1000 nits.
  - kall 7y ago
    Yeah good point. I want the brightness as well. It's also nice to have a big lever to pull when you need to, by setting an annoyingly low brightness.
Eric_WVGG 7y ago
It could mean 20 hours off the same chassis and battery, or 8-10 hours off of a much skinner machine. I'll happily take either.
floatingatoll 7y ago
What if running certain apps or heavy loads did not shorten the laptop's battery life from 8-10 hours? Is an Apple processor chip able to provide more results in macOS creative apps (GarageBand, Logic, etc.) per watt-hour than any Intel chip? If so, then Apple will target Pro users with the A14, because it'll reduce demand on the battery in Pro scenarios. Either they'll reduce the weight of the laptop, and/or trade battery volume for other purposes, and/or increase the advertised battery life of the laptop. An iMac Pro is just a MacBook Pro glued to the back of a much larger monitor and a higher thermal cap. So if they would do it for MacBook Pro, they would do it for iMac Pro. And that means that the iMac Pro, which has a fixed amount of thermal capacity, would make more efficient use of the heat it generates. x% more efficient use of a battery on a laptop translates to y% improvement of some other aspect of a laptop and a desktop, and Apple isn't historically afraid of adding a new macOS architecture when improvements require it.
AgloeDreams 7y ago
It's Bloomburg so take commentary with a grain of salt. There's no one reason as much as a lot of great ones. Their own CPUs are far more power efficient, especially with light loads but notably they have wider power controls that allow for much lower 'low wattage' use. So Battery life will get better. Then you have performance, even assuming they were not moving to 5nm you would be looking at i9-destroying performance from the 8 firestorm cores, each on their own able to beat single-core performance from an i9. And that's before you think about the fact that the IceStorm cores can run full throttle with FireStorm. This laptop is going to have hilarious benchmark numbers. Think iPhone SE for the PC market. Then cost is the huge one. Obviously it allows them to move down-market or up the per-unit profit while reducing iPhone CPU R&D costs on paper.

k3liutZu 7y ago

Improved battery life is a nice bonus. But yeah, they are going to do this to have control as Intel has not been a reliable partner in the last 5-10 years.

Zenst 7y ago

Part of me wishes it is for battery life, yet sadly in many area's like this when we gain battery life we find that offset with a smaller battery and the marketing of how it is now lighter prevails. Which is fine if can do a whole day, which seems to be the target most aim for. I'd love a few days, heck I recall the days of mobile phones that ran for a week of usage. Alas over the decades we have seen faster and faster CPU's and equally we have in many area's seen sloppier and sloppier code. After all if it runs fine on the latest kit, no apparent need to optimise something that could run much better and by that, use less of the available CPU and less battery. Hence many applications that could run upon less resources - just don't and that's the real shame as whatever gains we make in one area's are eaten up in another when they don't need to be.

jp555 7y ago
"I recall the days of mobile phones that ran for a week of usage" do you mean talk time or standby? Because I do not remember this. Seems much more likely we just used our "single-app" mobiles WAY less. Maybe you were on cellphone calls 4-6 hours a day? But I do not remember any cell phone in the 90s and early 2000s that had a 30+ hours talk-time (plus 150 hours of standby).
- iamben 7y ago
  Standby. I'd get a week (at a push?) out of my phone at university in the late 90s/early 00s. I don't think 3-5 days was at all unreasonable back then - for me that would be multiple text messages, a few games of snake, and a handful of calls a day. I get a day (at very best) out of my phone now if I don't touch it at all.
  - Hamuko 7y ago
    I charge my iPhone 11 Pro every other day now because not leaving the house means that I'm using it way less now. I think I got about 3 days of standby when I really pushed not charging it. I don't think getting 3 days standby out of a current smartphone would be that impossible. It's just that no one uses their smartphone so that it just sits there, not doing anything.
    - piva00 7y ago
      Staying home has seen my phone usage drop to 1/3 of the normal, my XS Max has been lasting around 3 to 3.5 days on a single charge. My usage report shows about 2.5 hours/day of screen time, makes sense as I'm using my phone only in the mornings and late evenings. Pretty good battery life when on low usage, I feel like trying turning on low battery mode from full charge and see how long it would last.
    - nicoburns 7y ago
      Indeed. Samsung phones (I have the S7) have an "Ultra power saving mode" which enables a bunch of power saving features including throttling, reducing display resolution / brightness. But the thing that makes the biggest difference is disabling background data. I once got 4 days of usage at a festival in this mode. And I was using it to keep in touch with people and as a camera (I probably took ~150 photos). The trick was to use it as little as possible, and keep in airplane mode unless I was specifically expecting a message (I would periodically take it out of airplane mode to check for messages).
  - jp555 7y ago
    That's odd, my 6S can last a couple days at least on standby if I don't touch it (something I recently discovered in being stuck at home surrounded by PCs and iPads, not needing my iPhone much). And my unit is a total lemon, turns off randomly and I get max 2 hours actual use out of it (although the replacement battery health says 85%).
mjlee 7y ago
Apple has rolled back a little on the battery/weight tradeoff on the "pro" linuep recently. The latest 16" MacBook Pro has a 100Wh battery (which hits the limit for being allowed in an aircraft cabin).
- bluedino 7y ago
  The 2012 MacBook Pro had a 95Wh battery
rsynnott 7y ago
> Part of me wishes it is for battery life, yet sadly in many area's like this when we gain battery life we find that offset with a smaller battery and the marketing of how it is now lighter prevails. While Apple did definitely go down that road in 2016, since then MBP batteries have grown year on year back to the maximum (any bigger and they wouldn't be allowed on planes).
- ordinaryradical 7y ago
  Heading it put this way gives me the sinking feeling they were planning this upgrade path all along so that they could say “improved battery life” with each new product update.
  - rsynnott 7y ago
    Nah; the increases 2016 to early 2019 were minor, and they never really talked about them (or quoted different battery life figures). The early 2019 to late 2019 change coincided with the laptop getting thicker and heavier.
Analemma_ 7y ago
> Part of me wishes it is for battery life, yet sadly in many area's like this when we gain battery life we find that offset with a smaller battery and the marketing of how it is now lighter prevails. The iPhone has gotten thicker and heavier year-over-year for every year since the iPhone 6, mainly due to monotonically-increasing battery capacity, and the new MacBook Pros are also thicker, heavier and with a bigger battery than the outgoing ones too. I'm not sure where this "they always make it thinner and cut battery capacity!" meme comes from.

detaro 7y ago

I could see it if "connected standby" type things were their target, but I doubt Apple wants that for Macbooks, given iPhones exist. So I think battery life improvements might be a nice to have, but not motivation alone.

rsynnott 7y ago

I'd expect that realistically it will largely be about cost. Intel OEM prices for their higher end chips (and anything in any Mac is towards the high end these days; even the cheapest chips used in Macs are over $200 on a thousand order basis to OEMs) are very high.

twoodfin 7y ago
Cost & control. Apple can (and does) reliably ship SoC’s for phones with exactly the features and cadence they desire. Even the closest relationship imaginable with Intel can’t give them that.
- acdha 7y ago
  That seems like the key part: Intel delays held up multiple product lines in recent years and they have a long memory about those delays. They were able to fix other problems by pushing Ives out of the blocking path but they can’t do that to another huge company.
delfinom 7y ago
Hah, I see it about further killing repair. Now they can add full hardware locked components. You won't even able to exploit software to bypass any hardware locks. That and hackintoshes are becoming more common. You can't maintain your profit margins if they become too normal.
- rsynnott 7y ago
  > Hah, I see it about further killing repair. Now they can add full hardware locked components. Who's replacing CPUs on Macs? Or practically any laptops, these days either? > That and hackintoshes are becoming more common ... They are?! I'd have thought less so if anything.

dx034 7y ago

Slack will be able to drain a battery within 2 hours no matter what chip they choose..

kall 7y ago

It's a bit sad that "8-10 hours" is now great for an Apple laptop. They used to sell a macbook air that had 12 hours listed battery life and could run for like 14. I assume the reason we cannot get that anymore is retina screens?

AgloeDreams 7y ago
That and people want brightness. The legacy MBA that set that benchmark had like a 250nit display. Now the 400nit model on the new MBA is seen as 'dark'. The iPhone 11 Pro nears 1000 nits.
- kall 7y ago
  Yeah good point. I want the brightness as well. It's also nice to have a big lever to pull when you need to, by setting an annoyingly low brightness.

Eric_WVGG 7y ago

It could mean 20 hours off the same chassis and battery, or 8-10 hours off of a much skinner machine. I'll happily take either.

floatingatoll 7y ago

What if running certain apps or heavy loads did not shorten the laptop's battery life from 8-10 hours? Is an Apple processor chip able to provide more results in macOS creative apps (GarageBand, Logic, etc.) per watt-hour than any Intel chip? If so, then Apple will target Pro users with the A14, because it'll reduce demand on the battery in Pro scenarios. Either they'll reduce the weight of the laptop, and/or trade battery volume for other purposes, and/or increase the advertised battery life of the laptop. An iMac Pro is just a MacBook Pro glued to the back of a much larger monitor and a higher thermal cap. So if they would do it for MacBook Pro, they would do it for iMac Pro. And that means that the iMac Pro, which has a fixed amount of thermal capacity, would make more efficient use of the heat it generates. x% more efficient use of a battery on a laptop translates to y% improvement of some other aspect of a laptop and a desktop, and Apple isn't historically afraid of adding a new macOS architecture when improvements require it.

AgloeDreams 7y ago

It's Bloomburg so take commentary with a grain of salt. There's no one reason as much as a lot of great ones. Their own CPUs are far more power efficient, especially with light loads but notably they have wider power controls that allow for much lower 'low wattage' use. So Battery life will get better. Then you have performance, even assuming they were not moving to 5nm you would be looking at i9-destroying performance from the 8 firestorm cores, each on their own able to beat single-core performance from an i9. And that's before you think about the fact that the IceStorm cores can run full throttle with FireStorm. This laptop is going to have hilarious benchmark numbers. Think iPhone SE for the PC market. Then cost is the huge one. Obviously it allows them to move down-market or up the per-unit profit while reducing iPhone CPU R&D costs on paper.