One big Apple Silicon improvement that sometimes gets taken for granted is just HOW good the power efficiency is. Yesterday I got to the coffee shop and realized I had forgotten to charge my M1 Air—it only had ~20%. Almost three hours later, I packed up to go home and it still had about 5% battery and was doing fine. (My old Intel Air would have died in under an hour.)
The best encapsulation of this is that I just don’t carry a charging cable anymore unless I'm packing for a multi-day trip.
Mind you, this is a four and a half year old computer from the first-generation of this technology. Battery health is down to 85% and it still manages to deliver amazing life.
@dmoren I had a similar situation last week. Our power was out for 26 hours (electric company cut an underground wire by mistake, apparently) and went to a coffee shop. I made a bad choice of coffee shop, going for coffee quality rather than modernity. It was crowded and they only had one outlet available, and that one outlet required me to use a small 1-port charger. I chose to charge a battery pack and just use my M1 MBP unplugged, starting at 17%. 90 minutes of work and only got down to 4%.
@dmoren Also the fact that the day before, with no power in the house after 10:30am, I got in a full day of work and still had 20% remaining.
@dmoren Meanwhile, my Lenovo Windows Laptop from Sept 2023 just told me to plug in (20% remaining) after starting the day at 100% and doing just under 2 hours of email and Excel. 😢
@gruber Honestly, it's just removed so much anxiety from my life. All I carry now is a small backpack that basically just has my Air in it. Then AirPods Pro and my iPhone in my pocket. That's it! I remember when I used to lug a giant bag with like ten pounds of equipment everywhere.
@dmoren also pretty great - when you do travel without a power cable, your odds of being able to borrow something that will at least let you slow down your power drain is pretty good.
@dmoren Mac centric conferences I have been to used to run long lines of power cables and strips among the seats so that attendees could keep the laptops charged. Post-pandemic/Apple silicon conferences don't bother any more and nobody cares, because the laptops will easily last through a day.
