Honestly, a lot of that is budget.
Apple makes low clocked, very wide SoCs, and are always the first customer of the most cutting edge silicon node. This is very expensive. And Apple can eat it with their outrageous prices.
Intel (and AMD) go more for “balance,” with smaller cheaper dies and higher peak clocks. Their OEMs also “cheap out” by bundling a bunch of bloatware that also drains the battery to pad margins. You can find PCs with big batteries and better stock configs, but these are more expensive.
AMD is only just now getting into the “premium” game with the upcoming Strix Halo chip (M2 Pro-ish spec wise). Intel isn’t there yet, but there are rumors they will as well.
bloatware
Even if you remove all that crap, battery life is nowhere near the same vs the M-series chips. So while it may be a problem, it’s still not anywhere close to the reason battery life sucks.
It can be if you run linux and throttle the chips. Even my older G14 last a long time, as the AMD SoCs are great, it can run fanless throttled down, and it just has a straight up bigger battery than razor thin Macs.
But again, it’s just not configured this way in most laptops, which sacrifice battery for everything else because, well, OEMs are idiots.
What specific driver and linux tools do you use to throttle your CPU?
Also throttling often produces the opposite result in terms of extended battery life as it likely takes more time in the higher states to do the same amount of work whereas running at a faster clock speed, the work is completed faster and the CPU returns to a lower less energy using state quicker and resides there more of the time.
I would be interested to hear your results. Have you done any tests comparing a throttled versus throttled system with the tools you are using?
Isn’t the screen eating most of the power in laptops? I just have an old T490 that I don’t use very much so I might be not that well informed.
I thought so too, but if Apple is getting more than 2x the battery life vs competitors while having a more dense screen, then I suppose it’s not as significant as I had thought.
