2003 x86 laptop: 1-2h battery life, fan ~always on, annoying tonal fan noise
2023 x86 laptop: 6-10h battery life, fan off in idle, some kind of wide spectrum whooshing sound when on
And my work Microsoft Surface laptop fan never shuts off.
It's almost like there's a spectrum of PCs.
My former work 16 inch MacBook Pro could easily make it through a day and half of decently heavy work and conference calls doing presentations over Chime (how do you say where you worked without saying where you worked) on battery when on site at a customer. Some of their team couldn’t make it.
My personal MacBook Air (M2) can make it 16+ hours with a relative light workload and there is no fan.
Why would I ever in 2023 still put up with a heavy, loud, low battery life laptop when I could get an M1 Air for less than $1000?
> Why would I ever in 2023 still put up with a heavy, loud, low battery life laptop when I could get an M1 Air for less than $1000?
Because your workload isn't compatible with MacOS, and Apple makes no effort to remedy it at a software-level? Docker should not be more energy efficient on Windows than it is on Mac... and that's really just the tip of the incompatibility iceberg. Unless your workload is explicitly compatible with ARM, it probably Just Works better on x86.
The real killer-app for me was just switching to Linux as my base OS. I can leave containers idling while watching YouTube at a cool 27c internally. I'm using a 6-7 year old T460s, but honestly I feel like I could get away with even weaker hardware if I wanted. A Macbook Air running Linux might be a candidate if I didn't need to wait for basic functionality to get reverse-engineered. As-is though, you can count me among the people who doesn't quite need an upgrade yet.