Battery Life is Driving Sales of Qualcomm Snapdragon Copilot+ PCs, Not AI

[clopezi]

No, it's just broken. I'm not talking about the battery being short when gaming or doing anything, that would be understandable, the battery is just short always because laptop don't enter low power states correctly especially in hybrid gpu scenarios.

That's right. I've a Dell XPS from three years ago and on suspend status, battery could last one or two day at top, and with big draining.

 

[JustBenching]

The market accidentally made a good product because the chip accidentally also saves power alongside its AI 'capability'.

It would be hilarious if it wasn't so sad. So these companies hire millions worth of marketing teams and innovative teams and all they really had to do was improve battery life.

Read between the lines here corporate. We don't need your upmarketed bullshit, we just want a proper productivity device that works well on the road.
And MS, for you that means a low-power optimized version of Windows. One that doesn't do all sorts of unnecessary shit nobody asked for. Take the hint pls. You can just copy over an LTSC build its okay.

Sad thing is most laptops can already get decent battery life, but they are just overbloated both by windows and whatever vendor crap they have installed in there. Simply by formatting my laptop - removing all asus services and installing a thin version of windows my baterry life has literally almost doubled. Out of the box 3.5 to 4 hours of trowing +youtube would basically drain the baterry to 0. Now I'm hitting 7.5 to 8 hours consistently.

Battery life on x86 laptops has been effectively broken - super broken if you have discrete graphics alongside integrated - for years due to bad sleep state implementation and windows crapfest of bugs. You won't see a difference on a battery test in any review because the normal test is to leave the laptop doing something until it dies, but I believe the snapdragon elite fixed - or mitigated might be a better word - the crapfest of bugs in windows so in real use you can see a big difference.

That crap is what's happening with the amds adrenaline software. It keeps waking up the freaking dgpu even in eco mode. I un-installed that virus and did just a driver install.

All else being equal, the Intel product in your example would require almost double the charging time. That's definitely a battery-life-related downside. I don't disagree, though, that battery life claims and even third party battery life testing are often flawed. @trsttte makes a great point about idle power, for example.

Why would all else be equal though. Usually they split big baterries into 2 parts for faster charging, therefore big baterries can charge just as fast as small ones. It really depends on the implementation

 

[R0H1T]

Well a true Apple's to Apple's comparison would also ensure unnecessary background tasks/services & applications are not running! How many of these "bloatware" you see on Apple or Linux on any models?

Surprised no one from the "reputed" press has even bothered doing that, or maybe they don't know which windows services are safe to disable

 

[CosmicWanderer]

I have the new Surface Pro 11 and the battery life is absolutely incredible. A game changer.

Thankfully for my use case I haven't run into any app compatibility issues, but it's definitely something that needs to be addressed if these devices are to be truly successful.

 

[phints]

If only Intel and AMD could start making CPUs that sip power too. I don't need Apple M4 equal battery life, but just something more comparable. Having a thin/light laptop for work that lasts 12 hours would be awesome. Companies load these things up with so much crap that they will get bogged down anyway. My current company laptop is recent (i7-1365U, 16GB, 1TB, Win11) and works great, but battery life isn't good.

I'm want to maintain compatibility with all x86-64 software, 3rd party Nvidia/AMD GPUs, custom builds, gaming, etc. But damn, reduce TDP without having to go to ARM.

 

[remixedcat]

I'm more interested in the SDXE latitudes or xps and there's very little about em... any good reviews that aren't bs?

I really want something I can make music in bitwig studio for 8 or more hours with heavy tracks!!! the best I cna do on any of my current ones is 3 hours if that...

best battery life i've had is on my latitude 5400 and I've gone 7 hours with a mix of music, web browsing, youtube, discord, and file management. and the battery is at 86% health

This inspiron that I'm typing this on is about 3-6 w mostly web and half hour of music production. for music production about 2-3 hours, but it has a 120Hz display so that cuts into battery life. battery health: 96%

 

[bitsandboots]

ARM having better battery life is real, but overplayed.
People who paraded around the M1 laptops as some miracle for battery life were probably doing so after having used miserable, outdated laptops.
Modern x86 laptops aren't that far behind. Benchmarks I was looking at were like 20% difference between AMD systems and Qualcomm ones. But, maybe that increases as ARM support improves and emulation use decreases.

Overall though, as an owner of modern AMD systems and an M1 system, I notice:
1) They're all quite good for battery life
2) But it's harder to get the AMD systems into the ideal state, which I believe is because Windows is a menace for idling.
3) Plugging in any peripheral can basically cut the battery life in half, because modern CPUs are THAT efficient, that USB power draw becomes noticeable.
4) When your CPU is efficient enough, the rest of the system efficiency matters. Horribly inefficient monitor? Network cards that can't idle? Yeah, your battery will be bad. Not x86's fault! Buy higher quality laptops.

No, it's just broken. I'm not talking about the battery being short when gaming or doing anything, that would be understandable, the battery is just short always because laptop don't enter low power states correctly especially in hybrid gpu scenarios.

Speak for yourself. Works fine here. But yes there are exceptions, like one time I upgraded vmware and it decided it then wanted to use the discrete GPU instead of the embedded. Simply put discrete GPUs = more trouble. That doesnt make ARM any better, because theoretically they could have discrete GPUs too if desired.

 

[Destined]

If they used AI it could have collected data to see this answer, meaning that even the people selling AI aren't using it.

You are hired!!

 

[AsRock]

Who wants a bias AI anyways, good or not MS have already proven they cannot be trusted with it with Copilot crap.