In my experience, with my old 2015 MacBook Air that’s been through hell and back with me, looking at the battery indicator has never brought me any good news. So, to imagine taking a look at the battery life, seeing it full after hours of play, going, “Huh? That must be a bug,” and then have it turn out not to be one? Yeah, that’s literally a dream. And that’s apparently what happened with the Apple M1 MacBook’s battery life.
Hold Up, What’s the Deal?
Okay, so let me back up a bit. By now, we’ve read the reviews of how Apple’s M1 MacBook’s battery life is truly far superior to its predecessor. Apple’s marketing vice president, Bob Borchers, recently spoke to Tom’s Guide about the Apple M1 chip and had quite the story to tell. Apparently, when the team at Apple HQ had been testing it, they first brushed the strong battery life off as a broken indicator.
“Then Tim’s laughing in the background, ‘Nope, that’s the way it’s supposed to be’ and it was pretty phenomenal,” Borchers recalled.
(In case you didn’t know, Apple claims it’s good for 17 hours of wireless surfing, and the site’s own tests came incredibly close to that figure at 16 hours and 25 minutes.)
Can you imagine?
Then again, that’s exactly what Apple intended when it left Intel behind and started working on its own chip.
It’s All Went As Planned
“If somebody else could build a chip that was actually going to deliver better performance inside that enclosure, what’s the point? Why would we switch?” Apple’s vice president of platform architecture, Tim Milet, told the website.
And indeed, the M1 MacBooks don’t just blow away most Windows machines on performance; it also achieves the one thing that would’ve had make-or-break repercussions on the M1 chip for Macs—the seamless performance of older apps that run on Rosetta 2.
“We started a small project years before we started transitioning to Silicon to try to make sure that we could actually deliver the second generation of Rosetta in a way that allowed us to do this seamlessly,” Milet said.
What Next?
Now, it seems, Apple has set its sight on its next target: gamers. Macs currently fall short in performance when it comes to this demanding audience, but no doubt we can expect big things in the future of Apple Silicon.
“We love the challenge,” said Milet, and that about sums it up, I think!
