I think ecosystem is a big thing to call out here. A decent proportion of why the M* CPUs are so efficient is that the OS is built around them, with tasks being appropriately scheduled to CPU cores based on developer hints, and things like the widgets framework taking into account minimising power used to update data which doesn't need it, and background updates for other apps being batched rather than each app waking up for network traffic at random. While it's possible to write inefficient software for macOS if you follow the happy path you'll like come out the other side with something that respects the user's battery.
> A decent proportion of why the M* CPUs are so efficient is that the OS is built around them, with tasks being appropriately scheduled to CPU cores based on developer hints
It helps, but its far from the whole story. Asahi Linux developers have reported exceptionally good battery life on Linux. IIRC they were getting around 7 hours before the GPU driver was implemented and it was continually burning ~60% all-core CPU just to render.
I believe the hardware itself (and the firmware) handles a lot of the power management. Aside from which, Apple's CPU cores do seem to be straight up more power efficient than anybody else's.
I might be mistaken, but I believe Apple's first gen M1 chips (TSMC 5nm) are still more power efficient than AMDs Zen 4 chips (also TSMC 5nm), although the difference isn't huge (~10-20% ?)
7 hours is still quite a bit below the 20-22 hours with MacOS though. It may seem a lot given how bad batteries are on non-apple computers, but it's still less than 1/3 of what it could be.
Do Mac app devs really do much to reduce power consumption? It doesn't seem like anything special to me, but I haven't actually shipped anything Mac-specific in a long time.
Most of the power on a given day will go to web apps anyway, which ofc the dev doesn't optimize for Mac, and it seems like the Macs do that more efficiently too.
