alt Hacker News2025 and counting. Apple launched the M1 in 2020. I am an Apple user but not a fanboy but everyday I wonder about the magic in Apple that is unique because even established competitors with virtually infinite money and incredible processes can't move forward. Another incredible aspect is the early addition of an NPU by Apple in a SoC.
I would love to resurrect my XPS 13s with a durable battery and working in Linux without trigerring the fan. The same for my Lenovo Xs.
In my imagination I am waiting for the billionaire geeks doing their part for fun (e.g. energy management in Linux).
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Qualcomm has had DSPs in its chips for a long time, providing a lot of NPU-like functionality before the term NPU had been coined. What Qualcomm currently calls its NPUs are just Hexagon DSP cores with specific instructions and abilities for matrix math and common inferencing datatypes.
The original Apple M1's performance per Watt and physical battery size may have been special when it first came out, but nowadays there's nothing special about its hardware specs relative to a modern x86 laptop.
The difference you perceive is mostly software. Windows and Linux are really just designed for desktop machines first and foremost. MacOS was too, but when they transitioned to Apple Silicon, they replaced a lot of the internals with stuff taken from iOS, and iOS is designed with batter life first and foremost.
Getting the level of battery life out of non-apple laptops is just going to be a long, hard slog of going through the operating systems and auditing *everything* and every design decision for how it affects battery life and how much resources its using.
> Another incredible aspect is the early addition of an NPU by Apple in a SoC.
I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that you've not used CUDA yet. NPUs are a lot of things, but "incredible" is the last word an engineer would use to describe them these days.
> Apple launched the M1 in 2020.
which means the M1 was being worked on since at least 2018, I'd bet much earlier than that, for sure much earlier than that if you count silicon which never left the lab.
reminder iphones run on apple silicon since 2010, which means they had to be working on it at least since 2008. they have a lot of experience in silicon design by now.