Apple did some OS optimizations. But the next to last x86 laptop generation (the butterfly keyboard era) was really bad. The keyboards were bad and they had poor thermals

I remember battery life on my Late 2015 MBA was great for the time. It easily got through my post-secondary classes, 3-8 hours depending on the day, with leftovers. IIRC Apple claimed 12 hours of battery life. That was a significant improvement over the suggested 5 hours of my previous laptops.

Yeah, but that’s Mac, not Linux on Laptops of the era designed for Windows