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ALAC (Apple Lossless) was specifically designed to be power efficient, hence its use in AirPlay.

Interestingly one of the most power efficient lossy codecs is still ATRAC, Sony's MiniDisc codec, specifically designed to sip lightly at your AA batteries.

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Doesn't seem to be the case at least in Rockbox, ATRAC is less efficient than Vorbis or MP3: https://www.rockbox.org/wiki/CodecPerformanceComparison

Maybe ATRAC was designed for the purpose of being efficient when using dedicated hardware without making the hardware expensive to manufacture? It's from the minidisc era so I'm not sure it would have been common for them to use general-purpose CPUs to decode audio by then

Indeed. Sony made ATRAC ASICs, and I doubt there's one in anything Rockbox supports.

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