I’m also frequently confused when people refer to Windows laptops as in a different league of battery life. Modern Windows laptops do just fine. M1 is a cycle ahead, but the Ryzen mobile parts are actually very good too.
Also really cheap laptops aren't as great about battery life just cuz of reasons. I think there's a lot of selection bias (like people who have a lot of money will buy macbooks in general cuz that's what everyone says to do)
I'm sure a huge component of it is just people-hours spent in figuring out the right balance of defaults that don't just mess people's setups up.
And then there are the hardware bugs which require workarounds in firmware or drivers, and the firmware bugs which require workarounds in drivers, all of which are only developed and tested against Windows.
The set of power management options that Windows 10 exposes to the user has been steadily dwindling to the point that on a new laptop you basically only get to customize how long before the screen shuts off and how long before it goes to sleep. All the more detailed options you had in early Windows 10 or in Windows 7 are no longer exposed, because there's no consistent way to map such controls onto the ever-shifting set of underlying platform features.
That and automatically activating a 'small speaker' EQ for when a device is detected to be portable / be a laptop and have internal speakers would be a massive user experience improvement for laptop Linux users.
TLP isn't magic. More than half of its documented options are inapplicable to current hardware or kernels, and a fair number of the remaining options that could still have an effect are not safe for distros to ship as defaults, usually because they'll trigger firmware or hardware bugs. Installing TLP by default would be far from an actual solution, and isn't even that great a first step toward solving platform power management inadequacies.
Linux is far superior to windows in this regard.
Makes a nice change from five years ago, when I kept breaking my display in order to make CUDA work.
aka Watts
But thinkpads didn't tend to remove batteries to get slimmer then.
It just werks.
At least that's my pet theory, running an 4750U with 64GB of RAM installed ;)
But, the largest differences are probably in idle power management, with the phone having much lower power IO channels and better zoned power management to really reduce idle power. A laptop often has the system in a much higher power level with off-chip resources powered up, including WiFi, screen refresh, data buses, and backlight driving a much larger screen area.
Edit to add: I've noticed on laptops with Linux that vastly different battery life from "similar" machines come from differences in how the software and firmware interact to reach different powersaving modes for screen on but idle states, such as with a browser open on a page that has already rendered and awaits user input.
So if your kernel woke up (let’s say after 30 min of suspend to ram) to try and see if it can reclaim physical DIMMs and mark them unused (shrink caches, reorganize pages, etc) you could get quite a big win on standby time. The trick is how to do this without actually hurting battery life (waking up can be expensive and there’s no guarantee you’ll be able to free up DIMMs) and preserving wake from suspend performance (if you’re phone is laggy on wake that’s an experience users will switch away from + you could eat your entire power savings paging back in).
And, I am referring to active idle, not suspend-to-ram scenarios. I think people are talking about screen-on time for battery life, not lid closed and suspended nor lid open but screen disabled. Precious few people are enjoying a laptop that successfully performs a suspend to RAM sleep state while keeping the display alive. Often, the integrated GPU is continuously scanning framebuffers in system RAM and outputting pixel data to the embedded display port even though nothing is changing on screen. Frequently, drivers have disabled LCD panel self refresh modes due to unresolved glitches and artifacts in the graphics stack.