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Comment by littlestymaar | Hacker News Reader

> Imagine an entire core optimized for Safari and its Javascript engine. Their next chip is called the "M1 Marathon Edition" and you get 36 hours of real-world battery life with Safari.

I don't think that would be worth it. What's the point of 36 hours of battery life? How often do you need more than 12 hours of life on battery? Increasing the maximum battery life only makes sense when it also increases battery life for the more power-hungry workload (which is where you're likely to reach the limit), why bother building dedicated hardware for a specific workload that's already beyond what you need?

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Many parts of the world don't have stable electricity, reducing electricity usage reduces costs and overall emissions in to the planet, and as you approach much longer periods you massively increase convenience.

There's a gap between no stable electricity and 20+ hours without electricity, so what fraction of Apple customers do you expect to live in this tiny niche, like 0.1%? In such situation you'd use an external battery anyway…

> reducing electricity usage reduces costs and overall emissions in to the planet

You're going to need a looooooooooooooooong time for the electricity usage reduction to compensate for the enormous energy cost of manufacturing a new laptop. If you care about the climate, don't buy a new laptop if your previous one is still running fine, there's just no way energy efficiency is going to be worth it.

I don’t think regions susceptible to black/brown outs and power outages are the intended market of an M1 Mac, though that could change.

Aren’t many companies normally located in the Silicon Valley now migrating to Texas, where the electricity infrastructure is wonky at best.

Texas is pretty average when it comes to electricity reliability in the US even though it experiences some of the most diverse weather in the US. Not too many states experience both tornadoes and hurricanes on a regular basis. Its biggest challenge it currently faces is winterization measures due to climate change. Things just weren't designed to get as cold as it did in February, which was a exceptionally rare event historically. I've lived in Texas nearly my whole life, it has never been that cold for that long since I've been here.

Those parts of the world aren't generally spending multiple thousands of American dollars on a laptop.

You'd be surprised. Additionally, that also includes parts of the US as well.

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