I suppose it depends on the app more and more. I see some of the photo editing apps I use (Pixelmator Pro, Affinity Photo) are much more power-efficient on the M1 architecture than on intel. Same goes for Webstorm, VsCode and of course xCode. The latter three are apps many software developers use. From personal experience, the battery-life is out of this world when using these apps. But here’s another example that a ton of people use: Chrome. It seems that Chrome alone is able to use up about 30–50% of the available battery/charge.

I think the bottom line for me is that I’m so done with needing faster/more powerful machines. What I need and probably 90% of users (including pros) need is extremely energy-efficient machines. Imagine having a laptop you need to charge once a month. There is an energy-crisis going on at the moment, and everyone scrambling to find more ways to generate power, but I think the future is in creating extremely efficient power consumers. Just look at LED lights. Refitting one’s home to only use those already makes a huge difference. If industries keep applying the same strategy to everything else we use, we could end up in a world where even renewable energy sources produce excess power, or even better, your own home could be fully off the grid with very little investment!