Intel skepticism aside, I hope they can deliver on this. M-series Macs seem streets ahead in terms of battery life right now and it doesn’t feel great buying any other portable.
Honestly, a lot of that is budget.
Apple makes low clocked, very wide SoCs, and are always the first customer of the most cutting edge silicon node. This is very expensive. And Apple can eat it with their outrageous prices.
Intel (and AMD) go more for “balance,” with smaller cheaper dies and higher peak clocks. Their OEMs also “cheap out” by bundling a bunch of bloatware that also drains the battery to pad margins. You can find PCs with big batteries and better stock configs, but these are more expensive.
AMD is only just now getting into the “premium” game with the upcoming Strix Halo chip (M2 Pro-ish spec wise). Intel isn’t there yet, but there are rumors they will as well.
bloatware
Even if you remove all that crap, battery life is nowhere near the same vs the M-series chips. So while it may be a problem, it’s still not anywhere close to the reason battery life sucks.
It can be if you run linux and throttle the chips. Even my older G14 last a long time, as the AMD SoCs are great, it can run fanless throttled down, and it just has a straight up bigger battery than razor thin Macs.
But again, it’s just not configured this way in most laptops, which sacrifice battery for everything else because, well, OEMs are idiots.