Apple Intelligence and batteries | June 11 2024, 14:38

In all this buzz about AI integrated into operating systems, what really doesn’t concern me is privacy. Rather, it’s the fact that overengineered software begins to devour hardware faster than the hardware can evolve, and eventually, I start contemplating a switch back to Linux, where things are much more transparent.

Just look at this. My Mac’s advertised battery life is 21 hours. In other words, you turn on your laptop at 8 AM, start streaming something from YouTube, and the battery should only run out by 5 AM the next day.

But in reality, that’s not what happens. Indeed, it does last significantly longer than any other laptops I’ve had before, but sometimes the battery drains in just a few hours. Why? That’s unclear.

Why? Because the OS, for example, might find an unindexed unpacked archive, and the corespotlightd process kicks off to index it. This process can’t be stopped—you can only turn it off forever, but then the search function won’t work. It’s possible to exclude indexing in Documents (which I’ve already done). But then another process wakes up due to some signal or schedule, and it too starts consuming the battery or CPU.

Still, it’s fair to say that this doesn’t really cause any major issues. Things run, they heat up the air, might be useless, but specifically the M3 Max never lags.

For instance, among the processes is the Apple Neural Engine Daemon (aned). It periodically wakes up and consumes resources. With new functionalities, such a process will awaken more frequently and use up more resources. Or something like com.apple.NRD.UpdateBrainService decides it needs to update some neural networks. And the more software you install on the computer, the more such instances you’ll encounter. Just Intellij Idea alone drains my battery and processor faster than anything else. I’ve made it a rule—when on battery, shut down Idea.

Ideally, having AI on a device should indeed heat the chip and drain the battery more actively, and most likely “just in case,” since not all users need all these AI features. I suspect that Apple will employ a trick: measuring battery performance without a configured iCloud and Apple Intelligence account, and we’ll see all those 21 hours of autonomous work. But as soon as the computer switches to working mode, it will need charging more often, and the office will be slightly warmer.