M3 Air vs. Pro: V1 engine engine vs V1 decode

[Torty]

With almost the same battery size the 14" MBP outperforms the 15" Air in battery life: 22h vs 18h. When I did the model comparison at official apple site I found out that the MBA has VC1 decode engine vs. MBP VC1 decode.

Is the M3 from the MBA crippled and therefore it consumes more energy resulting in less battery life for video watching? Web surfing is given 15h for both models.

 

[casperes1996]

I think it’s more likely that it’s about the display panels and the pros ability to limit the refresh rate to match the frame rate of a film

 

[Supermallet]

Also the MBP is Mini LED which means portions of the screen can dim independently of other portions of the screen, which should in theory save battery compared to a screen that is uniformly lit the entire time like the standard LED on the MBA.

 

[Torty]

Also the MBP is Mini LED which means portions of the screen can dim independently of other portions of the screen, which should in theory save battery compared to a screen that is uniformly lit the entire time like the standard LED on the MBA.

That would affect also web surfing? But there is no difference at all. The M3 MBA got the same hours as the M2 MBA despite the VC1 „engine“.

 

[galad]

There is no difference, both have the same AV1 hardware decoder.

 

[mr_roboto]

With almost the same battery size the 14" MBP outperforms the 15" Air in battery life: 22h vs 18h. When I did the model comparison at official apple site I found out that the MBA has VC1 decode engine vs. MBP VC1 decode.

Is the M3 from the MBA crippled and therefore it consumes more energy resulting in less battery life for video watching? Web surfing is given 15h for both models.

You are being too dismissive of one spec (battery size) and completely missing another that's very important.

MBA15: 66.5 Wh battery
MBP14: 70 Wh battery

MBA15: about 106.8 in^2 display area
MBP14: about 92.1 in^2 display area

Display area is important because backlight power is proportional to area. If you hold the light energy output per square inch constant, and you increase the number of square inches, backlight power must go up by the same ratio as the area.

That and the bigger battery completely explain this:

66.5 Wh / 18h = 3.694 W average power (MBA15)
70 Wh / 22h = 3.182 W average power (MBP14)

3.694 W / 3.182 W = 1.16x power consumption
106.8 in^2 / 92.1 in^2 = 1.16x display area

(Yes that does mean backlight power is essentially all the power used during this test. That's not unreasonable - Apple puts a lot of work into making sure non-Pro/Max SoCs can almost completely shut down during long term video playback, and into making the hardware video codecs incredibly power efficient. So you end up with probably 99% of the power being the display backlight, and the rest of the system accounts for 1%. Or numbers in that ballpark.)