Apple used lower brightness setting for showcasing M1's superior battery life(apple.com)
apple.com
Apple used lower brightness setting for showcasing M1's superior battery life
https://www.apple.com/in/macbook-pro-13/specs/
8 comments
There is one reason that makes it potentially legitimate to compare screens at different brightnesses when gauging battery life, but not when comparing SoCs. There are screen technologies that adjust color representation and brightness together, to make it possible for a dimmer screen to look brighter (or show up better in brighter light) by sacrificing some color range in a mostly imperceptible range. If you're showing off a technology like that to improve battery life, it's completely reasonable to compare screens at different absolute brightnesses in nits. But if you're comparing generations of SoCs, you should be doing so with exactly the same screen brightness.
Yup. Content adaptive backlight control (CABC) has been around for decades. But I don't think any modern devices use it? Least of all "Pro" devices like the macbook pro which lay so much emphasis on color accuracy.
Your headline is a lie.
You suspect they used a different screen brightness, but you don’t actually know.
It’s easily possible that the different laptops have a different number of clicks in their bightness settings since they use different panels.
I agree that it would be better for them to use a nits value or some other objective measure.
You however don’t know what the value is and so have made a false claim with your headline.
How about updating the headline to a question or a suspicion?
You suspect they used a different screen brightness, but you don’t actually know.
It’s easily possible that the different laptops have a different number of clicks in their bightness settings since they use different panels.
I agree that it would be better for them to use a nits value or some other objective measure.
You however don’t know what the value is and so have made a false claim with your headline.
How about updating the headline to a question or a suspicion?
They likely use the same panel and settings, but your request is reasonable. Edited the title.
Doesn’t look meaningfully different to me.
The screen brightness curves can of course be differently calibrated. But if Apple really wanted to show a fair comparison, they'd have just specified screen brightness in nits directly, instead of using this roundabout comparison.
Laptop screens can easily consume 3-7 Watts of power, which dwarfs the SOC power, and makes up for ~70-90% of the total system power draw for watching videos. So if the brightness settings were really different (in nits terms), this comparison is quite disingenuous on Apple's part.