Why Reviewers Underestimate the Power Consumption of Apple Silicon Macs
Posted23 days ago
youtube.comTech Discussionstory
informativeneutral
Debate
40/100
AppleMACPower ConsumptionTech Reviews
Key topics
Apple
MAC
Power Consumption
Tech Reviews
Discussion Activity
Light discussionFirst comment
N/A
Peak period
1
Start
Avg / period
1
Key moments
- 01Story posted
Dec 11, 2025 at 2:43 PM EST
23 days ago
Step 01 - 02First comment
Dec 11, 2025 at 2:43 PM EST
0s after posting
Step 02 - 03Peak activity
1 comments in Start
Hottest window of the conversation
Step 03 - 04Latest activity
Dec 11, 2025 at 2:43 PM EST
23 days ago
Step 04
Generating AI Summary...
Analyzing up to 500 comments to identify key contributors and discussion patterns
ID: 46236181Type: storyLast synced: 12/11/2025, 7:45:11 PM
Want the full context?
Jump to the original sources
Read the primary article or dive into the live Hacker News thread when you're ready.
However, in the man pages of the facility it is clearly explained that the readings are estimated and not measured values and that they shouldn’t be used for making power consumption comparisons.
In my performance investigation studies I found that the reported CPU and GPU power consumption is vastly underestimated: in case of the GPU the reported value is just over a third of the actual consumption, as is explained in the video.
It is unfortunate that said reviewers do not bother to sanity check the numbers with a power meter and thereby perpetuate misleading information on Apple silicon performance/Watt.
In a prior investigation, where I did extensive Linear Algebra performance investigations on the M4 Max, I found that it’s CPU performance/Watt in dense matrix multiplication is well below that of Ryzen 9950X, when the computations are carried out on its Neon vector units. Similarly for Apple’s M4 Max GPU vs nVidia last gen RTX 4090.