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I've just tested letting a Youtube video play on my M2 Macbook Air.

At 25% screen brightness, it uses around 4 Watt.

At 50%, around 6 Watt.

At 100%, around 11 Watt.

The person in question is unlikely to have a modern computer, but letting a video play all the time could technically still be using less power than the light.



That's insane to think about. Extrapolating down to 0% brightness means the actual compute required to manage the network connection and decrypt and render the video, plus anything the OS is doing in the background happens in maybe 2 watts?! With 2 watts you could power a fairly dim LED lightbulb or perform the equivalent of thousands(?) of man hours of hand computations.

https://xkcd.com/676/


The computer idles at 3.5 Watt.

A 1440p video is played at 4.0-4.5 Watt at 0% internal screen brightness.

The same video at 4k uses 4.5-5.0 Watt.

And at 8k, it's 15-17 Watt.

The xkcd is apt, as usual. The last time I felt with Intel as I feel with Apple since the M1 was with Haswell.




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