The whole point of this product is that you get a device whose hardware is tailor made (e-ink, no other distractions, long time between charges, etc.) for this purpose.
My hope is that Stage Manager is configurable in a manner similar to the dock, such that it can be hidden off screen until the cursor hits the edge of the screen.
Stage Manager is a mode that can be toggle in quick settings. When enabled it replaces Split View and Slide Over for multitasking. When Stage View is enabled the “…” button at the top of each window can he used to toggle between Stage Manager mode and single window mode.
I've never squeezed more than 4 or 5 hours out of my two year old Macbook Pro. A 20 hour battery life in addition to the speed gains make upgrading a tempting prospect.
My wife has an ~year-old Intel MBA. I have an M1 MBA.
Her battery's dead after 2 hours on Zoom or Discord or any of those battery-hungry web tech multimedia apps.
I've not tried taking it that far, but judging from where the battery on my M1 MBA gets to after a couple hours, I could probably do 6ish hours under that load (it's very dumb that some of these "productivity" programs are high-load and eat battery like crazy, but that's where we are).
If I avoid the webshit (Slack's unavoidable, for me, but I can ditch most of the rest, at least temporarily) I can work a whole day plus another half a workday on battery, no problem.
[EDIT] oh, and it feels faster than my hex-core AMD desktop with the badass graphics card and 64GB of memory does, under Win10 or Linux. Jank, jitter, and pauses galore, when doing basically nothing. Not so on the M1, unless I really abuse it. Granted that's largely the software's doing, but it doesn't really matter why it's better, in the end.
This worked for me too and has been pretty neat during the pandemic. The key is to do proper fades on what is left and balance out with a little bit of a beard.