Sorry, but then you did something wrong. Since Haswell they are not only better overall but also much more energy efficient. The Macbooks went from 5-6hours to 10 in that generation.
not sure what we are arguing, maybe i should have mentioned the fact that my macbook ran OSX and my Thinkpad runs Arch Linux? I've did several battery management optimizations as well.
If i could run Arch painfree on a mac i would agree that i would have better battery life most likely.
I am mostly just arguing against the constant mention for "macbooks having the best battery life for developer laptops". Which is not true if you could also use a Thinkpad with Linux