14 ms·

M1 MacBook battery life so good Apple thought indicator was broken

95 points by retskrad 5y ago

bruce343434 5y ago
Reader mode to the rescue... I still can't fathom why it's so hard to make a readable site with a readable type, weight and color. But it's an interesting story.
- zachberger 5y ago
  Hmm I have no issues with it on my Pixel 5.
  - tyingq 5y ago
    It's the Roboto font in 300 weight, where 400 would be a normal weight. I believe Roboto was the Android default font, so probably lots of testing/tweaks on Android make it readable there.
- matthoiland 5y ago
  On a 109ppi Apple Thunderbolt Display, the blockquote text looks like it was printed on a dot matrix printer from 1994.
  - floatingatoll 5y ago
    Doesn’t everything look like that at 109ppi, relative to modern smartphone/tablet/imac displays?
lincpa 5y ago
Because Apple M1 use my "Warehouse/Workshop Model". https://github.com/linpengcheng/PurefunctionPipelineDataflow#The-unification-with-Computer-Hardware-Architecture https://github.com/linpengcheng/PurefunctionPipelineDataflow...
formerly_proven 5y ago
It's funny how they talk about how long the battery lasts when the OS doesn't show you that information.
- nerdawson 5y ago
  They used to but it was as hopelessly unreliable as the old file transfer progress bars.
- FootballMuse 5y ago
  Isn't there a Usage History graph in system preferences?
- akmarinov 5y ago
  If you tap on the battery icon on the top strip it tells you exactly that.
- ekianjo 5y ago
  FOr the sake of simplicity?
- pehtis 5y ago
  Its still there, just not on the menu bar. Try Activity Monitor/Energy. The battery graph, time remaining etc is at the bottom.
- projct 5y ago
  What? You can turn on percentage in the menu bar, and there's several different usage graphs in multiple places. If you want the actual milliamp-hours, load cycles, battery temperature, age, or even battery serial number, there's an api for that. You can use for example coconutBattery and get whatever data you want.
mjamesaustin 5y ago
They reference future models having enough performance to be serious gaming machines, but in my experience the main reason Macs lose out on games is because Apple stops supporting older technologies very quickly, and many games rely on those. A good example is the recent end of 32-bit support, which removed about half my Steam library.
- Joeri 5y ago
  The games also need to be ported to metal and optimized for apple hardware, which just isn’t worth it. This was especially true when only high end macs had decent gpu’s. Now that even the mini and air have a gpu that can actually play a modern game the economics may change. I have had good luck with dosbox games though. Many games on gog run fine on mac.
  - mywittyname 5y ago
    Not all of them. The AAA titles will need this, but there are a lot of games on the market built with Unity and have pretty basic graphics and will run fine on low-end laptops.
  - ozarkerD 5y ago
    Really wish Mac would support Vulkan. It kinda works with the moltenvk vulkan to metal translation layer but it’s not ideal.
    - jmull 5y ago
      It really doesn’t make sense for MacOS (or iOS) to directly support Vulkan. A particular OS release would implement a limited range Vulkan versions (probably just one) which would always be out-of-date. Apple would not be able evolve the OS, silicon and Vulkan API in unison (like they do with Metal) because they don’t control the API. In the end it would be a poor experience for end users. It would be nice if they supported open source efforts though. (MS doesn’t maintain the Vulkan API in windows, do they? Similar issues would apply.)
epsteindidntk 5y ago
Just listed my 2019 MBP.
post_break 5y ago
My M1 macbook pro battery lasts so long and doesn't get hot it's amazing. You don't have to use the laptop like a laptop any more. Range anxiety is totally gone. I can watch youtube videos without fear of burn or running out of battery fast. I thought it would be good, but not THIS good. It's actually cannibalized my iPad usage since that used to be the battery champ for me.
- qudat 5y ago
  Yeah I've been super impressed by my ipad battery life.
- criddell 5y ago
  In comparison, my Thinkpad P1 Gen 3 I bought a month ago keeps the fans running while it is sleeping. The machine is warm to the touch all the time. From what I've read, Lenovo blames it on Microsoft's modern sleep requirements. This morning I configured it to hibernate after 30 minutes, so I hope that fixes the problem.
  - xputer 5y ago
    I'm staying away from Lenovo ever since buying an IdeaPad laptop in 2018 with a fan so obnoxious that I literally could not get any work done. Lenovo needs to get their shit together.
  - grandpoobah 5y ago
    Go into the bios and change the sleep setting so that it uses S3 sleep (traditional) rather than S5 sleep (modern). Now your computer will actually turn off and stay off, and it's only using a very small amount of power to keep the memory on. It's comical how bad Windows S5 sleep is. Laptops waking up and running while they're in a bag should be the kind of bug that prevents an operating system from being released! But here we are in 2021, years after Windows 10 was released, and this is still common place. My next laptop will absolutely not be a PC.
    - foobar33333 5y ago
helsinkiandrew 5y ago
For me that’s been the biggest difference coming from my old laptop. I no longer have any kind of battery anxiety, it probably lasts a couple of days or more (9 or 10 hours a day use IntelliJ web and python dev, bit of YouTube etc) I don’t have to panic to plug it in every night and I’ve taken it away for the weekend without the charger.
- dv_dt 5y ago
  I hope they don’t use this performance to shrink the battery of later models to a day or less. You really need a couple days to keep margin for no battery anxiety over the life of a machine.
- dominotw 5y ago
  i take it you dont use docker :/
  - Eric_WVGG 5y ago
    Docker is pretty bad. I also work out on the patio pretty often, cranking up the screen brightness will also give it a hit. But still unimaginably better than the Intel notebooks. With Docker and the brightness up I'll get a measly 6.5 hours instead of the solid ten or so I get otherwise.
  - projct 5y ago
    Docker is currently using qemu for x86-64 to arm translation so when I use it with an x86-64 container I only get 2-3 hours out of it, and the performance is atrocious bc of how slow qemu is. With arm64 containers I tend to get 5-8 hours even with cpu intensive tasks going most of the time. I expect either qemu to get better or for apple to add some things to improve running x86-64 VMs. Rosetta 2's JIT portion (some of R2 is AOT) is worlds ahead of qemu's in terms of performance. So, the battery life and performance difference won't be forever. Thankfully, building arm64 images for most containers I've used is pretty straightforward.
pjerem 5y ago
Not arguing against the M1 performance and sobriety, but what is this anecdote worth when it comes from the VP marketing of Apple ?
- haswell 5y ago
  Here's my take. Leading up to and since the M1 Macs were released, the tech community went from skeptical, to intrigued, to excited, and if you were to completely remove Apple's hype machine, these machines stand on their own. As an M1 user, I can attest to the ridiculously good battery life, and others in this thread are sharing similar anecdotes (I'm on an Air, so I'm not even on the best battery life available). It is with this context that a statement from Apple's VP of marketing on the same topic is somewhat interesting. The performance and battery life surprised many of us in the tech community, and this anecdote seems to confirm that even at Apple, execs were/are downright surprised at how good this thing is. If this statement was released before these machines launched, or if performance/battery weren't stellar, then a statement like this from a marketing VP might ring hollow. But in the context of this product's success, I think it's more interesting.
esens 5y ago
The MacBook M1 battery life appears to be better than the iPad Pro M1 battery life in my testing. I wonder why that is?
- uncoder0 5y ago
  Larger battery in the macbook?
- runako 5y ago
  Among other things, the MacBook batteries are larger than the iPad batteries. Power consumption of the screen other components will obviously be different, but I would imagine that the MacBook Pro having a battery ~2x as large as that of the smaller iPad Pro would make a big difference.
- gerardvivancos 5y ago
  M1 iPads have 28.65 Wh (11”) and 40.88 Wh (12.9”) batteries while the M1 MacBook Pro has a 58.2 Wh one. https://www.apple.com/ipad-pro/specs/ https://www.apple.com/ipad-pro/specs/ https://www.apple.com/macbook-pro-13/specs/ https://www.apple.com/macbook-pro-13/specs/
nickelcitymario 5y ago
I just got a 13" Macbook Pro with M1. My expectations were exceedingly high, based on all the reviews and stories like this. After a few days of use, my take: It's good. It's not the messiah-of-tech that I was led to believe, but it's good. Honestly, I think the hype is overblown. If it wasn't for the hype, I might have thought this machine was amazing. But the expectations being set by all this hype is crazy town. Not trying to take away from the real technical accomplishment. I'm sure if I put it through the ringer with benchmark tests, it would beat everything with flying colours. But my day-to-day experience using it hasn't been much different than my previous 2016 Macbook Pro. Yet so many reviews make it seem like everything is so fast that you simply have to experience it to believe it, that every action you take feels faster and better. And that, in my own experience, is proving to be a load of B.S.
- leokennis 5y ago
  To me it’s not the performance that’s the “messiah-of-tech” part of the M1 laptops (have an Air myself). It’s that I can do the same things at the same speed as an Intel MacBook, but: * The machine is dead silent (literally no sound coming from it) * The battery life is incredible I’m not sure if it’s as simple as this, but I guess if they said: we don’t mind blaring fans and 6 hours of battery life, then they could clock the M1 so high it would have truly insane performance.
  - foobiekr 5y ago
    I think the mini and iMac both serve as indicators that this isn’t true - they have identical performance. I’m willing to guess that thermal transport for the SoC isn’t all that good and while a fan would help likely not as much as you’re crediting. ASIC teams design for a specific envelope. I was really hoping the iMac would do as you say.
- dabernathy89 5y ago
  I'm on the Air, and I had medium expectations because my previous work laptop (16" Pro, i7, 32GB RAM) was already incredibly snappy and rarely struggled except occasionally with Docker. I was still very impressed even with my tempered expectations. For the kind of work I do, it's just as capable as the 16" MBP was - but with no heat, no noise, and real all-day battery.
Fwirt 5y ago
I feel like one thing that seldom gets mentioned is that there is a difference in battery life between the Pro and the Air. I have an M1 MBA and while the battery life is very impressive I still go through about 10% of my battery per hour of simultaneous VMWare Horizon Client and Firefox (10 tabs, one playing music) with a little Zoom sprinkled in. If I just have Safari open I can definitely get a lot more out of the battery, but I feel like that's a little unrealistic. That being said it's still the best laptop I've ever owned and I don't have regrets about getting the Air, but when these battery life articles come up it's just assumed that everyone has the Pro.
- floatingatoll 5y ago
  To confirm, you reliably get 10 hours of battery life running VMware, Firefox, and Zoom?
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - Fwirt 5y ago
    I use AlDente to keep my battery between 80% and 20%. Zoom probably gets 30-60 min of usage during the day. If I start at 9 I usually have to plug in (hit 20%) around 2, so that's 60% in 5 hours. So probably 8-9 hours if I let it run all the way from 100% to 0%. It's not really a complaint about longevity, like I said it's above and beyond any other laptop I've owned, I just see many anecdotes of "I Zoom for 6 hours and my battery is at 90%!" and I find that hard to believe.
    - floatingatoll 5y ago
      One of Zoom’s most intensive CPU tasks is continuous H.264 encoding/decoding, which Apple has hardware accelerated and presumably made power efficient; so it isn’t valid to compare a VMware/Firefox workload to a Zoom workload in a vacuum, especially if the attendee is mostly facemuting (which saves further power in both encoding and webcam) or screensharing video with audio (which makes my 8-core Apple desktop turn on the heat-venting fans). Both workloads are possible, even just within a Zoom-only scenario, and anecdotes are generally insufficient to tell which is the case.
DrBazza 5y ago
ARM has a history of battery life though: "When the first test chips came back from the lab on the 26 April 1985, Furber plugged one into a development board, and was happy to see it working perfectly first time. Deeply puzzling, though, was the reading on the multimeter connected in series with the power supply. The needle was at zero: the processor seemed to be consuming no power whatsoever. As Wilson tells it: “The development board plugged the chip into had a fault: there was no current being sent down the power supply lines at all. The processor was actually running on leakage from the logic circuits. So the low-power big thing that the ARM is most valued for today, the reason that it's on all your mobile phones, was a complete accident." Wilson had, it turned out, designed a powerful 32-bit processor that consumed no more than a tenth of a Watt." https://www.theregister.com/Print/2012/05/03/unsung_heroes_of_tech_arm_creators_sophie_wilson_and_steve_furber/ https://www.theregister.com/Print/2012/05/03/unsung_heroes_o...
diminish 5y ago
are those subtle marketing materials produced for apple, or can't apple estimate how long a battery life will be without seeing it in the indicator first.
ben7799 5y ago
I've had one since last November.. I finally realized I use it more like a Kindle. Unfortunately I'm busy and I'm almost always on my work MBP (Intel) so my usage of the M1 is light. But we have a Surface Pro (i5) that gets the same style of "light" usage. The difference with the M1 is crazy. I don't bother to plug it in very often. It uses so little battery in light usage that it doesn't drain much, then it's suspend logic is so well done that it doesn't lose much for days and days sitting there. The Surface Pro goes right back on the charger pretty much immediately when you're done with it by comparison, cause you can't trust it's going to have battery if you don't, and when you use it even for something light it burns through lots of battery by comparison. My i7 MBP for work of course chugs down battery at an incredible velocity compared to both, but it gets harder usage. So in effect it gets treated like a kindle, I plug it in every week or two. That's very new, and it seems weird and took adjustment.
- r00fus 5y ago
  My kids are so infrequent in their plugins that they sometimes misplace the MacBooks (given summer break they don't use their laptops as much)
xs 5y ago
What I don't get is that the intel based macbook pros allow you to get 32G of RAM and 4TB hard drive. While the M1s only allow a max of 16G of RAM and 2TB hard drive. I'm not taking a hit on these other, in my opinion, much much more important specs to gain an extra battery life.
- grishka 5y ago
  M1 is basically a beefed-up iPhone SoC. Give them some time.
- joshstrange 5y ago
  The real test will be the M1X or whatever they put in the 16" (hopefully) this year. Rumors say up to 64GB RAM among other things. I'd settle for 32 again (I'm on 2018 15", i9, 32GB, and whatever the best graphics card was) and I'll buy the 16" M1* immediately when it goes on sale as long as I can run 3-4 monitors (ideally 4 but I'll settle for 3).
- happynacho 5y ago
  This is still a first-gen product. It's like saying that you don't get why the first iPhone had 32GB+ of storage or 3G at launch.... it will be refined and improved over time.
sschueller 5y ago
Well my Mac book pro (2018) battery has started to expand and bend the case. To replace the battery according to ifix it is very difficult. So I effectively have a paper weight with a high performance i9 in it because Apple couldn't make the battery removable in a device that isn't even waterproof. Even Apple them selves say a battery is a consumable. Then why do we have to deal with this garbage?
- joshstrange 5y ago
  I have the same MBP and same issue and they replaced it for free.
- Eric_WVGG 5y ago
  you should run (run) that thing to an Apple Store. They tend to be pretty generous with this kind of defect, "house burned down due to macbook battery" is kind of bad press. There is a recall program for an earlier model, probably doesn't cover yours (yet) but worth checking anyway: https://support.apple.com/15-inch-macbook-pro-battery-recall https://support.apple.com/15-inch-macbook-pro-battery-recall
kalleboo 5y ago
I'm just so terrified that for the next generation they use this low-power advantage to slim down the battery/machine down back to their typical target of "8 hours of wireless web" (=2 hours of coding in Xcode Swift) in favor of being able to say how thin and light-weight the machine is. With my Intel 16" MBP I currently have to carry around one of those gigantic Jackery-style 220 Wh Li-ion batteries to get 6 hours of work out of it
owenversteeg 5y ago
Yeah, I just got an M1 Air after hearing people talk about it as a sort of religious experience, and I can confirm that even with high expectations I'm incredibly impressed with the battery life. It's worth noting that the stories about crazy battery life (getting through 4+ full days on one charge) come when you use the Apple apps and don't have the brightness too high. If you have the brightness high and use Chrome/lots of non-Apple stuff then you'll have good but not insane battery life. If you set the brightness to a medium-low level and use Apple apps then you'll get ridiculous battery life - I managed to use 17% battery for a full working day the other day (Safari, Sublime, a node server, Postgres, the notes app, and two terminals open.) When I bought the thing I told myself that using Apple apps was what came with the territory, and I'm actually not missing much. The Safari devtools are great. I do miss uBlock Origin (the alternative for Safari seems to be AdGuard which is not great.) But Safari is a solid browser - certainly snappier than Firefox on Windows or Linux, competitive with Chrome, and I haven't run into any compatibility issues yet. I think it's interesting to hear the number of developers switching from Linux to macOS as they get M1 Macs. Personally I was a diehard Arch-on-a-beefy-Thinkpad guy (two extended batteries, three SSDs, etc etc) and in the first day of using this Mac I was completely won over. It all just works so seamlessly, performance is great, battery is incredible, screen is gorgeous, speakers are by far the best I've ever heard on a laptop, and shockingly I actually like the keyboard. The webcam is your average laptop quality (aka not great, and a disappointment in contrast to the rest of the hardware.) I do miss the pageup/dn keys, but aside from that, as almost all the M1 reviews end, "this is the best computer I've ever used."
- personjerry 5y ago
  Protip: Fn + Up/Down = Page Up/Down
- captn3m0 5y ago
  I’m eagerly waiting for the Linux M1 port.
caeril 5y ago
To be fair, most laptop battery indicators are broken. I've never had a Li-Ion device that didn't exhibit a non-linearity in terms of power draw vs percentage estimation. 100% lasts much longer than 99%, which lasts longer than 98%, down to about 92%, after which point the draw-per-percentage seems to be fairly linear. Anecdata, I know.
davidjytang 5y ago
If anything, doesn't TSMC's 5nm process play a large part in improving battery life?

95 points by retskrad 5y ago

Reader mode to the rescue... I still can't fathom why it's so hard to make a readable site with a readable type, weight and color. But it's an interesting story.

zachberger 5y ago
Hmm I have no issues with it on my Pixel 5.
- tyingq 5y ago
  It's the Roboto font in 300 weight, where 400 would be a normal weight. I believe Roboto was the Android default font, so probably lots of testing/tweaks on Android make it readable there.
matthoiland 5y ago
On a 109ppi Apple Thunderbolt Display, the blockquote text looks like it was printed on a dot matrix printer from 1994.
- floatingatoll 5y ago
  Doesn’t everything look like that at 109ppi, relative to modern smartphone/tablet/imac displays?

lincpa 5y ago

Because Apple M1 use my "Warehouse/Workshop Model". https://github.com/linpengcheng/PurefunctionPipelineDataflow#The-unification-with-Computer-Hardware-Architecture https://github.com/linpengcheng/PurefunctionPipelineDataflow...

formerly_proven 5y ago

It's funny how they talk about how long the battery lasts when the OS doesn't show you that information.

nerdawson 5y ago
They used to but it was as hopelessly unreliable as the old file transfer progress bars.
FootballMuse 5y ago
Isn't there a Usage History graph in system preferences?
akmarinov 5y ago
If you tap on the battery icon on the top strip it tells you exactly that.
ekianjo 5y ago
FOr the sake of simplicity?
pehtis 5y ago
Its still there, just not on the menu bar. Try Activity Monitor/Energy. The battery graph, time remaining etc is at the bottom.
projct 5y ago
What? You can turn on percentage in the menu bar, and there's several different usage graphs in multiple places. If you want the actual milliamp-hours, load cycles, battery temperature, age, or even battery serial number, there's an api for that. You can use for example coconutBattery and get whatever data you want.

mjamesaustin 5y ago

They reference future models having enough performance to be serious gaming machines, but in my experience the main reason Macs lose out on games is because Apple stops supporting older technologies very quickly, and many games rely on those. A good example is the recent end of 32-bit support, which removed about half my Steam library.

Joeri 5y ago
The games also need to be ported to metal and optimized for apple hardware, which just isn’t worth it. This was especially true when only high end macs had decent gpu’s. Now that even the mini and air have a gpu that can actually play a modern game the economics may change. I have had good luck with dosbox games though. Many games on gog run fine on mac.
- mywittyname 5y ago
  Not all of them. The AAA titles will need this, but there are a lot of games on the market built with Unity and have pretty basic graphics and will run fine on low-end laptops.
- ozarkerD 5y ago
  Really wish Mac would support Vulkan. It kinda works with the moltenvk vulkan to metal translation layer but it’s not ideal.
  - jmull 5y ago
    It really doesn’t make sense for MacOS (or iOS) to directly support Vulkan. A particular OS release would implement a limited range Vulkan versions (probably just one) which would always be out-of-date. Apple would not be able evolve the OS, silicon and Vulkan API in unison (like they do with Metal) because they don’t control the API. In the end it would be a poor experience for end users. It would be nice if they supported open source efforts though. (MS doesn’t maintain the Vulkan API in windows, do they? Similar issues would apply.)

epsteindidntk 5y ago

Just listed my 2019 MBP.

post_break 5y ago

My M1 macbook pro battery lasts so long and doesn't get hot it's amazing. You don't have to use the laptop like a laptop any more. Range anxiety is totally gone. I can watch youtube videos without fear of burn or running out of battery fast. I thought it would be good, but not THIS good. It's actually cannibalized my iPad usage since that used to be the battery champ for me.

qudat 5y ago
Yeah I've been super impressed by my ipad battery life.
criddell 5y ago
In comparison, my Thinkpad P1 Gen 3 I bought a month ago keeps the fans running while it is sleeping. The machine is warm to the touch all the time. From what I've read, Lenovo blames it on Microsoft's modern sleep requirements. This morning I configured it to hibernate after 30 minutes, so I hope that fixes the problem.
- xputer 5y ago
  I'm staying away from Lenovo ever since buying an IdeaPad laptop in 2018 with a fan so obnoxious that I literally could not get any work done. Lenovo needs to get their shit together.
- grandpoobah 5y ago
  Go into the bios and change the sleep setting so that it uses S3 sleep (traditional) rather than S5 sleep (modern). Now your computer will actually turn off and stay off, and it's only using a very small amount of power to keep the memory on. It's comical how bad Windows S5 sleep is. Laptops waking up and running while they're in a bag should be the kind of bug that prevents an operating system from being released! But here we are in 2021, years after Windows 10 was released, and this is still common place. My next laptop will absolutely not be a PC.
  - foobar33333 5y ago

helsinkiandrew 5y ago

For me that’s been the biggest difference coming from my old laptop. I no longer have any kind of battery anxiety, it probably lasts a couple of days or more (9 or 10 hours a day use IntelliJ web and python dev, bit of YouTube etc) I don’t have to panic to plug it in every night and I’ve taken it away for the weekend without the charger.

dv_dt 5y ago
I hope they don’t use this performance to shrink the battery of later models to a day or less. You really need a couple days to keep margin for no battery anxiety over the life of a machine.
dominotw 5y ago
i take it you dont use docker :/
- Eric_WVGG 5y ago
  Docker is pretty bad. I also work out on the patio pretty often, cranking up the screen brightness will also give it a hit. But still unimaginably better than the Intel notebooks. With Docker and the brightness up I'll get a measly 6.5 hours instead of the solid ten or so I get otherwise.
- projct 5y ago
  Docker is currently using qemu for x86-64 to arm translation so when I use it with an x86-64 container I only get 2-3 hours out of it, and the performance is atrocious bc of how slow qemu is. With arm64 containers I tend to get 5-8 hours even with cpu intensive tasks going most of the time. I expect either qemu to get better or for apple to add some things to improve running x86-64 VMs. Rosetta 2's JIT portion (some of R2 is AOT) is worlds ahead of qemu's in terms of performance. So, the battery life and performance difference won't be forever. Thankfully, building arm64 images for most containers I've used is pretty straightforward.

pjerem 5y ago

Not arguing against the M1 performance and sobriety, but what is this anecdote worth when it comes from the VP marketing of Apple ?

haswell 5y ago
Here's my take. Leading up to and since the M1 Macs were released, the tech community went from skeptical, to intrigued, to excited, and if you were to completely remove Apple's hype machine, these machines stand on their own. As an M1 user, I can attest to the ridiculously good battery life, and others in this thread are sharing similar anecdotes (I'm on an Air, so I'm not even on the best battery life available). It is with this context that a statement from Apple's VP of marketing on the same topic is somewhat interesting. The performance and battery life surprised many of us in the tech community, and this anecdote seems to confirm that even at Apple, execs were/are downright surprised at how good this thing is. If this statement was released before these machines launched, or if performance/battery weren't stellar, then a statement like this from a marketing VP might ring hollow. But in the context of this product's success, I think it's more interesting.

esens 5y ago

The MacBook M1 battery life appears to be better than the iPad Pro M1 battery life in my testing. I wonder why that is?

uncoder0 5y ago
Larger battery in the macbook?
runako 5y ago
Among other things, the MacBook batteries are larger than the iPad batteries. Power consumption of the screen other components will obviously be different, but I would imagine that the MacBook Pro having a battery ~2x as large as that of the smaller iPad Pro would make a big difference.
gerardvivancos 5y ago
M1 iPads have 28.65 Wh (11”) and 40.88 Wh (12.9”) batteries while the M1 MacBook Pro has a 58.2 Wh one. https://www.apple.com/ipad-pro/specs/ https://www.apple.com/ipad-pro/specs/ https://www.apple.com/macbook-pro-13/specs/ https://www.apple.com/macbook-pro-13/specs/

nickelcitymario 5y ago

I just got a 13" Macbook Pro with M1. My expectations were exceedingly high, based on all the reviews and stories like this. After a few days of use, my take: It's good. It's not the messiah-of-tech that I was led to believe, but it's good. Honestly, I think the hype is overblown. If it wasn't for the hype, I might have thought this machine was amazing. But the expectations being set by all this hype is crazy town. Not trying to take away from the real technical accomplishment. I'm sure if I put it through the ringer with benchmark tests, it would beat everything with flying colours. But my day-to-day experience using it hasn't been much different than my previous 2016 Macbook Pro. Yet so many reviews make it seem like everything is so fast that you simply have to experience it to believe it, that every action you take feels faster and better. And that, in my own experience, is proving to be a load of B.S.

leokennis 5y ago
To me it’s not the performance that’s the “messiah-of-tech” part of the M1 laptops (have an Air myself). It’s that I can do the same things at the same speed as an Intel MacBook, but: * The machine is dead silent (literally no sound coming from it) * The battery life is incredible I’m not sure if it’s as simple as this, but I guess if they said: we don’t mind blaring fans and 6 hours of battery life, then they could clock the M1 so high it would have truly insane performance.
- foobiekr 5y ago
  I think the mini and iMac both serve as indicators that this isn’t true - they have identical performance. I’m willing to guess that thermal transport for the SoC isn’t all that good and while a fan would help likely not as much as you’re crediting. ASIC teams design for a specific envelope. I was really hoping the iMac would do as you say.
dabernathy89 5y ago
I'm on the Air, and I had medium expectations because my previous work laptop (16" Pro, i7, 32GB RAM) was already incredibly snappy and rarely struggled except occasionally with Docker. I was still very impressed even with my tempered expectations. For the kind of work I do, it's just as capable as the 16" MBP was - but with no heat, no noise, and real all-day battery.

Fwirt 5y ago

I feel like one thing that seldom gets mentioned is that there is a difference in battery life between the Pro and the Air. I have an M1 MBA and while the battery life is very impressive I still go through about 10% of my battery per hour of simultaneous VMWare Horizon Client and Firefox (10 tabs, one playing music) with a little Zoom sprinkled in. If I just have Safari open I can definitely get a lot more out of the battery, but I feel like that's a little unrealistic. That being said it's still the best laptop I've ever owned and I don't have regrets about getting the Air, but when these battery life articles come up it's just assumed that everyone has the Pro.

floatingatoll 5y ago
To confirm, you reliably get 10 hours of battery life running VMware, Firefox, and Zoom?
- deleted 5y ago
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- Fwirt 5y ago
  I use AlDente to keep my battery between 80% and 20%. Zoom probably gets 30-60 min of usage during the day. If I start at 9 I usually have to plug in (hit 20%) around 2, so that's 60% in 5 hours. So probably 8-9 hours if I let it run all the way from 100% to 0%. It's not really a complaint about longevity, like I said it's above and beyond any other laptop I've owned, I just see many anecdotes of "I Zoom for 6 hours and my battery is at 90%!" and I find that hard to believe.
  - floatingatoll 5y ago
    One of Zoom’s most intensive CPU tasks is continuous H.264 encoding/decoding, which Apple has hardware accelerated and presumably made power efficient; so it isn’t valid to compare a VMware/Firefox workload to a Zoom workload in a vacuum, especially if the attendee is mostly facemuting (which saves further power in both encoding and webcam) or screensharing video with audio (which makes my 8-core Apple desktop turn on the heat-venting fans). Both workloads are possible, even just within a Zoom-only scenario, and anecdotes are generally insufficient to tell which is the case.

DrBazza 5y ago

ARM has a history of battery life though: "When the first test chips came back from the lab on the 26 April 1985, Furber plugged one into a development board, and was happy to see it working perfectly first time. Deeply puzzling, though, was the reading on the multimeter connected in series with the power supply. The needle was at zero: the processor seemed to be consuming no power whatsoever. As Wilson tells it: “The development board plugged the chip into had a fault: there was no current being sent down the power supply lines at all. The processor was actually running on leakage from the logic circuits. So the low-power big thing that the ARM is most valued for today, the reason that it's on all your mobile phones, was a complete accident." Wilson had, it turned out, designed a powerful 32-bit processor that consumed no more than a tenth of a Watt." https://www.theregister.com/Print/2012/05/03/unsung_heroes_of_tech_arm_creators_sophie_wilson_and_steve_furber/ https://www.theregister.com/Print/2012/05/03/unsung_heroes_o...

diminish 5y ago

are those subtle marketing materials produced for apple, or can't apple estimate how long a battery life will be without seeing it in the indicator first.

ben7799 5y ago

I've had one since last November.. I finally realized I use it more like a Kindle. Unfortunately I'm busy and I'm almost always on my work MBP (Intel) so my usage of the M1 is light. But we have a Surface Pro (i5) that gets the same style of "light" usage. The difference with the M1 is crazy. I don't bother to plug it in very often. It uses so little battery in light usage that it doesn't drain much, then it's suspend logic is so well done that it doesn't lose much for days and days sitting there. The Surface Pro goes right back on the charger pretty much immediately when you're done with it by comparison, cause you can't trust it's going to have battery if you don't, and when you use it even for something light it burns through lots of battery by comparison. My i7 MBP for work of course chugs down battery at an incredible velocity compared to both, but it gets harder usage. So in effect it gets treated like a kindle, I plug it in every week or two. That's very new, and it seems weird and took adjustment.

r00fus 5y ago
My kids are so infrequent in their plugins that they sometimes misplace the MacBooks (given summer break they don't use their laptops as much)

xs 5y ago

What I don't get is that the intel based macbook pros allow you to get 32G of RAM and 4TB hard drive. While the M1s only allow a max of 16G of RAM and 2TB hard drive. I'm not taking a hit on these other, in my opinion, much much more important specs to gain an extra battery life.

grishka 5y ago
M1 is basically a beefed-up iPhone SoC. Give them some time.
joshstrange 5y ago
The real test will be the M1X or whatever they put in the 16" (hopefully) this year. Rumors say up to 64GB RAM among other things. I'd settle for 32 again (I'm on 2018 15", i9, 32GB, and whatever the best graphics card was) and I'll buy the 16" M1* immediately when it goes on sale as long as I can run 3-4 monitors (ideally 4 but I'll settle for 3).
happynacho 5y ago
This is still a first-gen product. It's like saying that you don't get why the first iPhone had 32GB+ of storage or 3G at launch.... it will be refined and improved over time.

sschueller 5y ago

Well my Mac book pro (2018) battery has started to expand and bend the case. To replace the battery according to ifix it is very difficult. So I effectively have a paper weight with a high performance i9 in it because Apple couldn't make the battery removable in a device that isn't even waterproof. Even Apple them selves say a battery is a consumable. Then why do we have to deal with this garbage?

joshstrange 5y ago
I have the same MBP and same issue and they replaced it for free.
Eric_WVGG 5y ago
you should run (run) that thing to an Apple Store. They tend to be pretty generous with this kind of defect, "house burned down due to macbook battery" is kind of bad press. There is a recall program for an earlier model, probably doesn't cover yours (yet) but worth checking anyway: https://support.apple.com/15-inch-macbook-pro-battery-recall https://support.apple.com/15-inch-macbook-pro-battery-recall

kalleboo 5y ago

I'm just so terrified that for the next generation they use this low-power advantage to slim down the battery/machine down back to their typical target of "8 hours of wireless web" (=2 hours of coding in Xcode Swift) in favor of being able to say how thin and light-weight the machine is. With my Intel 16" MBP I currently have to carry around one of those gigantic Jackery-style 220 Wh Li-ion batteries to get 6 hours of work out of it

owenversteeg 5y ago

Yeah, I just got an M1 Air after hearing people talk about it as a sort of religious experience, and I can confirm that even with high expectations I'm incredibly impressed with the battery life. It's worth noting that the stories about crazy battery life (getting through 4+ full days on one charge) come when you use the Apple apps and don't have the brightness too high. If you have the brightness high and use Chrome/lots of non-Apple stuff then you'll have good but not insane battery life. If you set the brightness to a medium-low level and use Apple apps then you'll get ridiculous battery life - I managed to use 17% battery for a full working day the other day (Safari, Sublime, a node server, Postgres, the notes app, and two terminals open.) When I bought the thing I told myself that using Apple apps was what came with the territory, and I'm actually not missing much. The Safari devtools are great. I do miss uBlock Origin (the alternative for Safari seems to be AdGuard which is not great.) But Safari is a solid browser - certainly snappier than Firefox on Windows or Linux, competitive with Chrome, and I haven't run into any compatibility issues yet. I think it's interesting to hear the number of developers switching from Linux to macOS as they get M1 Macs. Personally I was a diehard Arch-on-a-beefy-Thinkpad guy (two extended batteries, three SSDs, etc etc) and in the first day of using this Mac I was completely won over. It all just works so seamlessly, performance is great, battery is incredible, screen is gorgeous, speakers are by far the best I've ever heard on a laptop, and shockingly I actually like the keyboard. The webcam is your average laptop quality (aka not great, and a disappointment in contrast to the rest of the hardware.) I do miss the pageup/dn keys, but aside from that, as almost all the M1 reviews end, "this is the best computer I've ever used."

personjerry 5y ago
Protip: Fn + Up/Down = Page Up/Down
captn3m0 5y ago
I’m eagerly waiting for the Linux M1 port.

caeril 5y ago

To be fair, most laptop battery indicators are broken. I've never had a Li-Ion device that didn't exhibit a non-linearity in terms of power draw vs percentage estimation. 100% lasts much longer than 99%, which lasts longer than 98%, down to about 92%, after which point the draw-per-percentage seems to be fairly linear. Anecdata, I know.

davidjytang 5y ago

If anything, doesn't TSMC's 5nm process play a large part in improving battery life?