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How long can you use the M1 laptop on single charge?

by effie 5y ago

xiphias2 5y ago
https://support.apple.com/kb/SP824?locale=en_US https://support.apple.com/kb/SP824?locale=en_US The official number is 17 hours, bu I never had to test it in real life. The crazy thing is charging to 50% in 30 minutes, and 50% is enough to get me through my trips.
- effie 5y ago
  That's great. Yeah, once the on-battery time is slightly greater than one workday requires, increasing it further stops being interesting. For battery longevity, in general I would charge to 90% and then use it until 20%, then recharge to 90% again. This makes the most out of the battery charge cycles, and avoid the increased stress of close-to-0% charge (bad if there for longer time) and close-to-100% charge (less bad but still better not to go there often). But maybe M1 battery system is different for some reason, I don't know.
  - masklinn 5y ago
    It’s not different. In theory recent macs are supposed to “learn” about your habits and lock charging at around 80% when you’re not going to move a while (“optimised battery charging”), but from what I’ve heard it’s not super reliable. And I’ve never seen it work properly on my iphone, whose usage is about as reliable as you could be (plus iOS has all the alarms so it knows exactly when I’m going to wake up) so I didn’t exactly have high hopes. A more reliable solution is to manipulate pmset directly, or use something like AlDente which handles it for you (the paid version has lots of extra features but the free one suffices to avoid charging above 80% by default). Obviously when charging time arrives you need to realise yourself and plug in somewhere between 20 and 40%. The only annoyance is the magsafe’s LED remains amber even when the mac stops charging at 80%.
    - Joeri 5y ago
      On my iphone it pretty reliably charges up to 80%, waits a few hours and then charges to 100% when I put it on the charger for the night. On my m1 air I’ve only known it to charge to 80% after a period of several weeks where it was docked. As soon as I started using it away from power for significant amounts of time it went back to charging to 100%.
      - masklinn 5y ago
        > On my iphone it pretty reliably charges up to 80%, waits a few hours and then charges to 100% when I put it on the charger for the night. I just checked what happened last time. I went to bed around 2300, it quickly charged to 80% (getting there a bit after 2400), then stayed there until 0200, at which point it decided to charge to 100 which it had reached by 0400. As it does every workday, and has since before I had that specific phone (which is 2 years old), the alarm woke me at 0600. So over a 7h night it managed to spend more time at 100% than it did at 80. I’m not going to say I’m impressed, because I’m not. Based on usage pattern I could see it fail to reach 100% by 0600, but I don’t think I’ve woken at 4 once in the last 3 years.
- xxs 5y ago
  >The crazy thing is charging to 50% in 30 minutes, There is zero crazy about that part, it's just 1C charging which is not even extra hard on the batteries.
marcan_42 5y ago
Not just that; how long does it last while idle/sleeping? Pretty much forever; the MacBook Air I have for random OSX tasks and testing Linux on sporadically goes over a week between charges. These things are very power efficient while actually computing, but they are extremely power efficient while idle. The whole SoC uses a couple dozen milliwatts while in active idle state (e.g. screen off, machine up and responding to pings via WiFi).
runeks 5y ago
I use an M1 Air for my daily development, and under full CPU load the battery lasts about 2.5 hours, while under no load and low screen brightness it will last for 15-20 hours.
- Joeri 5y ago
  Was that an artificial load test? The heaviest continuous load I’ve put my m1 air under was playing one of the tomb raider games, which puts a heavy load on cpu and gpu, and it still lasted 3 to 4 hours on battery.
  - runeks 5y ago
    No, it was building a large software project using all the CPU cores which lasted several hours.
barsonme 5y ago
I go about 2-3 days without charging it under moderate (regular) use. While developing (compiling, lots of tabs, etc.), I’ll use about 80% in a day. For reference, the last zoom call I was on (2 hours) with nearly max brightness only drained the battery ~5%. My Intel MBP would’ve been down at least 20%.
- olyjohn 5y ago
  I feel like a lot of people are comparing their old Intel machines to brand new M1s with fresh batteries. Of course there will be a drastic difference. Every time I get a new laptop, the battery life is incredible, and then after a few years goes to shit. I'm sure the M1 is generally more efficient, but the difference might not be as big if you compared new vs new.
  - barsonme 5y ago
    FWIW, my comparison was against a one year old MBP. I’ve had a range of MacBooks (2013, 2016, 2020, 2021) and it just isn’t a competition. The M1 is head and shoulders above the other models in battery life.
  - brodock 5y ago
    I never got more then 3 hours with any previous intel mac, doing "normal" development.

How long can you use the M1 laptop on single charge?

by effie 5y ago

How long can you use the M1 laptop on single charge?

https://support.apple.com/kb/SP824?locale=en_US https://support.apple.com/kb/SP824?locale=en_US The official number is 17 hours, bu I never had to test it in real life. The crazy thing is charging to 50% in 30 minutes, and 50% is enough to get me through my trips.

effie 5y ago
That's great. Yeah, once the on-battery time is slightly greater than one workday requires, increasing it further stops being interesting. For battery longevity, in general I would charge to 90% and then use it until 20%, then recharge to 90% again. This makes the most out of the battery charge cycles, and avoid the increased stress of close-to-0% charge (bad if there for longer time) and close-to-100% charge (less bad but still better not to go there often). But maybe M1 battery system is different for some reason, I don't know.
- masklinn 5y ago
  It’s not different. In theory recent macs are supposed to “learn” about your habits and lock charging at around 80% when you’re not going to move a while (“optimised battery charging”), but from what I’ve heard it’s not super reliable. And I’ve never seen it work properly on my iphone, whose usage is about as reliable as you could be (plus iOS has all the alarms so it knows exactly when I’m going to wake up) so I didn’t exactly have high hopes. A more reliable solution is to manipulate pmset directly, or use something like AlDente which handles it for you (the paid version has lots of extra features but the free one suffices to avoid charging above 80% by default). Obviously when charging time arrives you need to realise yourself and plug in somewhere between 20 and 40%. The only annoyance is the magsafe’s LED remains amber even when the mac stops charging at 80%.
  - Joeri 5y ago
    On my iphone it pretty reliably charges up to 80%, waits a few hours and then charges to 100% when I put it on the charger for the night. On my m1 air I’ve only known it to charge to 80% after a period of several weeks where it was docked. As soon as I started using it away from power for significant amounts of time it went back to charging to 100%.
    - masklinn 5y ago
      > On my iphone it pretty reliably charges up to 80%, waits a few hours and then charges to 100% when I put it on the charger for the night. I just checked what happened last time. I went to bed around 2300, it quickly charged to 80% (getting there a bit after 2400), then stayed there until 0200, at which point it decided to charge to 100 which it had reached by 0400. As it does every workday, and has since before I had that specific phone (which is 2 years old), the alarm woke me at 0600. So over a 7h night it managed to spend more time at 100% than it did at 80. I’m not going to say I’m impressed, because I’m not. Based on usage pattern I could see it fail to reach 100% by 0600, but I don’t think I’ve woken at 4 once in the last 3 years.
xxs 5y ago
>The crazy thing is charging to 50% in 30 minutes, There is zero crazy about that part, it's just 1C charging which is not even extra hard on the batteries.

marcan_42 5y ago

Not just that; how long does it last while idle/sleeping? Pretty much forever; the MacBook Air I have for random OSX tasks and testing Linux on sporadically goes over a week between charges. These things are very power efficient while actually computing, but they are extremely power efficient while idle. The whole SoC uses a couple dozen milliwatts while in active idle state (e.g. screen off, machine up and responding to pings via WiFi).

runeks 5y ago

I use an M1 Air for my daily development, and under full CPU load the battery lasts about 2.5 hours, while under no load and low screen brightness it will last for 15-20 hours.

Joeri 5y ago
Was that an artificial load test? The heaviest continuous load I’ve put my m1 air under was playing one of the tomb raider games, which puts a heavy load on cpu and gpu, and it still lasted 3 to 4 hours on battery.
- runeks 5y ago
  No, it was building a large software project using all the CPU cores which lasted several hours.

barsonme 5y ago

I go about 2-3 days without charging it under moderate (regular) use. While developing (compiling, lots of tabs, etc.), I’ll use about 80% in a day. For reference, the last zoom call I was on (2 hours) with nearly max brightness only drained the battery ~5%. My Intel MBP would’ve been down at least 20%.

olyjohn 5y ago
I feel like a lot of people are comparing their old Intel machines to brand new M1s with fresh batteries. Of course there will be a drastic difference. Every time I get a new laptop, the battery life is incredible, and then after a few years goes to shit. I'm sure the M1 is generally more efficient, but the difference might not be as big if you compared new vs new.
- barsonme 5y ago
  FWIW, my comparison was against a one year old MBP. I’ve had a range of MacBooks (2013, 2016, 2020, 2021) and it just isn’t a competition. The M1 is head and shoulders above the other models in battery life.
- brodock 5y ago
  I never got more then 3 hours with any previous intel mac, doing "normal" development.