8 ms·

Anecdotal, but my M1 MacBook Pro doesn’t have amazing battery life. The other day I went to a coffee shop with 60% charge and only made it about 2.5 hours doin

Anecdotal, but my M1 MacBook Pro doesn’t have amazing battery life. The other day I went to a coffee shop with 60% charge and only made it about 2.5 hours doing iOS development.

sb8244 3y ago
Same here. My MacBook air easily could go 6+ hours and it feels like the pro goes 2-3. Same workload.
- Reason077 3y ago
  I have an M1 MacBook Air and use an app called CoconutBattery to monitor power usage. What I’ve noticed is that while the laptop is usually super efficient (say, 2.5-4W while web browsing giving 8+ hours battery life), occasionally the power draw climbs up to 6, 7, 8W or more with no obvious explanation, draining the battery in 3 or 4 hours. Activity Monitor will show no apps using unusual energy yet the power is going somewhere? I’m suspicious that there’s something with maybe the WiFi hardware or the SSD which sometimes causes elevated power use, unseen by Activity Monitor? Even a reboot won’t solve the phantom power drain while it’s happening, but it does seem to go away on its own eventually…
  - lathiat 3y ago
    Watch your backlight level, which auto adjusts to the room light level. "When comparing battery life, remember that screen brightness makes a huge difference! On an M1 MacBook Air sitting idle on the KDE desktop, you will get around 7 hours of runtime at 100% brightness, and 23 hours of runtime at the minimum (not zero) brightness. Even keyboard brightness matters! Those numbers are with the keyboard backlight turned off. If you turn it on at max, even with the screen left at minimum, your runtime goes from 23 hours down to just 14 hours. So please don't ask us what battery lifetime to expect while doing a certain task and expect a single answer!" https://social.treehouse.systems/@AsahiLinux/110548137464042052 https://social.treehouse.systems/@AsahiLinux/110548137464042...
    - beebeepka 3y ago
      You are correct. Even plugging in my gaming mechanical keyboard makes a noticeable difference.
    - Reason077 3y ago
      Yes, I should have mentioned I always have keyboard backlight turned off [1] I’ve suspected something to do with screen brightness in the past also. System log was often full of messages from the brightness adjustment/monitoring daemon, which raised my suspicions, but I think it might just have been normal behaviour at the time. However the mystery power draw seems to happen independent of screen backlight setting. ie: when the problem is happening, turning backlight right down will reduce power draw a bit, but it’ll still be high. On other occasions, even with the screen brightness at 100% I’ll still get “normal” power draw. I’ve experimented with turning off brightness auto-adjustment too, with no effect. [1] Keyboard backlight is very annoying at night when trying to watch a movie or something, and Apple made it difficult to toggle on and off on recent Macs by removing the hot key for it. So I’ve learned to just live without it.
      - mwint 3y ago
        Keyboard brightness - you can put the control into control center and then it’s two clicks to get to a slider for it. Not awesome, but for the relatively rare times I want to change it manually, it’s been acceptable.
        Reason077 3y ago
        Yeah I do have that, but I usually find it too slow/annoying to have to use the mouse to turn it on and off. It was so much quicker and easier when there was an F-key to instantly do it. Maybe one day I’ll get around to making an app to map it to an F-key again, which has been on my todo list for a long time…
        lathiat 3y ago
        Have you got the automatic adjustment off? The night time thing hadn't bothered me. https://support.apple.com/en-au/guide/mac-help/mchlp2265/mac https://support.apple.com/en-au/guide/mac-help/mchlp2265/mac
  - distortedsignal 3y ago
    On my (2020 intel) MBP, SSD IO is VERY power hungry. Usually the culprit is Firefox, but my company is on the MS office suite, so sometimes it’s Outlook or Teams. It’s frustrating.
  - watersb 3y ago
    Metadata indexing for Spotlight? I've had very stubborn runs of the md* indexer (not at laptop can't recall name -- mdimport?) decide that yes, this coffee shop is a great place to crank it up. A similar one is a large initial indexing by the Dropbox app. I've had my M1 Air on the desktop Thunderbolt dock for the past month so it's gotten way past that initialization stage.
    - Reason077 3y ago
      Spotlight’s energy use shows up in Activity Monitor, though. Whatever drains my battery is invisible to Activity Monitor (but visible to apps that monitor the power management hardware itself), so presumably it must be some hardware device?
      - crazygringo 3y ago
        I'm no expert but I definitely can't help but wonder if it's WiFi or Bluetooth. Maybe something like radio interference making it work 50x harder? Around a decade ago I had a MacBook that was super sensitive to interference issues. Although I'm not sure if that results in a big power draw (the way it does with cell phones for example when you're constantly going in and out of service).
        Reason077 3y ago
        I can fairly confidently rule out Bluetooth, as turning it off in control Center doesn’t seem to affect the power drain. Wifi is certainly a possibility though.
JCharante 3y ago
I’ve gone 4 work days without charging my M1 MBP
- willcipriano 3y ago
  I've never gotten a full day
- Gigachad 3y ago
  I've got the M1 2020 and find it almost lasts 1 day usage.
- beebeepka 3y ago
  If you live on Jupiter, with its 10-hour days, then maybe.
  - beebeepka 3y ago
    Oh, this was meant for the 4-day guy. Not sure how I responded to GigaChad
kylec 3y ago
Do you have a 13" MacBook Pro with M1 or a 14+" MacBook Pro with M1 Pro/Max? If the latter, it has decent battery life, but it's nowhere near as efficient as the regular M1 MacBook Pro. If it's the former, I guess I'm surprised, I own one (I'm writing this comment on one) and I've loved how the battery seems to just last forever on mine.
- RulerOf 3y ago
  I have an M1 Max and while I admit that I find myself sometimes disappointed by the battery life, it’s still often getting more than three hours while I expend precisely zero effort to ensure I’m getting the most out of my limited battery life. It’s a far cry from the 20+ hour runtimes shown during reviews of the new machines, but still good enough to cover about as long as I’d want to sit in one spot.
antigirl 3y ago
My M1 max [14inch] was suffering with really bad battery life. Turned out it was sync plugin for VSCode.
- OrderlyTiamat 3y ago
  Could you expand on that? You discovered vs code takes a lot of power when settings sync is turned on or something?
  - antigirl 3y ago
    it was a third party extension: https://twitter.com/jordanpittman/status/1526247984349978629?lang=en https://twitter.com/jordanpittman/status/1526247984349978629... https://github.com/shanalikhan/code-settings-sync/issues/1361 https://github.com/shanalikhan/code-settings-sync/issues/136...

Anecdotal, but my M1 MacBook Pro doesn’t have amazing battery life. The other day I went to a coffee shop with 60% charge and only made it about 2.5 hours doing iOS development.

sb8244 3y ago

Same here. My MacBook air easily could go 6+ hours and it feels like the pro goes 2-3. Same workload.

Reason077 3y ago
I have an M1 MacBook Air and use an app called CoconutBattery to monitor power usage. What I’ve noticed is that while the laptop is usually super efficient (say, 2.5-4W while web browsing giving 8+ hours battery life), occasionally the power draw climbs up to 6, 7, 8W or more with no obvious explanation, draining the battery in 3 or 4 hours. Activity Monitor will show no apps using unusual energy yet the power is going somewhere? I’m suspicious that there’s something with maybe the WiFi hardware or the SSD which sometimes causes elevated power use, unseen by Activity Monitor? Even a reboot won’t solve the phantom power drain while it’s happening, but it does seem to go away on its own eventually…
- lathiat 3y ago
  Watch your backlight level, which auto adjusts to the room light level. "When comparing battery life, remember that screen brightness makes a huge difference! On an M1 MacBook Air sitting idle on the KDE desktop, you will get around 7 hours of runtime at 100% brightness, and 23 hours of runtime at the minimum (not zero) brightness. Even keyboard brightness matters! Those numbers are with the keyboard backlight turned off. If you turn it on at max, even with the screen left at minimum, your runtime goes from 23 hours down to just 14 hours. So please don't ask us what battery lifetime to expect while doing a certain task and expect a single answer!" https://social.treehouse.systems/@AsahiLinux/110548137464042052 https://social.treehouse.systems/@AsahiLinux/110548137464042...
  - beebeepka 3y ago
    You are correct. Even plugging in my gaming mechanical keyboard makes a noticeable difference.
  - Reason077 3y ago
    Yes, I should have mentioned I always have keyboard backlight turned off [1] I’ve suspected something to do with screen brightness in the past also. System log was often full of messages from the brightness adjustment/monitoring daemon, which raised my suspicions, but I think it might just have been normal behaviour at the time. However the mystery power draw seems to happen independent of screen backlight setting. ie: when the problem is happening, turning backlight right down will reduce power draw a bit, but it’ll still be high. On other occasions, even with the screen brightness at 100% I’ll still get “normal” power draw. I’ve experimented with turning off brightness auto-adjustment too, with no effect. [1] Keyboard backlight is very annoying at night when trying to watch a movie or something, and Apple made it difficult to toggle on and off on recent Macs by removing the hot key for it. So I’ve learned to just live without it.
    - mwint 3y ago
      Keyboard brightness - you can put the control into control center and then it’s two clicks to get to a slider for it. Not awesome, but for the relatively rare times I want to change it manually, it’s been acceptable.
      - Reason077 3y ago
        Yeah I do have that, but I usually find it too slow/annoying to have to use the mouse to turn it on and off. It was so much quicker and easier when there was an F-key to instantly do it. Maybe one day I’ll get around to making an app to map it to an F-key again, which has been on my todo list for a long time…
        lathiat 3y ago
        Have you got the automatic adjustment off? The night time thing hadn't bothered me. https://support.apple.com/en-au/guide/mac-help/mchlp2265/mac https://support.apple.com/en-au/guide/mac-help/mchlp2265/mac
- distortedsignal 3y ago
  On my (2020 intel) MBP, SSD IO is VERY power hungry. Usually the culprit is Firefox, but my company is on the MS office suite, so sometimes it’s Outlook or Teams. It’s frustrating.
- watersb 3y ago
  Metadata indexing for Spotlight? I've had very stubborn runs of the md* indexer (not at laptop can't recall name -- mdimport?) decide that yes, this coffee shop is a great place to crank it up. A similar one is a large initial indexing by the Dropbox app. I've had my M1 Air on the desktop Thunderbolt dock for the past month so it's gotten way past that initialization stage.
  - Reason077 3y ago
    Spotlight’s energy use shows up in Activity Monitor, though. Whatever drains my battery is invisible to Activity Monitor (but visible to apps that monitor the power management hardware itself), so presumably it must be some hardware device?
    - crazygringo 3y ago
      I'm no expert but I definitely can't help but wonder if it's WiFi or Bluetooth. Maybe something like radio interference making it work 50x harder? Around a decade ago I had a MacBook that was super sensitive to interference issues. Although I'm not sure if that results in a big power draw (the way it does with cell phones for example when you're constantly going in and out of service).
      - Reason077 3y ago
        I can fairly confidently rule out Bluetooth, as turning it off in control Center doesn’t seem to affect the power drain. Wifi is certainly a possibility though.

JCharante 3y ago

I’ve gone 4 work days without charging my M1 MBP

willcipriano 3y ago
I've never gotten a full day
Gigachad 3y ago
I've got the M1 2020 and find it almost lasts 1 day usage.
beebeepka 3y ago
If you live on Jupiter, with its 10-hour days, then maybe.
- beebeepka 3y ago
  Oh, this was meant for the 4-day guy. Not sure how I responded to GigaChad

kylec 3y ago

Do you have a 13" MacBook Pro with M1 or a 14+" MacBook Pro with M1 Pro/Max? If the latter, it has decent battery life, but it's nowhere near as efficient as the regular M1 MacBook Pro. If it's the former, I guess I'm surprised, I own one (I'm writing this comment on one) and I've loved how the battery seems to just last forever on mine.

RulerOf 3y ago
I have an M1 Max and while I admit that I find myself sometimes disappointed by the battery life, it’s still often getting more than three hours while I expend precisely zero effort to ensure I’m getting the most out of my limited battery life. It’s a far cry from the 20+ hour runtimes shown during reviews of the new machines, but still good enough to cover about as long as I’d want to sit in one spot.

antigirl 3y ago

My M1 max [14inch] was suffering with really bad battery life. Turned out it was sync plugin for VSCode.

OrderlyTiamat 3y ago
Could you expand on that? You discovered vs code takes a lot of power when settings sync is turned on or something?
- antigirl 3y ago
  it was a third party extension: https://twitter.com/jordanpittman/status/1526247984349978629?lang=en https://twitter.com/jordanpittman/status/1526247984349978629... https://github.com/shanalikhan/code-settings-sync/issues/1361 https://github.com/shanalikhan/code-settings-sync/issues/136...