5 ms·
Great investigation and data. While the M3 Pro looked pretty disappointing at first because of the loss in P core count, it looks like the huge strides have bee
by pants2 3y ago
Great investigation and data. While the M3 Pro looked pretty disappointing at first because of the loss in P core count, it looks like the huge strides have been made with the E core performance, so it's not the downgrade that one might think.
I own a 16" M1 Pro for work and a 16" M3 Pro for play, and wow I can really tell a difference in both performance and battery life. It's a nice upgrade.
- als0 3y agoBattery life must be hard to compare because presumably the battery life on the M1 Pro must have degraded by about 10% by now, which is quite a significant difference in capacity compared to a brand new 16" MacBook.
- FlyingAvatar 3y agoYeah, my M1 Pro's battery has 525 cycles on it and has lost 16% of its capacity. (Edit: Actually, mine is M1 Max, FWIW.)
- lambdaba 3y agoThat is remarkably low, isn't it? I mean, saying this as an (ex) ThinkPad user :P. Did you take any special care with it?
- fragmede 3y ago"Special care" on OS X is to use Al Dente.app, which limits the charge at 80% so as to not damage the battery. https://apphousekitchen.com/ https://apphousekitchen.com/
- sgerenser 3y agoIsn’t that option built into MacOS now? Since Ventura I think.
- minimaxir 3y agoYes: the MacBook eventually learns to stop charging and keep at 80%. (it took a month for mine) You can override it to fully charge.
- masklinn 3y agoIt has a supposedly intelligent thing which works about the same as iOS, meaning not well and not reliably. iOS has gained a hard limit toggle, but macOS has yet to. Aldente does that job.
- duskwuff 3y agoThe built-in option is a step in the right direction, but doesn't provide any way for a user to specify that the battery doesn't need to be charged to 100% if the OS thinks it needs to be. In my experience, it usually ends up charging the battery 100% every night, then letting it discharge to 80% during the day.
- pram 3y agoI’ve had it never charge, and sit reliably at 80% for weeks. Then when I unplugged it the schedule was ruined and it reverted to charging at night. Overcomplicated for no reason lol
- obmelvin 3y agoI can't recommend Al Dente enough. Apparently I'm only at 134 cycles with 92% capacity*. M1 max is 26 months old. I have used a work computer for large portions of time obviously. * TBH the capacity seems a bit low for my cycle count. Possible I've let it sit around 30% for too long at points. Such is the scourge of living in San Diego with the highest kWH rates in the country and only trying to charge at night or on weekends. I cry inside when I see people quoting 12c/kWh. Try 50c-1.20 depending on time of day/year.
- rsynnott 3y agoHow old was the Thinkpad? I used to expect a laptop battery to be borderline useless after 4 years or so, but my 2016 MBP is coming up on 8, and the battery is doing surprisingly okay. It reports 70% capacity, and that feels about right.
- lambdaba 3y agoI can't say exactly, but it degraded remarkably quickly. Maybe someone else can chime in with a different experience, but I doubt it would be anywhere near as good as what I read from MacBook users, especially M-series. I got the ThinkPad brand new, and it was a relatively recent model.
- marmakoide 3y agoMy Thinkpad 470s battery is close to its death (1h30 autonomy editing text, doing CAD or websurfing), after 5 years of heavy use.
- alphabettsy 3y agoI’m pretty sure they’re rated for 1000 cycles. Idk if that’s good or bad. Or what’s expected to happen when it’s beyond that.
- sgerenser 3y ago1000 cycles is when it’s expected to drop to ~80% of original capacity. Still plenty of use left after that.
- MilaM 3y agoYou can check the rated cycle counts for most Macbooks on the following Apple Support page: https://support.apple.com/en-us/102888 https://support.apple.com/en-us/102888 Most recent Macbooks should last for 1000 full cycles. Though I'm pretty sure you can brick your battery quickly by keeping it at 100% charge all the time or if you use it in a very hot environment.
- dzr0001 3y agoI have the original M1 air that I got the day it released in 2020. In a typical week, I will let my battery discharge to less than 10% twice and recharge it to 100%. I've logged 458 cycles and lost 11% of my capacity. Not too bad.
- ahepp 3y agoWhere are you getting the cycle count? I have an M1 Air, I got it new and use it heavily. I see "battery health" is "normal" and "max capacity" is 90%, but I don't see a count of charge cycles.
- MilaM 3y agoYou can check the cycle count using the System Information app in the power section. Option-click on the Apple logo is a convenient shortcut to open System Information. There is also the third-party Coconut Battery app that gives you other nice statistics and keeps track of battery health if you open it occasionally. https://coconut-flavour.com/coconutbattery/ https://coconut-flavour.com/coconutbattery/
- bombcar 3y agoI'm really wondering if I should push for an M3 upgrade from the M1 Max I have now; it is a 2021 model ... I'll probably hold out for the M4.
- Detrytus 3y agoI just ordered M3 Max Macbook Pro, currently own M1 Macbook Air. The one thing that I found the Air lacking is running VM with Windows 11, which I need for work. All those translation and virtualization layers add up and CPU temp rises to 95 Celsius sometimes, visibly slowing down. I decided I need a laptop with active cooling. If you have M1 Max, and a fan, then there's probably no point in upgrading.
- PaulWaldman 3y agoAre you expecting significantly improved efficiencies when running Windows VMs with the M3 Max Macbook Pro?
- Detrytus 3y agoThat’s pretty much the only reason I bought it. Other than the cool, “space black” color :-) Benchmarks look promising
- avidphantasm 3y agoI traded an M1 Pro for an M3 Max and my AMD64 Linux containers seem to be MUCH faster, so this would probably carry over to Windows VMs.
- rifty 3y agoThe P core drop is apparently kind of a downgrade for audio production. Some DAWs only use the performance cores and Logic is one of them. This means you can utilize more tracks with an M1 Pro.
- masklinn 3y agoIs that possible? You can set priority to background and your process will be restricted to E cores, but last I checked other processes will favor P cores but will be spilled to E if everything is loaded. I also don’t remember an API to query the core layout (to only spawn as many workers as there are P cores). But maybe that was added since?
- wtallis 3y agoIIRC there are sysctls that list the number of cores of each type, and their cache sizes. So an application can check how many P cores there are, and choose to only spawn that many threads.
- vlovich123 3y agoYeah but it just means that software needs to tweak some parameters on M3 to slow spilling to E cores. In fact, a good system would always spill to E cores ands just let completion rates drive acceptance of work stealing.
- daviddever23box 3y agoThis is not actually the case: this can be changed within Logic Pro's settings.