14" MBP users...but how good is battery life in optimal conditions?

[lJoSquaredl]

Everyone says the battery life is horrendous but what if you're a big battery saver nut like me. I'm talking turning off XDR, low power mode, promotion in LPM for 1-60hz, brightness never over 50%, M2 4 efficiency cores instead of 2, Safari or native apps in general, keyboard brightness off, with all that going it should pump out an extra hour or two no? Anyone do all that when on battery? Trying to decide if I want the 14" but I hear nothing but bad things about the battery. Obviously comparing it to lots of Windows machines it's still better, but just curious how much extra juice you can get out of it if you run a tight ship.

Also haven't kept up with M3, would it be worth the wait for 6 efficiency cores and new tech or just the usual 10-20% boost range in some areas like always?

 

[Chancha]

As an owner of the M1 Pro base 14”, while also having experience with 16” and other M2 MacBooks, I can tell you only the combination of having just 2-cores + not enough battery capacity in the M1 Pro (Max) 14” that battery life becomes a real issue (that is, feels like an intel machine).

Once you go into M2 territory, especially with Low Power Mode active, you probably don’t need to do much else to get a decent uptime. I have seen reports of 10hr+ semi-thin workflows on people’s machines.

If the A17pro is anything to go by, it seems Apple did not take advantage of the 3nm advances in efficiency, but we need real world tests to confirm. Also as per rumors, M3 is going to use the exact core config as the M2 for some reasons, so still “only” 4 e-cores.

For someone seriously concerned with uptime, I‘d advise against 14” anyway, since the 16” exists and they both can use the same LPM and various tricks, but 16” has a 100Wh battery. The 15” Air is supposed to behave similarly probably without LPM active even. The 14” by design is to take away the volume occupied by battery (and screen) to compress the volume of the machine as much as possible. That said, If one prefers the 14” form factor, you always have the option of bring a power bank.

 

[AF_APPLETALK]

I really like my 14" M1 MBP, but I'm starting to notice declines in battery life more and more and wish I had sprung for the 16" MBP instead. Screen space is mostly fine for me on the 14", but I am trending toward bigger screens these days and I have a hard time telling anyone to "go smaller." The battery though... I noticed that runtime isn't what it has been so I went and looked. My battery has 26 cycles on it and has 93% "health." Which was shocking to me. Had this machine for about a year.

I'll wait until the M3 hits before I do anything, but next time it'll probably be a 16", if I don't get a Studio instead. If you want battery and have the option/cash to do a 16", I'd say do it.

 

[cappo3]

Doing my mundane tasks (Safari/Firefox, Mail, Messages, Word and Preview, mostly), my 2013 13" i7 rMBP on a 5 year old battery and 800 cycles, never formatted, has a better battery life than my 2022 14" M1 Max with 32 cycles (and capacity apparently already degraded by 5%).

That's my worthless anecdote of the day.

 

[6749974]

I noticed that runtime isn't what it has been so I went and looked. My battery has 26 cycles on it and has 93% "health." Which was shocking to me. Had this machine for about a year.

I'm on an M2 MacBook Air with 35 cycles and 96% battery health. Because it's plugged in 99.9% of the time—despite the low cycle count—the battery health has taken a hit. Keeping it plugged in all the time is not good for battery health. (I'm ok with this as I'll just gladly have the battery replaced in a few years and will most likely replace the M2 Air with a Mac mini or Mac Studio by then anyway)

 

[AF_APPLETALK]

I'm on an M2 MacBook Air with 35 cycles and 96% battery health. Because it's plugged in 99.9% of the time—despite the low cycle count—the battery health has taken a hit. Keeping it plugged in all the time is not good for battery health. (I'm ok with this as I'll just gladly have the battery replaced in a few years and will most likely replace the M2 Air with a Mac mini or Mac Studio by then anyway)

Yeah my machine is plugged in most of the time, but also most of the time it's never charged past 80%.

The plugged in all the time thing is why I'm considering a Studio next time, and keeping this MBP as a secondary for portable situations.

 

[mihighil]

This is really weird, bought mine last November (base macbook pro m1 pro 14"). I'm using it mostly at home with Al Dente running in background keeping the charge at 80%.

 

[Reached]

Mine is a base M1 Pro 14" from November last year.

I honestly don't think the battery life is great, much much better than my work issued 16" i9, but nothing like my former M1 Macbook Air, which of course is to be expected

 

[headlessmike]

I've never done anything special to try to squeeze out extra battery life from my 14" M1 Pro. But I've been very impressed with it since day one. Its battery life is way better than the 2013 or 2020 13" MacBook Pros (3rd and 10th gen i5's) I had before it. I just went through two full work days without charging it and had plenty of battery to spare. Granted, I was mostly writing text.

 

[idreaus]

its been great, could have been a little better though. My battery life went from 100% to now 96% after 1.1 years. kinda dropped pretty drastically in the past month so im not sure what's going on with the algorithm reading.

I work remote, so lots of tabs/browser, apps running easily from 5 am to 4pm, usually my battery drops to about 25% at the end of my day, which is decent but I have to play conservative on what I am running and closing.

The low power mode can turn that into a 40% but I can't stand the dropped on refresh rate of the screen lol, I wish we had the option to keep that and still have low power mode running, would have been perfect.

 

[6749974]

Yeah my machine is plugged in most of the time, but also most of the time it's never charged past 80%.

The plugged in all the time thing is why I'm considering a Studio next time, and keeping this MBP as a secondary for portable situations.

It's certainly more optimal from the battery perspective to buy a laptop and to not use it in clamshell desktop mode. But if I can share my opinion on the matter:

From a cost perspective, it's smarter to buy a laptop—use it in clamshell desktop mode—and just accept that you may need to replace the battery 3-4 years down the line. Battery replacements are either free anyway (with AppleCare+)—so long as you have gone under 80% battery health—or cost $129 (for MacBook Air) or $199 (for MacBook Pro).

My MacBook Air with RAM and storage config costs $1,900. Had I bought a laptop and desktop I would have spent an additional $1,399.00 for the Mac mini config I need. That's a total of $3,299. That's much more expensive than just paying $1900 + $129 (for battery replacement). So in conclusion I think us people using a laptop as a desktop have the right idea and a battery replacement isn't a bad price to pay.

 

[throAU]

depends what you use it for. for the things i do, i get 10 hours out of it easily.

but that’s mostly system admin stuff with a lot of browser windows, remote sessions, maybe a windows VM running in the background, video playing, etc.

i’m not using it to edit or encode video on battery. for this its better than any intel laptop i’ve used.

 

[ascender]

depends what you use it for. for the things i do, i get 10 hours out of it easily.

I've borrowed someone's 14" MBP M2 Max today as my Air is at Apple. I'm doing a pretty similar workload to you and 10 hours feels right. I've not enabled low power mode (which maybe I should try actually), but feels like I can easily get through a full day of work on a charge.

I've got Chrome, Firefox and Safari open with a load of tabs in each (inc Office apps). A Windows 11 VM. Streaming Apple Music and playing on the speakers.

Todoist; Fantastical; Messages; WhatsApp; Mail; BBEdit; Notes and Office apps.

As others have said, when you start hammering the GPU, that's when you'll see the battery just get eaten through.

 

[dmccloud]

Unless I'm doing heavy photo/video rendering tasks, connecting to an external monitor, or playing games, I can easily go 2-3 days between charges of my 14" MBP. Turning on Low Power Mode in the battery settings will help extend battery life and unlike low power mode on Windows, it really doesn't make a noticeable impact on typical usage, only the aforementioned video rendering, gaming, and benchmarks. I do tend to keep the laptop plugged in when I know I'm going to doing some heavier tasks, but I do not have to bring the power adapter with me everywhere I go.

 

[throAU]

I've borrowed someone's 14" MBP M2 Max today as my Air is at Apple. I'm doing a pretty similar workload to you and 10 hours feels right. I've not enabled low power mode (which maybe I should try actually), but feels like I can easily get through a full day of work on a charge.

I've literally never run it flat, but I will admit I don't use it on battery a heap as most of the time I'm at an office desk. But not always.

Yeah pretty much. I've used it without a power adapter all day pretty easily - and had charge left over the next day. I've seen estimates of 13 hours plus of actual usage.

And the best thing is if you get the 97 watt adapter, you can get most of a charge in your 1/2 hr+ lunch-break if you have somewhere to do put it down to do that.

Fast charge plus this battery life = I have no concerns with battery on this.

 

[throAU]

Unless I'm doing heavy photo/video rendering tasks, connecting to an external monitor, or playing games, I can easily go 2-3 days between charges of my 14" MBP. Turning on Low Power Mode in the battery settings will help extend battery life and unlike low power mode on Windows, it really doesn't make a noticeable impact on typical usage, only the aforementioned video rendering, gaming, and benchmarks. I do tend to keep the laptop plugged in when I know I'm going to doing some heavier tasks, but I do not have to bring the power adapter with me everywhere I go.

The only difference I've noticed on low power mode is that scrolling is slightly less smooth.

I've run things like Divinity Original Sin and Baldurs gate 3 on it in low power mode (while on AC) to make it quieter and haven't noticed any real difference in performance.

I don't run things like that on battery because I think it severely wears out the battery draining it that fast, but yeah. Low power mode is still quite performant - and if you're wanting to make the battery last longer there's very little drawback to using it.

I'm sure HDR content would hurt battery a bit more due to the 1600 nits capable panel; if you're trying to conserve battery and not needing HDR to work with HDR content you could turn that off to re-claim some of the power consumption. As it is, the panel only switches into HDR mode when playing HDR content; so if battery life is low select SDR versions of whatever you're watching - or manually select the 500 nits option in display settings - there's no getting around the fact that a display brightness that bright is going to burn more power.

 

[dmccloud]

The only difference I've noticed on low power mode is that scrolling is slightly less smooth.

I've run things like Divinity Original Sin and Baldurs gate 3 on it in low power mode (while on AC) to make it quieter and haven't noticed any real difference in performance.

I don't run things like that on battery because I think it severely wears out the battery draining it that fast, but yeah. Low power mode is still quite performant - and if you're wanting to make the battery last longer there's very little drawback to using it.

I'm sure HDR content would hurt battery a bit more due to the 1600 nits capable panel; if you're trying to conserve battery and not needing HDR to work with HDR content you could turn that off to re-claim some of the power consumption. As it is, the panel only switches into HDR mode when playing HDR content; so if battery life is low select SDR versions of whatever you're watching - or manually select the 500 nits option in display settings - there's no getting around the fact that a display brightness that bright is going to burn more power.

I usually keep my display around 50% brightness or one notch below 50%, which also helps with battery life. The display is more than bright enough to read comfortably at that level, especially in dark mode.

 

[ascender]

I had to do some work late last night so enabled low power mode and it really made a big difference. Also, the base of the laptop was very cool - like an Air or M1 Pro - whereas with it disabled, it was noticeably a bit warm in the centre just doing normal stuff.

 

[throAU]

I usually keep my display around 50% brightness or one notch below 50%, which also helps with battery life. The display is more than bright enough to read comfortably at that level, especially in dark mode.

Same, but as soon as you run a high dynamic range video, it will pump up that 50% to (up to) 800 nits for highlights

 

[TSE]

Here's my perspective. I went from:

M1 Max 14" MacBook Pro ----> M1 MacBook Air -----> M2 13" MacBook Air



And while the M1 Max MacBook Pro's battery life was amazing compared to what I was used to with Intel laptops, after going to the MacBook Air, it took that amazement to a whole new level.

While the 14" MacBook Pro was enough to last a full day of my design work, it was close enough that I carried a charger with me for that peace of mind. Most days I ended my day with less than 10% battery life, so I didn't want to risk it.

After upgrading to the MacBook Air line, there was enough battery life that I never had to worry about bringing a charger for the day. I'll easily work in Figma, browse the web, Teams calls, etc. for 8-10 hours, just like on the 14" MacBook Pro and it'll end the day at 20-30%.

Please note that the M1 Max in general consumes more power than the M1 Pro, so maybe if I went for the Pro my story would be a bit different, but I've heard similar perspectives from people with a 14" M1 Pro machine compared to the Air line.

 

[throAU]

Yeah the M1 Pro would probably consume less. I think a big deal is the screen. The display on the pros is a much more capable unit than on the air, and I'm sure that it probably draws a lot more power.

In terms of CPU/GPU, measuring those with power metrics indicates they don't consume a heap at all on the Pro.

e.g. right now with two email clients, two calendars, finance app, Remote Desktop, remote VMware console, two browsers with many tabs each etc...

System instructions retired: 1.58374e+10 System instructions per clock: 1.7667 CPU Power: 223 mW GPU Power: 81 mW ANE Power: 0 mW Combined Power (CPU + GPU + ANE): 304 mW


300 milliwatts is NOTHING. It's the other stuff in the box, if you have a "typical desktop app" workload (as opposed to video processing, 3d work, etc.).

 

[dmccloud]

Yeah the M1 Pro would probably consume less. I think a big deal is the screen. The display on the pros is a much more capable unit than on the air, and I'm sure that it probably draws a lot more power.

In terms of CPU/GPU, measuring those with power metrics indicates they don't consume a heap at all on the Pro.

e.g. right now with two email clients, two calendars, finance app, Remote Desktop, remote VMware console, two browsers with many tabs each etc...

System instructions retired: 1.58374e+10 System instructions per clock: 1.7667 CPU Power: 223 mW GPU Power: 81 mW ANE Power: 0 mW Combined Power (CPU + GPU + ANE): 304 mW


300 milliwatts is NOTHING. It's the other stuff in the box, if you have a "typical desktop app" workload (as opposed to video processing, 3d work, etc.).

With Firefox open with around 8 tabs, Mail, and Affinity Designer open, and downloading some video assets for a project I'm currently working on, I'm using between .11 and .41W combined right now. Oddly enough, Asitop overestimates RAM usage by a factor of approximately 2x right now - not sure if that is something within Asitop itself or Powermetrics (where Asitop pulls its data from).

 

[cappo3]

I thought I'd chime in for a second... By using Powermetrics, Terminal tells me that CPU and GPU are using very little power on my M1 Max, while the DRAM is constantly drawing nearly double as much as the CPU.
Does this align with your findings?