Base 14” Pro - Worrying battery life

[Internaut]

Noticed this weekend that when disconnected from the USB-C hub and monitor, the Pro burns battery at greater than ten percent per hour. This is in stark contrast to my M1 Air which behaves pretty much as Apple advertises. Just running Safari with a few tabs. Is there anything I should be looking at (or doing) before approaching Apple support?

 

[lcubed]

what does the activity monitor report as using the most cpu?
is the machine indexing (spotlight)?

 

[jdb8167]

Noticed this weekend that when disconnected from the USB-C hub and monitor, the Pro burns battery at greater than ten percent per hour. This is in stark contrast to my M1 Air which behaves pretty much as Apple advertises. Just running Safari with a few tabs. Is there anything I should be looking at (or doing) before approaching Apple support?

Isn’t that close to what Apple specs? They say up to 11 hours. You are going to get around 10 hours at 10% an hour. Display brightness can make a huge difference too.

 

[yurkennis]

10% per hour for browser usage on 14" seem to be normal.

On 16" MBP, my average time on battery charge on is 9h to 10h 30m when used for browser and moderate-load office apps. Time is more or less the same across Pro and Max processors I tried.

 

[Internaut]

Isn’t that close to what Apple specs? They say up to 11 hours. You are going to get around 10 hours at 10% an hour. Display brightness can make a huge difference too.

Ok, so maybe not as far off as I was thinking. Just went back to Apple’s description

 

[ian87w]

the new Macbook Pros were positioned as workstation laptops, where performance is prioritized over battery life. Thus the reduction of efficiency cores count.

 

[Internaut]

Ok, thanks everyone. Likewise, just went back to Apple’s description and my device is perhaps not as far out as I thought. I’ll do some further tests and give Aldente’s calibration feature a try. I think part of the problem is I’ve done some pretty crazy things with the Air. For example, sat on the sofa from 10 in the evening through 7 the following morning, on one of the dreaded planned maintenance windows, and still having plenty of battery to spare (and that includes some Browser time with Teams running in the browser and simple browsing through my idle time). The holiday use case isn’t the same…

 

[kirk.vino]

I’m seeing a significantly reduced battery life on my 14” (10/16) after updating to 12.1.

 

[Internaut]

Bumpety bump. After a couple of calibration cycles, I'm now seeing somewhat better battery performance on my base 14". Certainly greater than one hour for ten percent burn so easily enough for a day.