I haven't gotten close to that and tested out my M1 Max base(32gb) using premiere with my s5(h265) footage, two luts, and curves. Then I exported a 36 min video to HEVC. I also was using safari, playing a movie from Apple TV app, and brought my brightness up. My battery dropped from 100 percent to 56 percent in an hr and half(plus an hr idle). The youtuber above was using chrome, spotify, and premiere(not sure what she edits, so that would determine decode/encode vs cpu, gpu power) with max brightness. I am not sure if she was using high or low power mode though.
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Battery life on M1X PRO vs M1X MAX?
- Thread starter Starfyre
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I continue to be really impressed by the battery life of my 14" M1 Max (see my earlier post for my "light usage scenario" battery rundown). I am currently at 57 minutes on battery with 100% remaining, and Activity Monitor saying I have 15 hours and 31 minutes left. Yesterday I meant to plug it in but forgot. I noticed after 1 hour, 47 mins on battery that I had 97% remaining, which didn't seem possible. Note - I'm just doing light browsing at the moment, so not trying to tax the machine.
It was at 8 clicks for around a half hour, then at 7 clicks for the rest of the time. (8 clicks is 50%).
The CPU is 30 watts, the 16c gpu is 30 watts. So each hour you would use 60 watts. The battery is 99watts/h. So if you do the calculation, you would get about 1h30.
I’ve been doing some light case testing with both pro and max 14” at exactly 8 clicks (50%) and I don’t think I’ve ever seen that good of battery, even just letting it idle…. Seems like you have a unicorn
You need to test in the linear part of the battery curve - between 90-10%. Measurements close to 100% are not representative of what you will actually get.
Check out my earlier post for my battery rundown from 100% down to 20%:
Battery life on M1X PRO vs M1X MAX?
As Tested: 10+ Hours of Battery Life on a 14" M1 Max with 24 Core GPU: I've finally received and tested the battery on my 14" M1 Max 32GB RAM, 24 core GPU, 2TB SSD in a "very light" usage scenario, and the results exceeded my expectations (to put it mildly). The headline here is that you should...
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Indeed, on light use, the MAX64 on low battery gave me close to 11 hours, around the same as the PRO32 on normal battery mode.
If both are on normal mode, the difference is easily 2 hours.
Out of curiosity I also tested the PRO32 with low battery mode, and this is what really surprised me: 14h30 minutes! So much for that long-haul flight where I can't sleep!
Awesome! Thanks for the test! Just curious did you run the battery from 100% all the way to 0? or is it estimated based on % left and current average usage?
Secondly, did you notice any significant performance differences from MAX64 (Low power) vs PRO32 (regular)?
Yes 100% (leaving cable in for around 3h green before starting the test) to around 2%, so I could take screenshots of the measurements and compare it with the manual clock I ran.
To your second question, this is more of an impression: I am writing this on MAX64 low-power mode, and even the scrolling up and down of the screen on Safari - it's "stuttering". I have the impression that the MAX64 very easily uses its immense GPU capacity, while the PRO32 simply doesn't have that capacity. I could also see that difference when I was scrolling through movies. But again, very subjective.
I will run again a light-use test of the MAX64 with low-power mode, because I just want to double check before I give it up......
That's odd, is it because safari still having issues optimizing 120hz? does the issue happen on other browsers?
Also random unrelated request: but can you check if your shortcut have a "Set Playback Destination" option?
Safari was working better when not in "low power mode", that's why assume GPUs are throttled and the scrolling was not that smooth
This is the only video that shows no difference. Many others show one. Including articles, reviews etc
I've read that low power mode disable 120Hz and locks the screen at a 60hz refresh rate I think. That's what you may be referring to.
So the New MBP 16" Max has a slightly better feeling keyboard than the New MBP 16" Pro?
Not necessarily, I was referring to the ones i had purchased. When i tried a second Max its keyboard was more similar to the Pro than the first Max. *shrug*
M1 Pro owner here. I was getting 8-10 hours of battery life on a typical day, but all of a sudden that has plummeted. For example, this morning I'm at 45% after just 2.5 hours of very light use (writing in Google docs primarily with some web browsing). Any ideas?
These time showing numbers are just a kind of accidental lottery game. You see 12 hours, in half an hour 8,5 hours, in another hour 3 hours etc. then again 5 hours and then 1 hour in 2 hours. This cannot be taken seriously in any moment.
I get that the estimates aren’t super reliable. But there was a big change in the last week in what the estimate is reporting, so it’s not that.
What does Activity Monitor tell you?
What is your CPU, disk/network I/O and swap usage like?
Are any applications showing as having high energy usage (in the "energy" pane)?
Even web-pages can hammer the CPU, so it's worth looking at all your browser processes to see if any tabs are using a lot of CPU%.
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Alright so as promised, I received the new mac and was able to make the tests I always wanted to do.
So first, which computers I am comparing?
1 - 14 inch, M1 Max 10c/32c/64GB -> referred bellow to as "Max64"
2 - 14 inch, M1 Pro 10c/16c/32GB -> referred bellow to as "Pro32"
First test "the idle battery drain test", aka reddit thread test
Methodology: please read the reddit post linked in earlier pages, I used the same.
I had already done the test once with Max64, and result was about 12/13% drained per hour.
This time, same test with Pro32 gave.... I guess similar results. I say "guess" cause I wish I did it with the same precision as Max64 but I forgot to note the percentage two times in a row, after what it weirdly seemed to have been drawn more than Max64, but it doesn't make sense.
In other words, I think it didn't have any impact, but I will retest that tomorrow just to be sure.
Second test "1080p youtube video playing in safari"
Methodology:
- disabled ability of screen to change brightness automatically
- nothing else besides safari is launched
- both computer are set to the exact same brightness level
- both play the same video
- 1080p video
- both computer charged to 100% before starting the test
- videos were set full screen
Limitations:
- At the very end I have had the doubt regarding if brightness was actually the same or not, because I figured out brightness change automatically when you plug-in the charger (it adds brightness), and when you unplug it (it lowers brightness). I know I had put the same amount of tick manually, but maybe that messed things up cause I dont remember if I controlled at beginning of the test. I guess it was same tho.
- I am unsure that both videos were to "1080p" maybe one of them was on "1080p (auto)" which means it theoretically could have changed during playback. I should have picked it manually for both.
- I forgot about ADs... Youtube launches ads that make video play unsynced, so conditions were not perfectly identical
- I messed up the time, I started at 36 min, and then for some reason I switched to 16min.
For those reasons I have made a third test where I controlled for all of these. But for now, here are the results.
Results:
Hour | Pro32 | Max64 | Difference
=======================
20h36 | 100% | 100% | 0%
21h36 | 96% | 94% | -2%
22h36 | 88% | 84% | -4%
23h18 | 81% | 77% | -4% (!warning: not one hour)
00h18 | 72% | 67% | -5% (!warning: one hour from last one, but only 1% diff increase)
Conclusion: I am not confident in this test and I decided to make another one with no flaws.
Third test "Two 1080p youtube videos playing simultaneously on different tabs, on Chrome"
Methodology:
- Browser is Chrome this time, not safari, because why not? Also I never use Safari as a developper so it better matches my use case
- Two videos playing at the same time on different tabs
- Audio disabled on video, computer audio disabled
- First video is playing full screen and other in the background
- Video playing fullscreen was a countdown timer so not very demanding in pixel color
- Both are set manually to 1080p
- Brightness have been double-checked to be exactly the same: 10 ticks.
- Start battery percentage was 66%, I wanted to try not starting from 100% and thats the first number I could manage to sync both machines on.
- I installed an ad blocker.
Limitations:
- I don't see any, tho I forgot to take note once at 18h00.
Results:
Hour | Pro32 | Max64 | Difference
=======================
12h00 | 66% | 66% | 0%
13h00 | 61% | 59% | -2%
14h00 | 55% | 53% | -2%
15h00 | 49% | 46% | -3%
16h00 | 43% | 39% | -4%
17h00 | 36% | 32% | -4%
18h00 |
19h00 | 24% | 19% | -5%
20h00 | 18% | 12% | -6%
21h00 | 13% | 6% | -7%
Conclusion:
I secretly hoped the Max64 to display the exact same battery performance, especially because the task was really easy for both computers.
Unfortunately, we can see that the Max64 has worse battery, even when not using its extra horse power.
We can note that battery drain speed seem to slightly increase the more we approach 0% left.
In the end, with that particular test, which is no near real use case where you could have many software opened at the same time, many tabs, virtual machines, etc, Pro32 seems to have at the very least 1 hour more battery.
In real world use, how much will that be? Not really sure, but its hard to do lighter use than this test, so I'd say at the VERY least, you loose 1h30 of battery life when you go for the Max64 compared to Pro32.
Maybe that difference can increase the more you push on it (with non-gpu tasks). EDIT: since I started at 66%, differences could have been broader if started from 100% and so it may be safe to assume around 2h difference.
What do you guys think?
Please tell me if you want me to test anything else on them while I'm at it. I'll do it tomorrow at most, after that I'll pick a winner and stop doing tests
Whilst interesting, you need to do multiple runs for both machines so that you can calculate the margin of error.
You may find margin of error is as much as a couple of percent due to background tasks, indexing, what the actual battery charge was, how fast etc.
I suspect that the Pro will get marginally better battery life but i doubt it will be far outside of the margin of error.
Battery life on my 14" M1 Pro is "fine". I use it in clamshell mode enough it probably doesn't matter in the long run, but my wife has the Air and I would recommend that for any moderate user (I use my Mac for work)