Battery life on M1X PRO vs M1X MAX?

[KirkDayne]

In this reddit post we have a test that finally matches what we need to see to compare those machines battery life:
https://www.reddit.com/r/macbookpro/comments/qufufo
Protocol for testing is:
- No app launched. Computer fully idle, no activity, no videos playing, nothing.
- Settings > Desktop & Screen Saver > Screen Saver tab > Uncheck "Show screen saver after"
- Settings > Battery > Battery on left panel > Set "Turn display off after" to "never" on the upmost right.
- Settings > Display > Disable "automatically adjust brightness"
- Set screen to maximum brightness
- Leave other Display settings as they are (True Tone / Apple XDR Display 1600 nits / ProMotion)
- Fully charged 100%

Then, note remaining battery percentage EXACTLY every one hour, until it's so low you know it cant stay one hour more.

Please ppl out there in the interest of the community do this test and post your results!

I'm tired of "i've just watched 3hours of video", "light use". Let's put all these machines in the same conditions and see how their internals impact battery life.

 

[Natzoo]

Through normal use, with 65% brightness. Multiple tabs open on Brave and Safari, Spotify on 3/4 volume. I lost 11.5% an hour on my 16" M1 Pro. Opening powerpoint kills it faster. A Pdf is also open in the background.

Coconut battery says my battery health is ay 96.8% if that means anything.

 

[Fomalhaut]

In this reddit post we have a test that finally matches what we need to see to compare those machines battery life:
https://www.reddit.com/r/macbookpro/comments/qufufo
Protocol for testing is:
- No app launched. Computer fully idle, no activity, no videos playing, nothing.
- Settings > Desktop & Screen Saver > Screen Saver tab > Uncheck "Show screen saver after"
- Settings > Battery > Battery on left panel > Set "Turn display off after" to "never" on the upmost right.
- Settings > Display > Disable "automatically adjust brightness"
- Set screen to maximum brightness
- Leave other Display settings as they are (True Tone / Apple XDR Display 1600 nits / ProMotion)
- Fully charged 100%

Then, note remaining battery percentage EXACTLY every one hour, until it's so low you know it cant stay one hour more.

Please ppl out there in the interest of the community do this test and post your results!

I'm tired of "i've just watched 3hours of video", "light use". Let's put all these machines in the same conditions and see how their internals impact battery life.

I would suggest also defining all the other power settings, e.g. on my MBP with Catalina I have these options:

Looking at the Reddit post, I was initially optimistic until I read what the test was doing - absolutely nothing with the screen on! .... 12-14% battery per hour doing nothing seems like a lot. How much of this is due the screen at maximum brightness, and how much is steady-state consumption of other parts of the system? I would say setting screen to 50% is a more realistic baseline - very few people will run their screens at 100%.

I appreciate that this is a baseline test, but it's still going to need some actual controlled usage tests - which are of course harder to define. There may be standard productivity benchmark tests out there somewhere, which I assume tools like PCMark use.

 

[KirkDayne]

Exactly, I think this really is a baseline test. Not that it's perfect, but it allows comparison of the different models in a standardized measured way. With only one result tho, we cannot know (how much of it is due to screen brightness as you suggested?), so I hope more ppl will help by performing the experiment and posting their results.

I think regarding battery options, all are left to default in this test (since it was just after unboxing), except the "turn display off after" as specified in the protocol, which is set to "never".

 

[Charlesje]

As a smaller test, it would already be great if people could run the power metrics readout with the computer idling (a few minutes after reboot, computer unused, nothing running, screen brightness at 50%). This would give you the memory, CPU and GPU Power draw (and the package power draw) when idling and would give you more indications on the battery draw differences at light to intermediate use of the different m1 models (and memory sizes!).

If you're interested, just paste this command in your Terminal window, and return a print screen or the values here :

sudo powermetrics -i 1000 -a --samplers cpu_power

 

[KirkDayne]

As a smaller test, it would already be great if people could run the power metrics readout with the computer idling (a few minutes after reboot, computer unused, nothing running, screen brightness at 50%). This would give you the memory, CPU and GPU Power draw (and the package power draw) when idling and would give you more indications on the battery draw differences at light to intermediate use of the different m1 models (and memory sizes!).

If you're interested, just paste this command in your Terminal window, and return a print screen or the values here :

sudo powermetrics -i 1000 -a --samplers cpu_power

Thats also a good idea indeed! I ran it on my mac mini just for testing, are these the values that we should use for comparison?
```
ANE Power: 0 mW
DRAM Power: 42 mW
CPU Power: 77 mW
GPU Power: 3 mW
Package Power: 80 mW

```

 

[schmidt65]

I have the 14" M1 Pro, 16Gb RAM & 1TB SSD. Used it on battery yesterday for just over 2 hours using Teams, Outlook, Excel, OneDrive syncing files regularly and battery dropped from 98% to 85%. Brightness was just over 50% so quite impressed with that

 

[Thysanoptera]

ANE Power: 0 mW
DRAM Power: 42 mW
CPU Power: 77 mW
GPU Power: 3 mW
Package Power: 80 mW

And these are totally legit numbers, lol. I don't know what those report, but that ain't what it says it is. The only reliable power sensor is the total power from iStatMenu, it matches battery drain.

Running battery test at 100% brightness hides the difference between Pro and Max because the screen will be the major power hog.

 

[throAU]

I ordered 14-in mbp and I'm a bit worry about battery life...

Don't be. It's got the best battery life of any MacBook I've ever owned. By a LONG way.

Those being

• 2011 15" Pro
• 2015 13" Pro
• 2020 13" Air
• 2021 14" Pro

 

[throAU]

In this reddit post we have a test that finally matches what we need to see to compare those machines battery life:

Uh... what? Leaving the machine idle running nothing? What sort of test is that?

I don't care what the battery life is on an idle machine, I care about the battery life I get in daily use.


My real world test:

I took my 14" M1 Pro to work on day 2 with 100% charge with the intent of seeing how long I could work on battery.

I worked my regular day job as a system admin (mail, web, many browser tabs, java web admin tools, OneDrive sync, wireless networking, external monitor, ssh sessions) - took it home at the end of the day with > 50% remaining.

Yeah there was some downtime where I was not at my desk. Sure, if I was doing more heavy workloads I would have had less time. But even if I got the thing down to 30% by lunch (i.e., more than 2x my battery consumption), you can get 50% back with a 1/2 hr charge. I'd be back up to 80+ percent if I left it on charge for 30 minutes during lunch... which would have carried me the rest of the working day.

YMMV, your workload may vary but previous intel based machines would have been almost dead by lunch time for me and no fast charge...

Fast charge is a game changer imho. If you can get > 4 hrs out of a charge (which you will, unless you're pushing the machine super hard constantly) and have some way of getting Ac power during a break... no problem. Previous MacBooks take an eternity to charge.

 

[Charlesje]

Thats also a good idea indeed! I ran it on my mac mini just for testing, are these the values that we should use for comparison?
```
ANE Power: 0 mW
DRAM Power: 42 mW
CPU Power: 77 mW
GPU Power: 3 mW
Package Power: 80 mW

```

Yes these are the right numbers. On a Max m1 with 32c gpu and 32gb ram I get

150 mW dram
20 mW cpu
1 mW gpu
about 500 mW package power

This idling test is meant to give you an idea of battery draw at light use (where cpu and gpu are not taxed). You can see the new m1 Max machines throttle back (and cut the power back) the cpu and gpu efficiently, but this is less the case for the memory that can’t be throttled back (nor memory bus), so the lower the load on the system, the higher the relative impact of the fast ddr5 ram (and large bandw of the bus) of the m1 Max. I would be most curious to see results from the m1 Pro with 32gb and the m1 Max with 64 gb to be able to compare them directly. This will at least give part of the answer of wat the subject of this thread was about.

 

[james948]

Anecdotal but if anyone's worried I have a maxed out 14" (8tb, 64gb, all the cores) and battery life is fine.
Again, and I think this is important; it doesn't take long to just fill up to 50% again.

I'm using App Tamer to keep an eye on things and because some of the apps that aren't optimised are insanely hungry. Ones you wouldn't think. I have an app called Backtrack that was using 150% cpu for no real reason. Descript is another one that just hoses everything. So, if you have poor battery perhaps look into istatmenus or app tamer and see what it's doing. I use app tamer to tell apps to only allow a certain amount of CPU. I have no idea how it works.

Has anyone tried turning off pro-motion? I was thinking of doing that since I don't think I appreciate the difference.

 

[fyun89]

I dont even understand why people suggest this.... if people wanted to lug around a 31000 mah external battery they'd just get teh 16"...

That is just me. There are very slim batteries that would still work for the Macbook Pro.

which battery model is that?

I have Ravpower AC battery https://www.ravpower.com/products/rp-pb055-upgraded-ac-power-bank-30000mah
But I bought it because my other Macbook Pro didn't have USB C and needed AC port.

For batteries, I strongly suggest getting reputable brand like Anker and Ravpower. Try to get something that has higher output than 45W. but I think anything above 15 W would still trickle charge.

 

[macintoshmac]

ouch.... for the 16" M1 max vs 16" M1 Pro that's a whopping 25% worse under light load and 48% less run time at load.

If that is the case, I'll immediately return the 16" Max macbook. :-/

Clearly you didn't need it in the first place, then. Also, it is about battery life. Are you going to be without power for those many hours? If you could even charge for 30 minutes or an hour (wherever you are on the go), you'd benefit from both the computing power and the battery life.

 

[macintoshmac]

Uh... what? Leaving the machine idle running nothing? What sort of test is that?

I don't care what the battery life is on an idle machine, I care about the battery life I get in daily use.


My real world test:

I took my 14" M1 Pro to work on day 2 with 100% charge with the intent of seeing how long I could work on battery.

I worked my regular day job as a system admin (mail, web, many browser tabs, java web admin tools, OneDrive sync, wireless networking, external monitor, ssh sessions) - took it home at the end of the day with > 50% remaining.

Yeah there was some downtime where I was not at my desk. Sure, if I was doing more heavy workloads I would have had less time. But even if I got the thing down to 30% by lunch (i.e., more than 2x my battery consumption), you can get 50% back with a 1/2 hr charge. I'd be back up to 80+ percent if I left it on charge for 30 minutes during lunch... which would have carried me the rest of the working day.

YMMV, your workload may vary but previous intel based machines would have been almost dead by lunch time for me and no fast charge...

Fast charge is a game changer imho. If you can get > 4 hrs out of a charge (which you will, unless you're pushing the machine super hard constantly) and have some way of getting Ac power during a break... no problem. Previous MacBooks take an eternity to charge.

That's the thing - people somehow think they are going in a power-less apocalyptic world to work and need the maximum battery life they can get. All they really need to do is charge the thing for 30 minutes to an hour at work or even while working. No big deal, considering the insane amount of power these computers now boast of.

 

[ChpStcks]

In this reddit post we have a test that finally matches what we need to see to compare those machines battery life:
https://www.reddit.com/r/macbookpro/comments/qufufo
Protocol for testing is:
- No app launched. Computer fully idle, no activity, no videos playing, nothing.
- Settings > Desktop & Screen Saver > Screen Saver tab > Uncheck "Show screen saver after"
- Settings > Battery > Battery on left panel > Set "Turn display off after" to "never" on the upmost right.
- Settings > Display > Disable "automatically adjust brightness"
- Set screen to maximum brightness
- Leave other Display settings as they are (True Tone / Apple XDR Display 1600 nits / ProMotion)
- Fully charged 100%

Then, note remaining battery percentage EXACTLY every one hour, until it's so low you know it cant stay one hour more.

Please ppl out there in the interest of the community do this test and post your results!

I'm tired of "i've just watched 3hours of video", "light use". Let's put all these machines in the same conditions and see how their internals impact battery life.

The thing about this test, which makes it have a lot less variables than others, still is flawed, since for idle tests with MAX Brightness, the actual wallpaper being used can provide different numbers... I saw another user who recorded better than average battery life but they're ALWAYS in night/dark mode which makes sense. Would be curious what wallpaper and time OP and others are testing at as day/night modes affect the max brightness

 

[ChpStcks]

so Linus is getting 22-24hrs at idle for the 14"?!? (brightness is at 2/3, but still... haven't see any reports anywhere that come close to those times...)

 

[Sanpete]

so Linus is getting 22-24hrs at idle for the 14"?!? (brightness is at 2/3, but still... haven't see any reports anywhere that come close to those times...)

At idle? I haven't seen any other reports of testing it on idle. All the tests I've seen are at least doing something.

 

[ChpStcks]

At idle? I haven't seen any other reports of testing it on idle. All the tests I've seen are at least doing something.

the test above from Reddit is at idle and it's showing 8-9 hours (granted Max brightness) but still. there was another thread here that tested the max 14" and it showed about 9 hours also doing nothing but having the the screen not shutting off

 

[tekmoe]

Can't believe we have a 9 page thread about battery life. These new Macs have some of the best battery life ever seen in any notebook with similar specs. I myself am thrilled but others apparently not so much.

I'd love to know what some of these folks do with their Mac who are returning their Max for a Pro..

 

[jvlfilms]

I have to say, battery life for me has been okay so far. And I say okay because it's just good. That's it. Good. Not great. Not bad. Good. Which definitely isn't the worst thing to hear considering the amount of power this thing has.

In a nutshell, if you only edit off battery power, then be slightly concerned getting the M1 Max 14". I have the 24c version and I'm not amazingly blown away by the battery life. But ultimately, it won't affect me as much as others because I tend to mostly work plugged into an outlet. And quick charge really is a game changer - being able to "top off" enough to get you through the rest of the day is huge.

I did get one "SOCD" reboot last night so hoping that was a one time thing..... seems to be a M1 issue overall.

 

[randfee2]

Clearly you didn't need it in the first place, then. Also, it is about battery life. Are you going to be without power for those many hours? If you could even charge for 30 minutes or an hour (wherever you are on the go), you'd benefit from both the computing power and the battery life.

me didn't need what? If you mean my usage scenarios, I really don't understand how people are always so narrow in their usage scenarios. Seems like you either are encoding videos all day every day or just sitting around watching youtube videos, lol.

I'll be running my own machine learning and image analysis code, data analytics etc. Video editing up to 8k, fiddling with 45MP RAW photos, making large panoramas and median stacking + optimal image correction of huge amounts of astro images. Then sometimes I'll be on low-power mode on the train reading PDFs, commenting on word or Ms Teams chatting, video-conferencing or emailing. Some other times I'll just hang there on the sofa, in bed on a business trip and watch movies at low brightness in the dark.

so what's your point? The cases where I edit video are likely the cases where I either have an outlet nearby or won't spend too much time doing so. The cases where I want to stretch battery life for as long as possible might be a weekend trip where I'm not actively seeking an outlet only watching some videos, reading, web browsing emailing, 5-10mins of photo editing.
Since I don't want two or more laptops, battery life is an important factor to me (always been a 15" Powerbook, Macbook Pro user). If the Max would consume significantly more on almost idle or light reading or video viewing, than that would have been something to consider and since Apple didn't mention it but some reviewers did, I was curious.
This kind of proofs to me, that the Max SoC is not notoriously consuming more at low power tasks...

case almost closed for me - video is just super optimized, so a light workload of word, powerpoint or browsing is going to be the final statement I need. My 16" M1 Max is inbound in a week!

so Linus is getting 22-24hrs at idle for the 14"?!? (brightness is at 2/3, but still... haven't see any reports anywhere that come close to those times...)

posted the same thing 10 posts up. As I stated there, I'm really stunned. My theory remains. Super optimized video decoder is almost like leaving the machine on doing nothing, there's also almost no movement in the video, so it's efficient. More importantly, large areas of the video seem black. With the thousands of dimming zones, this is almost OLED like then when it comes to power consumption, so might as well have the screen almost off. This result must have been to those two factors: basically idling machine with basically the screen turned off!
Can't wait for the 16" and Pro/Max in comparison.

______

while the 16" should perform best on battery alone when looking at battery vs. screen area, the 14.2" and 16.2" obviously have screens with dimming zones so they have another big advantage (maybe particularly in dark mode, when a lot of areas has no bright elements and is very dark).
(in the upper chart there is also the MBP 15.4" from mid 2014).

 

[throAU]

Has anyone tried turning off pro-motion? I was thinking of doing that since I don't think I appreciate the difference.

I think Promotion is apple's "Variable refresh". Yeah it goes faster, but I suspect if you do that you'll also kill the machine's ability to drop below 60hz. So for times when there isn't much happening on screen you may actually use MORE power running 60hz than 24 or whatever it can drop to.

so Linus is getting 22-24hrs at idle for the 14"?!? (brightness is at 2/3, but still... haven't see any reports anywhere that come close to those times...)

LTT's test was looping video playback.

Yeah, they got over 1 day of that with the entry level 14, and something like 22 hours for the maxed 14, but there was a second user session logged into it they forgot about (idle, but still, possibly doing cloud sync, etc. in the background for the second user).

And yeah, video is a best case workload for these machines - they have dedicated video decode blocks that are massively powerful. Playing back a single stream of video is basically idle for them (vs. say transcoding 8k pro-res streams).

 

[kgreen6901]

Doing the suggested discharge test with nothing running gave me some peace of mind actually.

Model Name: MacBook Pro
Model Identifier: MacBookPro18,4
Chip: Apple M1 Max
Total Number of Cores: 10 (8 performance and 2 efficiency)
Memory: 64 GB
Storage: 2TB

100% - 7:45am
98% - 8:45am = -2%
89% - 9:45am = -9%
79% - 10:45am = -10%
73% - 11:45am = -6%
66% - 12:45pm = -7%
57% - 1:45pm = -9%
48% - 2:45pm = -9%
40% - 3:45pm = -8%

And that's when I ran out of time. I'm going to do another test to see how much lower brightness helps.

 

[KirkDayne]

That's the thing - people somehow think they are going in a power-less apocalyptic world to work and need the maximum battery life they can get. All they really need to do is charge the thing for 30 minutes to an hour at work or even while working. No big deal, considering the insane amount of power these computers now boast of.

I agree with that, however we also know that lithium-ion batteries tend to deteriorate with time and give you less and less battery life. That's why having a good one from day-one is really important IMO.
With my old macbook I can't even go to the coffee shop for 2 hours. That's what I want to avoid 3-4 years from now.