On a laptop PC you'd be down to 50%.
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Catastrophic battery life on the new 16-inch MacBook Pro
- Thread starter alexe
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On a laptop PC you'd be down to 50%.
I used the migration assistant to transfer all my data over from my M1 MacBook Air (which, as far as I can tell, is equivalent to restoring from a Time Machine backup). Does that matter?
Apple advertises up to 21 hours of Apple TV app streaming and I get 4 hours of non-HDR Netflix streaming. Granted, it's not the same app and I use full brightness (brightness 16) and Apple specify they used brightness 8 in their test, but still, 4 hours on battery seems very little.
It's similar for basic web browsing while just having a few chat apps running in the background, again at full brightness. I'm also getting around 4 hours in this scenario. That's almost the same battery life I got on my first MacBook Pro from 2008. So yeah, I would consider this quite terrible battery life considering it's now 13 years later.
And compare that to my M1 MacBook Air, on which I easily get double the battery life in any given scenario I compared. I know one can't do a direct comparison there, but from the streaming and wireless web browsing statistics Apple provides for both machines, they should fare very similarly, which is clearly not the case for me.
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Sure, but brightness 6 is very low. I don't know how you can watch a movie like that, but I'll do a test with brightness 6 to see if I get a similar result.
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If I'm watching a move I always have brightness max when I'm not using a laptop with an external display.
Might be helpful to check in Activity Monitor if Spotlight [mds/mds_stores] is indexing files. Cloud storage syncing (OneDrive/Dropbox/iCloud Drive/Photos) may also hit battery life quite a bit during initial setup. In my case, the CPU was running between 25-50% for the first three days, and 15-30% in the next two days before stabilising at <5% at idle. I also find that some apps e.g. Zoom drain the battery quickly.
Could be the maximum brightness. At that setting, my 14" M1 MAX has less than a half of battery life of my M1 MBP.
On my 16" Max I can watch YouTube etc and do light work for more hours on battery than I care to do such things - so many many hours. It only drops to about 2-4 hours when maxing out the processor video editing.
It gets that performance and the gpu performance with no drop off on battery that is game changing. An i9 with a RTX card on battery power is fairly lacklustre to say the least.
I am witnessing something similar on my 14" MacBook Pro with M1 Max. The laptop gets very warm and I lose about 10% of battery when watching a 30 min show on Netflix. Overall battery life is also not great even when I'm just working using the browser. Strangely enough I have the impression that it got worse just recently.
Those 21 hours are also based on things like no wi-fi turned-on and all video being played via Apple services. I think the New York Times/Joanna Stern tried to replicate the tests and it took a fair bit of trial and error to get to the 21 hours. That's why you have to take the figures with a pinch of salt as they're quite artificial in some regards.
With max brightness and "a few chat apps" running, your battery is going to be hammered depending on what content you're watching. How efficient are those chat apps for example?
Battery life on my 14" M1 Pro Macbook is very good. Watching HDR movies doesn't kill the battery. I would say that 5%-8% battery per hour watching HDR videos..
Your Mac is probably still indexing and that takes a lot of battery imo.
Getting bad battery life on my 14" Macbook Pro M1 Pro (10 core CPU/16 core GPU) with 32 GB. I am doing super simple stuff, mainly opening 20-40 tabs in Google Chrome, downloading images from my own website, and loading data into a Filemaker Pro 16 database. I've been working on battery for 3 hours pretty intensely, and instead of having being down to 75-80% from my formerly full charge, which is what I would expect, instead I'm showing 37% remaining, which implies about 6 hours of this kind of pretty intense work. This is NOT what I want out of a super laptop: the speed is buttery smooth and very much appreciated, but if I am to have stress about whether my battery will work, or carry an external battery to get a full day of work done in a coffee shop in Tokyo (for example) then the M1 will have basically failed me. Perceptually my M1 Macbook Pro gave me maybe 25% more battery life, up to perhaps 8 hours.
The machine currently reports that Google Chrome and System Information are currently using a lot of energy. Usually this second slot shows that Safari is using lots of energy even though I don't use it except to run certain scripts as needed, and sometimes it reports the Finder is using lots of energy even though it's not doing anything.
I know that Google Chrome is a resource hog compared with Safari, but it's very important that I be able to keep using it as I have Applescripts written that require it. I guess I'll reinstall the Great Suspender and see if the situation improves, but I haven't had to run this since my Intel Mac days.
Versions: Google Chrome Version 95.0.4638.69 (Official Build) (arm64), fully updated Mac OS.
I will report this to Apple. Please give any thoughts you have.
The machine currently reports that Google Chrome and System Information are currently using a lot of energy. Usually this second slot shows that Safari is using lots of energy even though I don't use it except to run certain scripts as needed, and sometimes it reports the Finder is using lots of energy even though it's not doing anything.
I know that Google Chrome is a resource hog compared with Safari, but it's very important that I be able to keep using it as I have Applescripts written that require it. I guess I'll reinstall the Great Suspender and see if the situation improves, but I haven't had to run this since my Intel Mac days.
Versions: Google Chrome Version 95.0.4638.69 (Official Build) (arm64), fully updated Mac OS.
I will report this to Apple. Please give any thoughts you have.
What screen brightness?
Were you doing the same on another machine and getting better battery life?
oh same thing happened to me.... here's my story,
Just unboxed my m1 pro 3 days ago (It was a Friday.) I did a little "Fine tuning" here and there, and even forgot which settings I've changed. There's nothing wrong with the battery level then. I was impressed with it. I didn't touch it at all for the weekend. Then suddenly today, all I did was watching Youtube videos, the battery suddenly drop from 100% to 69% in just 1.5 hours. I suspected something might be wrong. Then I turned on the Activity Monitor to find some clues of what might be going on, first I saw only the action of opening Chrome with Youtube on has eaten up 13gbs of ram, That ain't possible!!! Then I saw an item called "Windowserver" and it had eaten up 22gbs of my RAM!!!! I googled it a little and followed what they told me to do (Disable transparency effects : System Preference - accessibility - display - check on reduce transparency, and also Disable automatic rearrangement in Mission Control : System Preference - uncheck "Automatically rearrange spaces based on most recent use". Then I rebooted the macbook to see if it works for me. It did!!! I ran 2 youtube videos in the background and opened a few other tabs too. The battery only dropped around 2% for an hour. I have no idea exactly what I did that fix the problem. Is it the change of settings, or just simply rebooting the macbook?. It might also be different cases for different people. I'm glad my problem has solved.
P.S. My Brightness level is 8 clicks from the lowest all along.
Just unboxed my m1 pro 3 days ago (It was a Friday.) I did a little "Fine tuning" here and there, and even forgot which settings I've changed. There's nothing wrong with the battery level then. I was impressed with it. I didn't touch it at all for the weekend. Then suddenly today, all I did was watching Youtube videos, the battery suddenly drop from 100% to 69% in just 1.5 hours. I suspected something might be wrong. Then I turned on the Activity Monitor to find some clues of what might be going on, first I saw only the action of opening Chrome with Youtube on has eaten up 13gbs of ram, That ain't possible!!! Then I saw an item called "Windowserver" and it had eaten up 22gbs of my RAM!!!! I googled it a little and followed what they told me to do (Disable transparency effects : System Preference - accessibility - display - check on reduce transparency, and also Disable automatic rearrangement in Mission Control : System Preference - uncheck "Automatically rearrange spaces based on most recent use". Then I rebooted the macbook to see if it works for me. It did!!! I ran 2 youtube videos in the background and opened a few other tabs too. The battery only dropped around 2% for an hour. I have no idea exactly what I did that fix the problem. Is it the change of settings, or just simply rebooting the macbook?. It might also be different cases for different people. I'm glad my problem has solved.
P.S. My Brightness level is 8 clicks from the lowest all along.
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Wow are you really getting better battery on the Air? If you had to guess how much longer the m1 Air is lasting compared to your 16", what would you guess?
I'm on the m1 Air now and was waffling as to whether to not I should sell it and get the 14" MBP. Sounds like - maybe not.
Quick update after some longer-term usage: I've now had this 16-inch M1 Max for almost two months and can report that the battery life issue I was describing in my original post only lasted for the first few days (maybe the first week or so) of use.
I can't tell whether the battery drain was caused by some processes that only consume a lot of energy initially but not later on (some have suggested file indexing, for example) or whether it was any software updates that solved the issue, but I'm now getting battery life that is more in line with what Apple advertises. For the past few weeks I've been getting all-day battery life for web browsing at full brightness. I'm back in a place where I don't really have to think about charging during the day, which is really great for such a beast of a machine.
So consider my initial complaint obsolete. Maybe this can be helpful for others in the future: If you set up a new MacBook Pro and are surprised that you're not doing much with it and still lose 25% battery in an hour, then this situation might just be temporary. Wait a week or so and see how the situation evolves, update your software, reboot, etc.
Slightly off-topic, but worth mentioning: I still get longer battery life out of the M1 MacBook Air for comparable use cases, and I'm now even more in awe about the almost magical battery life of that little machine.
I can't tell whether the battery drain was caused by some processes that only consume a lot of energy initially but not later on (some have suggested file indexing, for example) or whether it was any software updates that solved the issue, but I'm now getting battery life that is more in line with what Apple advertises. For the past few weeks I've been getting all-day battery life for web browsing at full brightness. I'm back in a place where I don't really have to think about charging during the day, which is really great for such a beast of a machine.
So consider my initial complaint obsolete. Maybe this can be helpful for others in the future: If you set up a new MacBook Pro and are surprised that you're not doing much with it and still lose 25% battery in an hour, then this situation might just be temporary. Wait a week or so and see how the situation evolves, update your software, reboot, etc.
Slightly off-topic, but worth mentioning: I still get longer battery life out of the M1 MacBook Air for comparable use cases, and I'm now even more in awe about the almost magical battery life of that little machine.
Check your energy usage vs screen usage. Any ideas on what could be causing this? I leave my laptop closed with a near full charge for a few days and come back to it drained.
There's a bug in the OS that can cause battery drain during sleep. It's supposed to be fixed in the coming OS update.
I read the thread and it sounds like your issue is sorted, but just so everyone knows - this is *not* expected behavior, and clearly OP's battery had to adjust for some reason. I've been using my M1 Max for a few weeks now and since day 1, I've been able to work with a LOT of tabs open and various apps and in an hour, I usually only go from 100% to 94%.
This is coming from the 2019 i9 MBP, which was down to 50% within probably an hour usually.
This is coming from the 2019 i9 MBP, which was down to 50% within probably an hour usually.
