Disappointing Macbook Air M1 Battery (Is this normal?)

[Exploder]

Long story short, my M1 Macbook Air lasts around 6 hours running full brightness and Safari with on and off Youtube and on and off Spotify at full volume, is this considered normal? There seems to be a lot of deluded circle jerk hyperbole going on in the internet regarding the M1 line's battery life, hyping it up to high heaven but there's also a lot of people documenting their cognitive dissonance regarding the underwhelming battery life they are seeing, relative at least to the purported hype. I saw this video where this guy says that according to his testing the M1 Air's battery will die in 8 hours if you leave the computer idle at full brightness and if that's true then perhaps the hours I get seem understandable.

Alas, I'm probably going to try and get a refund while I still can as I consider the battery life lame and I will not budge and I will not further sacrifice what I consider to be perfectly normal usage just to try to get closer to the self indulgent hype that Apple advertises, the deluded Apple apologists can eat that cake.

 

[Quackers]

Did you try to find out why the battery life is so poor?

 

[lemonkid]

Virus scanner in the background could be the cause. I've seen someone else report on this. After deleting the scanner, everything turned to normal.

 

[Honza1]

Did you try to search here for prior posts, which went through this discussion? You would find prior experience with same issue and solutions to the issue. It can be usually solved - but, of course, it could also be hardware issue.

FYI: All notebook manufacturers quote battery life at around 50% brightness. My MBP power drain varies between 6W with minimum brightness to 14W at maximum brightness. 8W is huge difference for M1 MBA which will drop battery life like stone.

TL;DR: You cannot break laws of physics. If you force computer to do too much (including in the background) and light display too much, no hardware can solve it. Remove background useless stuff and reduce brightens to get advertised lifetime.

 

[0906742]

Long story short, my M1 Macbook Air lasts around 6 hours running full brightness and Safari with on and off Youtube and on and off Spotify at full volume, is this considered normal? There seems to be a lot of deluded circle jerk hyperbole going on in the internet regarding the M1 line's battery life, hyping it up to high heaven but there's also a lot of people documenting their cognitive dissonance regarding the underwhelming battery life they are seeing, relative at least to the purported hype.

I agree the battery run time in MBA M1 is not quite as good as hyped in my opinion too. It is good but honestly nothing much different what I've seen in Zenbooks.
Also when you simply check the specifications published by Apple for MBA M1 and previous MBP Intel models they run screen only at 50% for M1 while Intels were tested around 75%. I had MBP 13" 2019 previously and I could see that it did not draw more power than M1 in simple tasks with low screen brightness. I often saw my MBP idling around 2.5W, which is something my MBA M1 struggles to reach even with low screen brightness.
I'd say my MBA M1 has roughly around 25-35% better battery life than my MBP was. MBA has only 50W battery and MBP had 58.2W so that must be considered too. It depends a lot what you do with it. Simple Safari playing Youtube video and sound from Airpods will easily use 8-12% battery per hour, my MBP 2019 took usually around maybe 10-14%. It has hard to say for sure as there are variable even what video you play and so on.

Anyway, my point is that your battery run time in probably normal.
Also consider that I think many just looks run times reported by battery menu and not really clocking how much they actively used the machine. I could see mine reporting something like 5-6 hours SOT with about 10%, not sure where it got that but it did not match real use.

I saw this video where this guy says that according to his testing the M1 Air's battery will die in 8 hours if you leave the computer idle at full brightness and if that's true then perhaps the hours I get seem understandable.

I'd say that 8 hours idle 100% brightness sounds about right when looking at CoconutBattery power draw in that situation showing just below 6W, so the math matches for 50W battery.