M1 Battery Life [serious]

[crevalic]

Can we have a serious thread about the M1 battery life now that the dust has settled a bit?

I know many people went a bit overboard when the M1 line was released and were reporting effectively infinite battery life, but recently I've been seeing an increasing number of critical posts and people getting battery life that's way below expectations.

What I've been currently able to gather is that the battery life still seems to be better than on the most recent Intel Macs, but it's closer to 30% better than 3x, which was the impression I got after the release. Is the increase in negativity an actual reduction in battery life over time, or is it a consequence of unreasonable expectations not being met?

I'd really ask that only people who've had their M1 MBA/MBA for at least a few months and use it as their primary computer contribute to this poll and thread. Non-quantitative experiences like "I''ve uSeD mY M1 MBA fOr LiKe 3 dAyS anD BatTeRy OnLy weNt dOwN fOr LiKe 10%" are not helpful here.

 

[MBAir2010]

apple Robert is a great person who can offer true advice on his MacBook M1 experience.

 

[crevalic]

See these examples from some posts from the last day: (not singling out anybody out, just trying to gather objective data)

Feels like I'm using a intel Mac again, not doing anything battery demanding on my Mac, mainly browsing safari, anyone else have crap battery life on 11.2.3? ? was getting 8-10h previously.

fwiw, I never get more than 7 hours work on a charge with my M1 MBA. (Unless I didn't use it at all and let it sleep!)

I never get more than 3 hours on any other laptop I've owned, so 7 is a big gain.

Yeah, Apple obviously lied about the M1 MacBook Pro 20 hour battery life. It only lasts like 7 hours. But my Late-2013 MacBook Pro lasts about an hour before dying.

 

[LFC2020]

Had my M1 macbook pro since launch day, battery life started off great 9-10h, now it’s gone to crap, 6-7h usage.

Only using safari, brightness on 4-5 bars, apples battery life claims are a load crap.

 

[Quackers]

Had my M1 MBA since 2nd February and have done a couple of battery runtime tests.
The first was a mixture of sleep and light use (surfing, email and watching YT videos) and I got 12 hours of actual use out of it.
I tried a second test a few days ago and with the same use as above (though with much more YT video viewing) and no sleeps in between (so constant use) I got 11 hours of use and it wasn't completely depleted.
Both tests run at a screen brightness of 12 clicks - so 3/4 brightness.

I used to get approximately 7 hours out of my 2012 rMBP throughout its 8 year use (even now I still will).
So that's a very appreciable difference.
I don't feel hoodwinked or ripped off at all 😀

Apple's quoted figures for battery life are done under very strict use circumstances and are always optimistic (or so I've found) but so is every other manufacturer's claims, so nothing different there.

 

[petvas]

I just got my 13" MBP today but I am blown away with the battery life so far. I have been using my laptop for two hours, surfing the Internet and listening to podcasts and my battery is at 91%. If it continues like that we are talking about 20+ hours of battery life, for common tasks. I am using Safari for browsing, haven't installed Chrome and I currently have 20 tabs open and 16 apps are running. Just amazing..

 

[LFC2020]

far. I have been using my laptop for two hours, surfing the Internet and listening to podcasts and my battery is at 91%

Unfortunately It won’t last, I was getting 2h usage for my first 10% of battery life when I first got my m1 pro, now it’s 1h for 10% usage or even less sometimes, this is only with safari open and 4-5 bars brightness.

Went from 10h plus usage to 7-8h.

 

[petvas]

Unfortunately It won’t last, I was getting 2h usage for my first 10% of battery life when I first got my m1 pro, now it’s 1h for 10% usage or even less sometimes, this is only with safari open and 4-5 bars brightness.

Went from 10h plus usage to 7-8h.

We will see about it. There hasn't been a single review out there that said anything negative about battery life. Such a degradation of battery life as you describe it must have a reason. Maybe some application is causing this.

 

[LFC2020]

Maybe some application is causing this.

hardly got any applications installed. ?‍♂️

 

[telo123]

Had my M1 macbook pro since launch day, battery life started off great 9-10h, now it’s gone to crap, 6-7h usage.

Only using safari, brightness on 4-5 bars, apples battery life claims are a load crap.

You're not exactly telling us the details to completely say apple battery life claims are crap. Those claims are under optimal conditions as a marketing gimmick, just as Microsoft does with their surfaces.

But battery drainage like you're saying (or even exaggerating) is abnormal. Are you absolutely sure there's nothing running in the background that you're not unaware of? Nothing abnormal on Activity Monitor? No Safari extension that hasn't been updated and causing some rogue CPU usage? Are you possibly using Google Drive and One Drive (seem to be battery hogging)?

Have you updated to the latest macOS?

Most people I've seen (both personally and YouTube in general) are getting amazing battery life from their M1 Macs.

 

[Apple_Robert]

I have had no battery problems with my M1.

 

[mi7chy]

Watch your Activity Monitor for CPU utilization. Battery life is ok for apps that have low or bursty CPU utilization. For higher sustained CPU utilization, battery drains quite a bit faster which I notice with testing video software decoding at ~40%+.

 

[Mistborn15]

Mine rarely goes below 50% thanks to me working from home and the USB C monitor but unplugged and using the laptop screen, it loses about 9-13% per hour.

Mixed usage: Safari, Chrome, emails, Photoshop, Premiere and Spotify

 

[Wizec]

I’m also getting only 6-7 hr of Safari use. I have one or two tabs open, no streaming video. I have not allowed Rosetta to install.

It runs very cool and fast, so I’m very puzzled that it’s actually about the same as my hot and noisy 2018 Pro.

 

[Gnattu]

My MacBook Pro has ~10hours with a linux VM, Nova(VS Code like text editor), Firefox and Safari with about 10 tabs open, which is my typical workload. Safari's battery usage is heavily user-dependent, because different plugins and different websites has significant different CPU usage.

A side note: streaming video on Youtube is not CPU-intensive, thank to the the hardware media decoder, M1 only uses hundreds milliwatts (in other words less than 1 watt) for Youtube Video playback(given there is no other tasks running). The screen may be using more power in this case.

Another side note: to get more accurate power usage measure on battery you want to measure that when your Mac is on battery. macOS performs lots of background tasks only when the Mac is plugged in and that could be quite noisy for power measurement, for example: Spotlight Indexing and Time machine backup. Spotlight scored 142.50 for 12hr energy impact (for comparison, Time machine scored 5.53 and Safari only scored 1.44)on my machine plugged in for ~15 hours. On the old Intel days if you are using a low-end MacBook with only 2 cores, such background tasks will make the whole system feels laggy. My personal experience: when my old MacBook Air became less responsive I knew that was Time machine started, I even disabled the Time machine auto backup to workaround this because it is not bearable for some critical workload. M1 Macs should not have this problem because M1 is fast enough and you are unlikely to notice it. For developers having complex source tree consisting thousands of files and directories, I recommend to exclude the folders you place your source codes for Spotlight, otherwise it will aggressively indexing your source tree and takes lots of time, and it is inefficient because we already have git and IDE/Editors to manage code way better than spotlight.

 

[Kung gu]

battery life most people I seen on YouTube and twitter say battery life is great. I think the 16" Apple Sillicon MacBook will be the best battery life.

 

[leman]

My M1 Pro runs at least 15 hours before charges, which is absolutely I sane when you consider that I mostly use it for testing software (so when it’s open, it’s compiling and running intensive code). Also, battery drain during sleep is pretty much non-existent, it stops almost zero charge when left in the drawer for a while.

 

[xxBlack]

getting around 16-18h with safari, iMessage, mail, podcast, my finance manager, reeder, WhatsApp, things 3 and microsoft Remote Desktop + vpn

 

[petvas]

battery life most people I seen on YouTube and twitter say battery life is great. I think the 16" Apple Sillicon MacBook will be the best battery life.

I don’t think it will be any different. The 16” display needs more power than the 13” one.

 

[OSX15]

There is a better and bigger battery in the M1 MacBook pro compared to the M1 Air, so I admire your quest to get accurate information, but this isn’t going to work

 

[jonnysods]

I’m getting about 10-12 hours out of my MBA. After coming from a 15” Intel MBP I’m pretty stoked with that much off a charge.

 

[JLH81]

No problems with the battery performance on my M1 MBA.

 

[Leon1das]

Same here - no issues at all.

However - must stay that if you ARE concerned with battery degradation then constant measurements from full to depleted will not make things better in time, as battery WILL loose capacity...

My M1 MBP is constantly plugged in with AlDente installed which prevents battery charging over 60% - and makes MBP being directly powered from the charger...

 

[spiderman0616]

My M1 MBA battery life is as advertised. I've been using it with two Spaces running at all times--work apps in one space, personal apps in the other. The only time I ever really shut it fully down is when there's a macOS update. It still seems to sip battery, even when I have video, conference calls, or games running. I'm still nothing but impressed with it so far.

Conversely, my 15" Intel MBP from work chews through battery in standby even when I have nothing open at all, and sometimes can't even make it to my lunch break if I have a lot of conference calls in the morning. It's barely usable as an actual laptop because it can't make it a full day of running the apps I need without needing a top off and gets way too hot to the touch in the warmer months.

 

[maternidad]

I used my MacBook Pro almost all day yesterday. It is at 16% now.

Here are some additional details about my usage:

• My display is at low brightness (2 clicks from the minimum). If I recall correctly, it was slightly brighter yesterday.
• I used a Discord app I built with nativefier. Nativefier is software that can produce applications from websites. I did this because I had the impression that the Intel app made by Discord was very energy inefficient; nativefier produces Apple Silicon binaries in M1 Macs.
• I did text editing. I like to write programs with Nova. It's an Apple Silicon app.
• I made several Final Cut Pro exports. Recreationally, I sometimes attempt to make funny videos.
• I did web browsing with Safari.

Perhaps this is related to usage of Rosetta. How frequently do others in this forum use it?