So today, as you can see, my battery went from way high to quickly low in 3 hours of web surfing with some Teams activity. It appears Honey (the safari extension) might be the culprit -- it was chewing a ton of CPU time and keeping Safari jacked up. I've disabled it and I'll see if it was actually the reason, but I do expect my M1 to get more than 4 hours of light use. Geez.
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M1 Max 14" battery fiasco
- Thread starter rickeames
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One thing I hope for in the next version of MacOS itself (MacOS 13 Coachella/Mammoth/whatever) is with identifying applications/extensions/processors that are consuming CPU time historically.
Battery fiasco? You‘re upset with the Mac due to a 3rd party extension causing high CPU usage? Whiskey Tango Foxtrot… I don’t get it. Bee upset with Honey. Quick Google search shows it’s known for high CPU usage and battery drain. The Mac is fine.
Filed under FUD.
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Web surfing is subjective. Some websites/plugins can draw tons of power which will obviously result in the battery running out of juice sooner. I'm not up to date on the state of Teams, but it used to be a resource hog, so that might explain it as well.
I agree with >4h of light use... but... the M1 Pro in a 14" provides around 8-9 hours of light use (again subjective), the Max will eat up more power so that 8-9 hours drops a bit and even more depending on what you do with it. Plenty of reviews that show this out in the wild on YouTube. The 14" with its 67Wh battery vs the 16" with 100Wh is just not a really good match for the Max (even less so with with 32GPU core) and plays much nicer with the Pro. That + the usual issues with websites can result in quickly draining the battery.
The issue of both CPU and RAM climbing up in use is not just with the laptops. Yes, there are websites that eat up RAM and some that kick off processes that consume CPU but alas, the only commonality is that they are an issue (in this case) of systems running MacOS. If there were to be a fix, it would certainly remain with the OS or, at least Safari should have built-in features to help resolve such issues. I have seen this site gobble up a couple of gigs of RAM on its own. Again, where is the best place to gain control so the end-user can either sidestep or moderate the amount of GPU and RAM being used?
You can do that with Activity Monitor and the CPU time column.
That really doesn't show historical, only current and cumulative and since last reboot. Even with iOS and iPadOS you can go to battery and select any hour (past 24) or any day (past 10) and it will display which applications where using which amount of energy.
Oh god, please don't tell me they will name it after that god-awful music festival! Good Grief!
Two things:
- You have an M1 Max, which is CPU not exactly known for battery conservation.
- An app ran your battery down.
Lol no kidding... More for the Valley than the music festival itself... and I just added that as sorta a joke.
8-9 hours of light use is unacceptable for a Pro machine that is supposed to be portable. Anything less than the 16" M1 Pro battery life is unacceptable.
Pro has a powerhouse chip, not meant to run light use. Why even a MacBook Pro in the first place. Get the MacBook Air M1/M2 for long lasting battery for light use.
I just don't get people mentality.
It's a laptop. It should have great battery life. The 14" does not, compared to the 13" M1 MBP and 16" M1 Pro MBP.
there's nothing wrong with pointing out deficiencies. I'm happier with the 16" M1 Pro but will gladly trade it in for the more portable 14" if Apple improves its battery life.
First of all. What one person calls light use might be heavy use for another. Second Apple tells you that it will run "Up to 11 hours wireless web" so 8-9 hours does not sound too bad.
So either you did not read the specs before buying or you did ignore them and were hoping for more. In either case you judging it 'unacceptable' is unacceptable! So stop whining!
One suggestion is that you can set it automatically to low power mode on battery and regular mode while plugged in automatically. I have 3 shortcut scripts set for performance mode (regular/regular), normal mode (regular/low power mode), and low power mode (low power/low power) while plugged in vs on battery. It also remembers the setting so if you want to leave it default to regular/low power mode, you don't have to ever touch it again unless you want to change it.
With this I get 10hr+ generally on battery, and have not ever noticed any performance deficiencies while on battery doing what I need to do.
The shortcut shell scripts as below:
Performance mode
sudo pmset -a lowpowermode 0
Normal mode
sudo pmset -b lowpowermode 1
sudo pmset -c lowpowermode 0
Low power mode
sudo pmset -a lowpowermode 1
With this I get 10hr+ generally on battery, and have not ever noticed any performance deficiencies while on battery doing what I need to do.
The shortcut shell scripts as below:
Performance mode
sudo pmset -a lowpowermode 0
Normal mode
sudo pmset -b lowpowermode 1
sudo pmset -c lowpowermode 0
Low power mode
sudo pmset -a lowpowermode 1