M1 Pro/Max battery life – what's your experience in 16in?

[woolypants]

I realise this is a hot-button topic for a while.

While there's clearly a battery life difference for 16in between M1 Pro and M1 Max, I read wildly different estimates for how much when it comes to casual use (e.g. when at a coffee shop browsing and writing docs, rather than transcoding 8K footage).

Some Reddit users say 10%. The Verge says 30%.

So, what's been your experience?

 

[woolypants]

Okay, I now have a 16in MBP M1 Max, 32GB, 1TB SSD.

The battery life is... Mind blowing. I used it for five hours last night for casual browsing/video play back, and it dropped to 75% from a full charge. My old MBP 15in, even with a nearly new battery replacement from iFixIt, would be down to around 20-30% at that point.

I left it churning away overnight on a whole disk virus scan* and initial Time Machine backup. Came back this morning and it's at 53%.

I'm reasonably sure that all the reports of poor battery life were caused by people using Rosetta back in the early days of M1. I strongly suspect Rosetta has a significant impact on battery life. I've banned it from my MBP. This means I can't use a few older apps and Safari extensions, but I'm trying to get workarounds.

* I had to install some beta open source software that wasn't digitally signed (Transmission 4.0 beta). Because Transmission's had issues around poor security in the past, I wanted to make sure everything was OK. I very rarely use antivirus software otherwise.

 

[mdhaus72]

I have the exact same configuration that you do...and I agree that the battery life is amazing. I typically only have to charge it every 3 or 4 days.

 

[Ma2k5]

M1 Max here with ridiculously good battery life, I can only imagine how much more the Pro gives but I’d say the Max life is so high I wouldn’t make battery life a decision point between the two. I like to do occasional gaming so I got the Max but I reckon the vast majority would be fine with the Pro and to be honest the M2 Air is probably good enough for most on a performance basis and the Pro would already be overkill.

 

[woolypants]

I can only imagine how much more the Pro gives

I strongly suspect that this battery life difference is negligible if Apple Silicon apps are in use, and Rosetta is banished from the system.

I think this is why Apple never stated there was a battery life difference between Pro and Max. In the long term, there wasn't going to be any.

They probably knew Rosetta had a battery impact, which is exacerbated on the M1 Max, but kept quiet about it because it would've ruined the marketing and put people off moving to Apple Silicon.

Incidentally, I did a battery run down in order to calibrate the battery on my new MBP 16in M1 Max. This involves running the battery down until it enters standby, and waiting 24 hours, before charging again.

While in standby, with theoretically 0% battery, the damn machine started and then completed its second overnight TimeMachine backup! I'm a bit mind blown by this. Trivial computing tasks appear not to tax the CPU in the slightest.

 

[Zest28]

They should be approximately the same except when you do heavy work, as the M1 Max has more power.

It is like comparing a sportcar that drives at 400km/h and one that drives at 300km/h. Ofcourse the one that drives at 400km/h will run out of gas sooner.