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M1 Pro vs M1 Max: cooler system with better battery life?
- Thread starter yurkennis
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I disagree. These things charge up so fast, you won't out of battery at all with the M1 Max. You have electricity where you live right?
Well, if the main purpose of your machine is super long international flights, then get the M1 Pro indeed. I agree with that.
Would it be possible to run power metrics after restart, machine idling a while on your machine? So we could compare memory power draw in a more or less standard way. I have a strong feeling that memory size will matter more then the m1 pro vs max cpu in battery life, but this needs to be confirmed by tests. Reviewers (like the one just above) are consistently comparing bigger memory m1 max laptops to lower memory m1 laptops, making it difficult to isolate possible sources of power draw. Sure, the m1 max has a power consuming larger bandwidth memory bus, but this will get solicited more by larger memory sizes. Memory is what heats up the system at light loads. I don't think the GPU core differences will matter in light load power draw.
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That is not the point: the more you have to charge, the quicker the battery will deteriorate. It's not only about being able to work unplugged but also about longevity of the machine. My i9's battery was shot after 2 years because it ran hot and it was constantly needing a recharge. The cost of replacing these batteries is insane.
I was thinking of these YouTube videos:
In this one (a battery run down test), An M1 MBP, 14" Pro and 16" Max all run out within 30 minutes of each other.
In this one (from about 21 minutes), he gets about 3% difference between 14" Pro and Max around the 45% usage mark, and estimates a projected difference of 5-6% by the time the battery gives up. That's about 25-30 minutes difference.
...and in this one, Luke Miani shows battery life decreasing faster on the M1 Max during a CineBench test (47% run down compared to 40% on the M1 Pro). If extrapolated (i.e. running Cinenbench only until the battery dies), this would obiously be a greater than 10% difference - closer to 15-20%. However, in real-world usage, I think the difference would be closer - you're not running benchmarks all day long in normal life.
In this one, at about 6:50, he estimates a 10-15% difference for light usage, but doesn’t actually test these workloads separately.
My take is that if running graphics intensive job that push the GPU cores, the M1 Max is going to take a hit, which will be somewhat offset by the faster run times at heaavier load. Maybe there is a 10% "surcharge" for having the M1 Max. For lighter productivity tasks, I can believe the 5-10% difference between Pro and Max. If you are getting 8 hours with a Pro, then it looks like worst case is about an hours difference, but it could be much less.
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That’s a much more significant difference for 14” machines (11:12 vs 8:01).
So I have one reviewer estimating a 25 minute difference based on real tests, and another showing a 3-hour difference.
I’m still none the wiser!
[emphasis mine]
I think display brightness may play a part here. My typical screen brightness is about 7-8 notches from minimum, and the battery life is an unqualified “full day” light office work. If your international flights are mostly cabin lights-off and the screen brightness is turned down accordingly, you might eke out a bit more battery life.
Funny, it never was a problem on my frequent long haul intercontinental flights. I just sleep during those (good to avoid jet lag) and my macbook stays in its backpack. Never ran out of battery yet
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Funny, it never was a problem on my frequent long haul intercontinental flights. I just sleep during those (good to avoid jet lag) and my macbook stays in its backpack. Never run out of battery yet
You are a smart flyer.
MacBook 16” M1 Max 32GB 1TB arrived. Left it plugged in for 3 days while I set up everything and spotlight ran etc. did a work day on battery today - Teams (3 hours) / Word / Image editing / Photos / Excel / Safari / Google Earth Pro / Outlook / etc.
Half the battery left at the end in the day - epic!
That's incredible and thanks for sharing! Do you remember at all what your brightness was at?
Thanks for sharing the teats but they are not as useful as they could have been.
The question here is if 32GB vs 64GB has any change to battery life. RAM needs to be the only variable in the tests. Which is not the case in the tests you shared.
7 dots for the first half of the day then 8 dots for the rest. Didn’t change any settings from default.
Also, left the Mac unplugged overnight (sleep mode), and started working again the next morning - made it to 15:30 before the battery went. It was very light office work that day, emails, working on Word documents, expenses in excel, etc.
All in all, very happy with battery, more than all workday battery for light tasks, Bon ?? - my old MacBook was getting about 2 or 3 hours by the end.
Yes, but it’s a comparison of the base 14 inch with 8 core cpu and the 16 inch with 10 core cpu…
Looking foward to hearing your user review! Looking at almost the same spec (I only need 1TB storage).
How much time do you spend doing heavy tasks during your international flights?
Light tasks will get you ~10hrs+. I would imagine that you're not working 10 hours on an international flight? Since most international flights don't exceed 12 hours.
I don't NEED 2TB really, but I struggled with storage in the past (suddenly joined a video start-up...) and I don't want to be there again.
Very true, but also the comparison does yield some results of note… meaning that actually it showed that inspite of it all, the difference across 32GB variations is somewhat negligible.