M4Pro 16": Is this poor battery life normal?

[AW84]

I'm on my second 16" M4 Pro. Battery life was a primary motivator in the purchase, because my M1 Pro was a lemon that topped out about 3-4 hours.

I read all these stories of people using their machine for 2-3 full days, with YouTube, Spotify, Zoom, doing code, etc. all running throughout their days. My experiences are so far misaligned with this, that either I'm really unlucky, or they're lying.

I tested both of these 16" pretty extensively. I'm at 50% brightness, keyboard backlight on low, power mode on automatic, on Wifi, Bluetooth on, all apps closed other than a single active tab in Safari with Youtube playing. It would stay at 100% for more than an hour, then deplete it's way down at around a percent very 6-8 minutes. If I put it on low power mode, it was considerably better, extending to around a percent every 10-12 minutes.

I finally ran it all the way down overnight to do a calibration, with a YouTube video on loop in one tab, YouTubeTV streaming a second tab. It lasted about 10 hours that way, and I noticed at below 20% it was really flying through battery, about a percent every couple of minutes. After the calibration it appeared to be depleting the battery even quicker.

Under my normal usage (lots of Safari tabs, Photoshop and Lightroom, some YouTube, Mail and Teams open) I'd be lucky to get a handful of hours on a machine claimed to get 24 hours.

Are the people claiming to be getting 15-20 hours under moderate to heavy programming and media consumption being honest, or am I having bad luck?

Below is my calibration depletion:

 

[Slartibart]

It would stay at 100% for more than an hour, then deplete it's way down at around a percent very 6-8 minutes.

that does equal ~11-14 hours continuous youtube video play in Safari, doesn’t it? 🤓

related to that: exact version of macOS and Safari? to reproduce it would be helpful if a link to the youtube video you used is provided. Or at least info about its resolution and format.

In relation to your daily routine: you use an adblocker in Safari? How’s the memory pressure and “idle” cpu usage in Activity Monitor? Anectdotically I have seen Teams effecting runtime on battery quite a bit under macOS and Windows 11 - my personal “solution” is to periodically quit it and do not run it outside working hours. But YMMV.
Other than that: depending on what you do in Photoshop/LR, it will eat battery runtime… 🥹

My personal experience is that depending on workload, battery runtime fluctuates somewhere between hours and days - I work as a data scientist and running “increasing fan activity”- data analysis will result in hours on battery, writing markdown docu while having Safari open (with adblocker; but probably never more than around 10 tabs open…do not count so 😄) will result in days.
Having written that: my company 16” M4 Pro eats more battery than my private 14” M4 Pro - still it’s such a joy using either of these!

 

[AW84]

that does equal ~11-14 hours continuous youtube video play in Safari, doesn’t it? 🤓

related to that: exact version of macOS and Safari? to reproduce it would be helpful if a link to the youtube video you used is provided. Or at least info about its resolution and format.

In relation to your daily routine: you use an adblocker in Safari? How’s the memory pressure and “idle” cpu usage in Activity Monitor? Anectdotically I have seen Teams effecting runtime on battery quite a bit under macOS and Windows 11 - my personal “solution” is to periodically quit it and do not run it outside working hours. But YMMV.
Other than that: depending on what you do in Photoshop/LR, it will eat battery runtime… 🥹

My personal experience is that depending on workload, battery runtime fluctuates somewhere between hours and days - I work as a data scientist and running “increasing fan activity”- data analysis will result in hours on battery, writing markdown docu while having Safari open (with adblocker; but probably never more than around 10 tabs open…do not count so 😄) will result in days.
Having written that: my company 16” M4 Pro eats more battery than my private 14” M4 Pro - still it’s such a joy using either of these!

Appreciate the response. OS is 15.2, and YouTube video was 1080p. Memory pressure is very low green (48GB) and CPU usage very low (not sure exact number now that a couple days have passed).

You mention "days" if you're using it light...how many hours each day are we talking? Is this clamshell mode, or the MPB display?

Based on how quick mine is dropping, the only way I would get "days" would be using it lightly for a couple hours, closing the lid, and not opening it again until the next day. Common quotes I'm seeing are around 5% an hour doing heavier usage, ie. coding, Spotify, YouTube, etc. Mine won't do that even with all tabs closed and browsing one Safari tab.

Is there a good definitive test I could give this thing before my return window passes?

 

[anpaman]

Could see battery runtime in this review.

Apple MacBook Pro 16 2024 review - Enormous battery life and better performance of the M4 Pro

Notebookcheck has tested the new Apple MacBook Pro 16 with the M4 Pro SoC, 48 GB RAM and a matte nano-texture glass panel.

www.notebookcheck.net

 

[raythompsontn]

Under my normal usage (lots of Safari tabs, Photoshop and Lightroom

Those apps will suck down a lot of energy. I have the same issue on my M4 Pro. When using either of those apps the battery drops consistently at about the rate you have. Getting 10 hours is considered a good day with those applications for me.

Remember those battery tests where the battery lasts all day are not demanding applications. Watching a video is not that stressful. I have been able to peg the CPU at 93% for over 20 minutes on a large import with Lightroom. Building the previews is very CPU intensive and consumes a lot of power.

When using those apps, I plug into shore power if I am able to get access to power.

 

[Flyview]

The best thing you can do when testing the battery is get an app that can show the power draw and see how low you can get it and what gets it to spike. On about 7 brightness clicks at idle, my M1 Max 16" MBP can go as low as 4-5W. Do you have peripherals plugged into the computer?

 

[Slartibart]

You mention "days" if you're using it light...how many hours each day are we talking? Is this clamshell mode, or the MPB display?

sorry for the delay - I do not use it in clamshell mode.

Adjustments: display brightness on battery around 6 bars, “slightly dim the display on battery” active, “optimize video streaming while on battery” active, wakes for network only on power adapter - light use for me is when I have to type (code, documentation, creating some quick graphic - VsCodium or XCode, Satyrn, RStudio/Positron, Terminal, Joplin, Inkdown, Safari with <= 8 tabs, adblocking with Adguard and ka-Block!, Preview/Affinity Designer) in low power mode it goes for days, easily a week - oh, I tend to close programs I do not use.

I run Teams and Outlook on the phone, because I have experienced some strange behaviour of these suddenly increasing the CPU usage.

 

[smirking]

I'm a developer and photographer. My workflow is lots of moderate intensity stuff happening often.

I was getting about 8 hours on my M1 Pro. Since I upgraded to an M4 Pro, my runtime has been all over the place. I'm pretty sure there's a bug affecting my battery life as I got 8 hours on battery doing all my normal work and then the next day, I left my computer on and was surprised to find the battery down by 30% in an hour of doing very little.

This kind of thing has happened multiple times. Usually after several days of operation. If I rebooted, whatever was causing the runaway power usage would get reset and it'd be fine again. Everytime my battery starts to burn fast, I just reboot and it goes back to normal.

I didn't have this issue on my M1, but I also intentionally did not upgrade to Sequoia while I was still on an M1 so I can't say whether the unexpected power consumption is a Sequoia thing or an M4 thing.

 

[dumiku]

I have M4 Pro 16" too, last time I had about 20-30%, I listen to music using the Music App for about an hour, then switch to YouTube 144p (when I reached 15%), battery on lower power mode, Bluetooth off, screen brightness around 20%, keyboard brightness 5-10%, I used it from 9AM to 4PM, when I put it to sleep at 2%.

I think the cooler you computer/battery is the longer the battery will last, by the way I was using Firefox. with more than 10 other tabs.

I have not really tested the battery, and I charge my battery to 80% only, but I usually get 16-18 hour estimated time with Aldente, but in reality it is usually 6-9hours when watching movies with IINA, brightness at 60-80%.

I will do the test tomorrow with the current apps, and report:

- Vscode
- Postman
- Wave terminal with 4 blocks (btop, lazygit, AI, browser, terminal)
- Safari with one tab to listen to music on YouTube (or simply the music app)

UPDATE
- Vsode
- Firefox (more than 20 tabs (mostly youtube)
- Music App (with last.fm scrobbler in the background)
- Gitkaken (5 tabs)
- Display brightness 1600nits ( I was outdoor)
- Music volume 50-60%
- keyboard brightness 0%

After the above test, I got 6-7hours with 14% battery life remaining.

 

[dmccloud]

There are ways to see how much power your Mac is using through the Terminal. If you do not use homebrew, "sudo powermetrics" will give you results that look like this:



If you do use Homebrew, there is a graphical version of this information called asitop:



Both of these screenshots were taken on an M4 Mac Mini, but the information displayed is what you would see on any Mac laptop. Since both run off the built-in powermetrics function, they have less of an impact on both RAM usage and battery life than many third-party apps.

 

[JSRinUK]

I don’t have the 16”, just the 14”, but I always take battery claims with a massive pinch of salt. The massive chasm between “Up to 22 hours video streaming” and “Up to 14 hours wireless web” told me that these claims are only valid if you’re don’t actually want to use the power of the machine you’ve just bought.

Just doing very light stuff shortly after my MBP arrived, I was getting about 11 hours of battery life - but I felt like I was wasting a very powerful machine. Now, when I’m doing LLM / AI image gen work, if I get two hours I consider that a lot.