Mac book M1 battery drains fast

[Arnav Sharma]

I got a new MacBook Pro M1 this month, but I feel that the battery drains much quicker than it should, I think there is something wrong with my device. I often use VLC media player, and the battery drains extremely fast. It even drains fast sometimes while I am watching YouTube (via Safari) please help me, I am really worried. I haven't pushed it further below than 30 percent, but it reaches 30 percent in about 4-5 hours while watching VLC or YouTube or doing anything else. I keep the brightness never more than 50 percent and often at 30-40 percent. I don't think it will go more that 8-9 hours in a full charge. Please help me I am really worried.

 

[Yester5]

Why didn’t you call Apple support? They can help you much more than we can

 

[spiderman0616]

1) This is definitely not normal battery drain on an M1 notebook. I use mine almost daily and only have to charge it once or twice a week. Open Settings and look in the battery area to see if anything is using unusual amounts of power. If you don’t find anything weird there, definitely call Apple.

2) Don’t get “really worried” about things like this. Take it from me, a fellow worrier, it’s so not worth it.

 

[dmccloud]

The issue might not be the programs you're currently using, but some other program you have installed running background processes. When the M1s first came out, Chrome was notorious for this, as its update process ran persistently in the background and killed battery life. The easiest fix was to completely uninstall Chrome and associated services. If you really needed a Chromium-based browser, Microsoft Edge would fit the bill without killing your battery.

 

[deeddawg]

Run Activity Monitor.
Go to the Energy tab
Sort by Energy Impact and then sort by 12 hr power.

What are the top five apps for each? Screenshots would be a help.

 

[mi7chy]

The higher the workload, the greater the battery drain. Use Activity Monitor to look at CPU utilization when watching videos. If it's higher than single digit CPU utilization then it's software decoding which drains battery more especially as video resolution increases to 4K and worst at 8K vs lower battery drain activities like browsing. 8-9 hours is probably normal for video software decoding.

Don't listen to the BS about switching browser. I've used Chrome since Jan/Feb this year without issue for general browsing.