Macbook Pro 14 M3 Pro battery life?

[nph]

I just read PC magazine's review and the battery life sounds fantastic but is this what others are experiencing?

I am considering upgrading from Macbook Pro 13 ()while it still has a good trade in value) to the 14 inch M3 Pro.

Doing some video editing, Xcode and running Parallels desktop plus Office etc.

Appreciate the feedback since I first felt the M1 Macbook Pro 13 was the ultimate laptop but now it looks like the 14" macbook Pro M3 Pro is it.

 

[dizmonk]

I don't have the Pro but I read the same article. I have a hard time believing their tests for a few reasons. No site is reporting battery results anywhere close to their 30 hours. Secondly, Apple claims the M3 has better battery life than the Pro. Finally, their test of a 720p seems very odd. I have the M3 and I'm guessing I'm getting about 10-11 hours on Wifi with just regular lite, use.

 

[Honza1]

This is video playback test, which uses dedicated silicon for video decoding and display, everything else is likely sleeping and uses close to no power. If you do anything else, battery life will be lower. I have 16inch M1Pro and with display on 25% (like in flight on plane) I get with light work 20 hours battery life. On 50% display I get nearly 20h, but now it depends a lot on what I do, some apps just eat more battery. Set display on 100% and battery life is 10-12 hours even with light use. Load some heavy duty apps with image processing and battery life drops down to 6-8 hours easily.
I do not think the Mx cpu type matters that much, it is all about display and cpu/gpu power. Video playback is just one of those highly battery optimized activities.

 

[3SQ Machine]

I have the 14" 12 core M3 Pro 1tb. As an example, today I'll get about 17 hours in mixed use, which included some logic mixing, according to Activity Monitor. Of course, not ALL of those hours I was actively doing things.

However, when I switch to low power mode, the battery use slows to a crawllll. I was traveling and using my laptop (a lot), put it in low power mode--but didn't need to charge it for like 3 days. I also notice much less lag (but still some) compared to my M1 Pro (no 120hz, for example). Geekbench scores in low power mode put it around 2K single core score (offhand I can't remember the multi-core). So...it's not great, but still usable for low-intensive tasks to extend time.

Overall, I had the same debate about the base M3--but the M3 Pro is just so much nicer and I think the battery life on this spec overperforms expectations. There are some other threads here on MR with other's anecdotal perspectives as well.

 

[dizmonk]

How long does it take in a new M3 to start getting reliable readings of battery life? I know it's indexing for a while but should I start getting accurate readings in a week, a month, or a few days?

 

[Honza1]

How long does it take in a new M3 to start getting reliable readings of battery life? I know it's indexing for a while but should I start getting accurate readings in a week, a month, or a few days?

In a day or so - but also never. Indexing etc. is usually done within few hours, depends on disk size and how much you use the computer. I tested complete disk reindexing on my prior MBP (2017 i7) and it took may be ~4 hours on 500GB of data.
But battery life is estimate based on recent usage. Same for computers as well as electric vehicles (or any other battery powered device). These estimates get lots of attention on EVs and Computers as their consumption varies A LOT. So if you run computer for few hours at low power - low display light and something light, like playing video - computer will estimate long battery life. Then you go out, bump display light to max and start doing some video editing and your battery life will end up being much shorter then estimate you had. Same as when I take my EV after driving in neighborhood for few days on a highway and start driving at 70 mph. My range drops like a stone.
That is why those battery life values are just estimate under average recent conditions (over last few hours). They can be really poor - or good.