MacBookAir 2020 battery life

[ForumWhiner]

I just bought a new MBA2020 (16GB RAM) and the battery life is around 4hours. This is no way comparable to the MBA that I owned before (I guess it was 2015 model) that consistently gave me 8 hours battery life. Is there a problem with my machine? I mostly just run code in Terminal and Anaconda(Spyder) and don't use battery intensive apps like Chrome. I have attached screenshot for reference.

 

[chabig]

It looks like you’re doing battery intensive things in Anaconda Navigator and Terminal. Naturally, the battery won’t last as long if it’s being used hard.

 

[ForumWhiner]

It looks like you’re doing battery intensive things in Anaconda Navigator and Terminal. Naturally, the battery won’t last as long if it’s being used hard.

Thanks. It is weird to me that I did the same things on my old laptop and battery life was better!

 

[chabig]

I know. it also seems like battery life on brand new machines is somewhat reduced by initial housekeeping chores. id say give it a week or two. battery life night stabilize closer to where you expect it. If your old machine got X hours, the new machine should be about the same.

 

[Lerten]

Well, to be fair, the 2013-2017 era 13-inch MacBook Airs were lauded for their battery performance. Apple quoted, I believe, 12hrs and the old-gen Air very often exceeded that.
I certainly felt reduced battery life when moving from 2013 13-inch MacBook Air to 2018 MacBook Pro.

 

[ForumWhiner]

I'm also puzzled with the energy impact graph (from screenshot)- I have no idea where is the occasional dip coming from.

 

[CheesePuff]

The 11 hour battery estimation from Apple is solely inside of Safari browsing webpages at 75% screen brightness, and if you do that it will last 11 hours.

The quad-core CPUs in the new Airs are more power hungry, get hotter, and with more pixels to push on the Retina display, it will end up providing less battery life then before.

 

[hungryghosty]

I've been getting 7-8 hours battery life with my 2020 i3 MacBook Air?

Mainly using Google Chrome to run Google apps, office 365, remote consoles and other web based stuff.

Could be better but overall I'm happy enough with 7-8 hours. It's an improvement over the last MacBook I owned and better then the latest MacBook Pro I tried.

 

[lambertjohn]

I get about 12 hours on my 2018 Air, using Pages and surfing the web. I have my display settings set on "Automatically adjust brightness" if that matters.

 

[earthxsucks]

i have a 2020 i5 and love it, but the battery on mine is trash. i only get about 5 hours absolute max using safari and spotify alone.

 

[twintin]

I use mine i3 around 8h per working day and have around 30% left at the end of the day. Using mine for VSCode remote development, slack+ ms teams chatting, 30 min ms teams vudeo calls, document writing with libreoffice etc.

 

[edubfromktown]

The 11 hour battery estimation from Apple is solely inside of Safari browsing webpages at 75% screen brightness, and if you do that it will last 11 hours.

The quad-core CPUs in the new Airs are more power hungry, get hotter, and with more pixels to push on the Retina display, it will end up providing less battery life then before.

True though, at 50% screen brightness it is possible to get 8-9 hours our of 2020 MBA's and MBP's.

I had an i7 MBA for a couple of months and then switched to 10th gen i5 MBP. Both average somewhere >8+ hours on battery running a mix of tasks.