The first rule of troubleshooting is to remove all variables. What is the battery life like, used regularly without the monitor and the 50% brightness Apple cites?
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Major Battery disappointment on MacBook Pro M1
- Thread starter Le0M
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The first rule of troubleshooting is to remove all variables. What is the battery life like, used regularly without the monitor and the 50% brightness Apple cites?
System Preferences > Battery > Power Adaptor (in left pane) > wake for network access (bottom option in right pane)
What does the build in battery menu say? Does it say 98% too? Coconut battery is a third party app so I wouldn’t trust their numbers...
Maybe not going down just yet. That figure could be the maximum charge capacity for your battery.
There must be variations in all batteries.
For instance mine shows full charge capacity as 5140mAh.
That's more than the design capacity of 5103mAh
Seems like some of us have serious battery related issues & others have battery related paranoia. I think we just need to see if we are getting more or less 16 hours and 14 hours of on-screen time on MBP & MBA respectively for general activities such as browsing & word processing with multitasking. The 20 hours & 18 hours mark seems to be for watching movies/videos on Apple TV without having to do any multitasking. & only expect this in the case if you is charging to full 100% (it is usually recommended to keep the charge to 80% max).
Not 16 hours here but I got 12 hours use (surfing and watching YT vids in HD) with a 9 hour break whilst it was sleeping.
That got me down to 8%.
It might get better and it might not.
Either way it's more than I've had out of any previous laptop
If you want to know more is simple, just compare CoconutBattery or similar apps info vs running ioreg -w 0 -f -r -c AppleSmartBattery in terminal. Then do the math yourself with ne values provided and see who is right.
In my unit using the mathematics I was taught at school I don't get the same value MacOS is telling me and this is just a question of simple percentage calculations, so I don't think my teachers and schoolbooks at the time were wrong.
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That is not really acceptable in my opinion but this seem to be going on with MBA, so probably it is not getting better with another unit. Mine also is below 100%, and was so right out of the box.
What your Coconutbattery history shows about where is started and how it as changed during the time you have had it?
Just for example I had MBP 13" 2019 nearly 1.5 years and battery FCC stay well above 100% all that time! Normal FCC was 5103mAh but mine was well above 5200mAh after that time.
So I guess in reality MBP has more like 11-12W larger battery. Anyway, with MBA I guess that is more or less normal still what we see.
If you want to know more is simple, just compare CoconutBattery or similar apps info vs running ioreg -w 0 -f -r -c AppleSmartBattery in terminal. Then do the math yourself with ne values provided and see who is right.
Code:
"NominalChargeCapacity" = 4382
"DesignCapacity" = 4382
"AppleRawMaxCapacity" = 4233That's what terminal is saying.
It started with 100% - now it's down to 97% (10 cycle count)
Now when you do the math between 4382 and 4233 we see there is no way is 100% using the math I was taught at school.
Anyway, that is more or less the way MBA's are I guess because I had briefly MBA 2018 and it was also way under 100% and went down several percentages right away and at the time I thought it was because I received that machine with empty battery since it was sitting so long in sellers warehouse (mf date about 6 months earlier) but I guess it was not just for that then either...
edit: Battery Health Management is not able to be disabled on M1 Macs, but Optimize Battery Charger still can be
I just realised it would be good if people shared their battery life while using the mac for a couple of hours doing this or that, with related display brightness, and see how much the battery drains for that little amount of time.
To have several of these real life tests would make it easier to understand if some people are affected by paranoia or real battery issues.
To have several of these real life tests would make it easier to understand if some people are affected by paranoia or real battery issues.
Full brightness at 500 Nits is going to put a hole in any battery life, I should think.
Full brightness eats through my battery, can confirm this...
How should I track my usage. The Mac battery setting show just vague graphs... Is there a convenient way? I'm just using Netflix, Apple TV, this forum, Facetime and Reddit with it. I guess I get 12-14 hours depending on what I do. I found out that Reddit is using much more battery than this forum...
This means you're seeing almost 9 hours of battery life at maximum brightness when watching videos, which really isn't too far off the expectations of 10 hour battery life from NotebookCheck (also at max brightness). Screen brightness makes a huge difference.
This sound a lot like what I see with mine (MBA M1). It uses around 9-10% battery per hour in very light use with display at max. -6 clicks. Not really much better than what my MBP 13" 2019 was in light use, could be even worse in very light use but that Intel liked to hog battery in more demanding use like playing music from Youtube where M1 is more efficient in that.
Yes, I think biggest confusion is that peoples just look at that vague battery information graph and go by that "information" without actually checking it anyway if it match to real use even remotely! For example I'm just looking at my battery graph and it claim I used my machine for over 5 hours with only about 10% battery use one day?!!?! I can say for sure this number it claims is pulled out of thin air and does not match what I measured myself with actual clock and watching battery percentage.
So far it seems I can get around 10-11 hours out of my MBA M1 is light use. No way getting 15-20 hours with decent display brightness with doing actually something. Maybe just leaving it on desktop or writing a book using simple text editor could give more that 10-11 but no in real use with Wifi and such...