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MBP 13 M1 disappointing battery life

N

nph

macrumors 65816
Original poster
Feb 9, 2005
1,054
216
So I got some great advice and identified the culprits to be my antivirus running background processes. Battery life is fine now.

Original post:

I have a 8/512 MBP M1 and speed is great but I am not impressed by battery life.
Tonight I was surfing using only Safari and checking email and battery dropped to 57% over 3 hours
after starting out with 98%.
Activity monitor now estimates remaining time to slightly over 3 hours.
This is nowhere near what I have seen others here post about 15hours+ with doing email, surfing and other tasks.

Glad I went for MBP if MBA is even less battery life.

I did run Parallels preview of Windows ARM earlier today but I closed that and quite the app several hours ago at what point I still had 98% left.

Oh, and it feels warm under, not hot just a bit warm which I also read people say it never gets warm so could I have a process or something running that is killing battery life?

Am I missing something here or could I have gotten a bad battery?
 
Last edited:
Open terminal, click energy tab and take a screenshot, should give us a clearer picture on what is draining your Macbook.
 
It is not new, have had it for two weeks now. But I will take a screenshot of Activity Monitor and post.
 
If your laptop is warm, it means that there's some background process running that is killing your battery. Also take a look at the CPU tab in Activity Monitor and sort by %CPU.
 
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How bright is your screen, that's another culprit, but like others have said, if its warm, then something somewhere is causing that to happen.
 
Screen intensity is less than 40% so that is not it.
Here is the screenshot of Energy tab in Activity Monitor.
Screen Shot 2021-01-07 at 8.58.21 AM.png
 
With 47% left I only get an estimate of 3 hours remaining...
 
Perhaps it's because you're running Avira Security, Avast Security and Malwarebytes simultaneously?! What possible reason could one have to run even one AV program on a Mac, let alone 3... if you think Spotlight likes indexing files, wait until you see what AV software does with the file system - single threaded crawls through every directory constantly.
 
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nph said:
It is not new, have had it for two weeks now. But I will take a screenshot of Activity Monitor and post.
Click to expand...
taylorwilsdon said:
Perhaps it's because you're running Avira Security, Avast Security and Malwarebytes simultaneously?! What possible reason could one have to run even one AV program on a Mac, let alone 3... if you think Spotlight likes indexing files, wait until you see what AV software does with the file system - single threaded crawls through every directory constantly.
Click to expand...
How was the battery life before you installed all these AV & AM apps?

What's your brightness level?

How is the sleep drain?
 
I ran Avira to try it out. I am not running the premium version that are constantly monitoring in real time. I will restart and see if they still are running. Might be the culprits. Thanks
 
Yeah I tried Avira yesterday normally I run a scan with Malware bytes every now and then.
Will deinstall Avira and see what the result is.
 
boss.king said:
What is Free Memory, and why do you have so many antivirus programs running?
Click to expand...
"Free memory (was Boost & Memory) is an app to monitor memory and disk space usage and clean up your memory. It increases your Mac’s performance by cleaning cached memory, making more memory available for new apps."

o_O - I think that might be contributing to your problems too. We can safely assume that the M1 systems are capable of managing RAM by themselves.
 
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Agree, but I never use it I just look at it to see the available free memory. But good point.
 
To all intents and purposes you can include cached memory in any free memory calculation.
Cached memory will immediately be freed up if that ram is required by a programme about to be run (or running).
 
From my experience, Chrome is the worst. And most of the stuff run through Rosetta. To the point that editing 4K footage for an hour with m1 based FinalCut takes less battery than browsing with Chrome for exact same time...
 
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