MBP 14" M1 Max battery life in low-power mode? Any owners want to share?

[Fomalhaut]

Just wondering if any of you 14" M1 Max owners have tried extended use of low-power mode, and if so, what your results were?

What difference in battery life did you see? I've seen some early indications that it might equate to 3-4 hours more battery life, which for me could be the deciding factor.

For general productivity tasks, including dozens of browser tabs, PDF, Word/Pages, Excel/Numbers, etc, and video conferencing, how noticeable was the performance drop? How about for more demanding tasks (e.g. code builds, photo/video editing etc.)?

Thanks for any feedback!

 

[vseera]

From what I have been reading, there's not much of a performance drop and it's not even noticeable on those tasks and should increase battery life by an hour or two.

I haven't tested mine enough but it's something I definitely want to test out more to see if there is any difference. The problem is, my workloads can change so it's difficult to pin down a standard set of tasks and compare.

 

[bill-p]

So I finally tried to use Low Power Mode for a day.

My 14" M1 Pro lasted... 14 hours at just about over half display brightness. That's about 2-3 hours more than the usual 10-12 hours I'm getting.

But Safari became very laggy and unresponsive in some cases that entire time. I had to switch to Chrome for my regular usage. Everything else seemed largely unaffected. Maybe my photo export was taking longer, but I wasn't seeing anything drastic. Fusion 360 was lagging a bit more than usual but I could just drop resolution. M1 with the same model would have lagged to no end.

Honestly, I guess... it does work and does indeed get me much closer to the same amount of battery life I was getting on the 13" Pro.

I'd think the same improvements can be had with M1 Max then.

Edit: trying it again now, too, with something I've thought of doing in Safari for a while: disabling HDR and GPU acceleration for canvas. It seems like GPU acceleration for canvas was the culprit making Safari unresponsive in Low Power Mode?

Edit 2: yep, that was it! How I got Safari to be responsive in Low Power Mode:
1. Go to menu bar, select Safari > Preferences > Advanced > Show Develop menu in menu bar
2. Go to menu bar, select Develop > Experimental Features > GPU Process: Canvas Rendering

That's it! Scrolling should be much smoother and the overall responsiveness of Safari should not drop so much anymore.

 

[godza]

Edit 2: yep, that was it! How I got Safari to be responsive in Low Power Mode:
1. Go to menu bar, select Safari > Preferences > Advanced > Show Develop menu in menu bar
2. Go to menu bar, select Develop > Experimental Features > GPU Process: Canvas Rendering

I can confirm that this helped a lot with page scrolling in Safari while low power mode is enabled.

Thanks, it was making me mad