MBP 16'' M2Max owners come please

[Daniel505]

Hello there! I've been using MBP 16'' M2 Max 19/38 32RAM/1Tb (Stock) for 3 months and I have some certain complaints from the perspective of my user experience. I'd like to know If by any chance I got mine unit malfunctioned or this behavior I describe further is normal? (Unfortunately in my region there is no apple official stores, only resellers and authorized tech service).

1) Battery life. My main complaint omg. Battery life imo is abnormally low. Like 4-6 working hours from 80% to 20% with light/moderate tasks and that's what I paid for rly?!...Apple commercial hello? 19 hours or so, not even close

Energy Mode: automatic (hell naw I gonna use LowPowerMode in 4KUSD machine with 60frames cap, dimming and stuff)
Brightness: 50%
HDR: off
Peripherals: satechi 3in1USB3.0A and midi keyboard connected to it only via 2.0 cable.
Work and background tasks open: Ableton Live 11 (Mostly) or Logic Pro sometimes, Safari with about 5-7 tabs open, some system monitoring apps like tgpro, istatsmenu, aldente etc.
bluetooth/airdrop: off
wi:fi: on

Most of the time I work with stock 140Wcharger plugged in controlled and configured by aldentepro like it stands like a desktop without discharging battery. And all my peripherals connected through CaldigitTS4 in this case.

Efficiency cores. Do they even work?!

Macbook is supposed to be a portable machine for work cases scenario. But I have interior feeling if I forget my charger brick I would die immiediately.

2) Temperatures. I mean obviously I know how things should work on a basic understanding of some principals like some processes demanding some loads and exhaust heat and stuff, and that M2 chips are hotter than predecessors since apple boosted up performance to 15-20% and added cores. My complaints are about some specific scenarios:

A: while charging the battery can heats up to 40C easily. I don't think this is ok in perspective. I manually capped it to 35C in aldente and since then it charging a bit slower bcs it reaches the 35 almost momentarily and it takes longer to charge due to pauses. I mean I could imagine that apple engineers tested it and when you pluggin some 140W power adapter you can't expect that it charge your system cool but anyway. And other indicators of system are kind of suspicious getting hot to me (i.e. charger proximity and palmrest areas near to trackpad from the left and right that you can feel it gets hotter when you lean your palms on it when charging).

B: In clamshell mode w/ two external monitors connected through caldigit ts4 fans turn on when temps of system reaches 50-55C while using just mbp it starts only if it reaches 80+. Is it ok? It's just around 1400RPM and I don't even hear them but anyway.



Addition notice: while using OBS just for recording video in default native resolution 5K with all default presets (nothing changed), cpu% is like 250% in activity monitor and fans start ramp up to 3500RPM. I'm just dumb I guess. Sorry.

English is not my first language, I'm sorry for messing up with text and if your eyes bleeding after reading.


TLDR: It does it job well (no complaints for performance and stuff for most cases), BUT why battery life sucks even with 5-30cpu load max? Does your machine works same?
Temperatures while charging hot, battery 40C almost insta. Is it ok?
Clamshell mode fans starts unexpectedly earlier. Is it ok?

 

[Honza1]

No one? I have 16 inch M1 Pro, so cannot tell much on M2 Max, but what you describe seems like some problem in applications (or system), not what I (and others) get. I do get close to 20 hours with light office work (think air plane "work") - but I get solid 15 hours when working in my office on batteries - with external monitor.
I had this short life and heat once, when an application hanged and was running 100+% CPU all the time. It hanged somehow and was running more than one core at full blast and battery life went down to 6 hours or so. Simple restart fixed it at that time.
I would open Activity monitor and check Energy tab, it lists all applications with their energy impact - immediate and 12 hour average. For example, in my case the worst application (12 hours average) is MS Teams (second with ~half is Safari). This will tell you what app is eating all that battery life. And then you can try to fix it, if it is possible. I cannot delete Teams - as much as I would like to - but I can quit Teams when running on batteries.

 

[Daniel505]

No one? I have 16 inch M1 Pro, so cannot tell much on M2 Max, but what you describe seems like some problem in applications (or system), not what I (and others) get. I do get close to 20 hours with light office work (think air plane "work") - but I get solid 15 hours when working in my office on batteries - with external monitor.
I had this short life and heat once, when an application hanged and was running 100+% CPU all the time. It hanged somehow and was running more than one core at full blast and battery life went down to 6 hours or so. Simple restart fixed it at that time.
I would open Activity monitor and check Energy tab, it lists all applications with their energy impact - immediate and 12 hour average. For example, in my case the worst application (12 hours average) is MS Teams (second with ~half is Safari). This will tell you what app is eating all that battery life. And then you can try to fix it, if it is possible. I cannot delete Teams - as much as I would like to - but I can quit Teams when running on batteries.

Hello, Honza. Thank you for replying. Yes, indeed m1 chips machine are working superior and pretty balanced imo in terms of performance/efficiency, and I can without any doubt trust your words about it performance and life. Sadly for me I decided to upgrade to next m2 gen (or I must say M1 boosted up version) for the future. Little did I know that time later my joy and excitement are going to replace with disappointment. The only reason I sticked with Max chip only because I need 32gb of RAM for my tasks and wanted not performance capped SSD which are beginning from 1Tb. And premium reseller don't sell any customized macs usually, they ask to wait for 6 months lol and the price is almost identical if it was with upgrade which is crazy. So that was the only option available on the market that time (stocked m2max w/ 32/1 configuration). I don't work with any graphics demand workload like 3d rendering, blender and stuff. Mainly I need my mac for programming (xcode, intellijidea, androidstudio), DAW (Ableton Live 11, Logic Pro) and a bit videoediting in finalcut/davinci. Neither high logic computing demanding tasks for data analytics / AI nor graphics demanding tasks like 3d and so. It's a pity that I live in a region where customer rights and laws are not in our score. I don't have the opportunity to test machine for 14 day period, like most countries do. In fact, the only reason for 14 day total refund if the machine is malfunctioned and some "authorized service" can detect and prove it via some closed access diagnostic utility from apple (which is, I hope, different from that we have in prelaunching system with command+D combination).

Yes, I monitoring my energy consumption exact same way as you described. Nothing suspicious in activity monitor I noticed (at least for now). Safari indeed did the job If you forgot to close the app (in my case even without tabs opened lol). The insta disappointment was that even simple usb hub for 3 usb without any devices plugged into it can discharge the battery well. ffs. seems like I bought some iphone on steroids with this battery life issues. Never had any device from apple ecosystem before (my ipod nano doesn't count, it was superior and long time ago :nostalgia.

Well, I still hope some m2max 16'' owners will respond in this thread sooner or later. I really need to figure out whats going on with this macintosh. Don't want to be sticked with my power brick for eternity.

 

[TechnoMonk]

Remove the system monitoring Apps, I have seen them causing issues in the past. Seems to me you have over complicated your setup. What are those safari tabs? I can open certain sites that can empty the battery pretty quickly? Look in to use of what Apps are causing it? I know folks who use M2 max for much more intensive workloads than yours and do just fine with battery.

 

[Daniel505]

Remove the system monitoring Apps, I have seen them causing issues in the past. Seems to me you have over complicated your setup. What are those safari tabs? I can open certain sites that can empty the battery pretty quickly? Look in to use of what Apps are causing it? I know folks who use M2 max for much more intensive workloads than yours and do just fine with battery.

Hello, TechnoMonk. Thank you for replying. Tabs in safari opened are nothing but ordinary websites like github, programming stuff, social/media etc... I realised that yt and media could indeed drain your battery pretty fast while being cached/reserved, so I close them every time before closing the lid of my mbp for a certain time.

about system monitoring apps: Yes, that thought came to my mind first, but I have only two monitoring apps installed (iStats menu and tgpro). None of them consuming the energy too much in background. And I customized them so they showing up some parameters I need only. But OBS is draining incredible for instance while running and recording.

hmmm, pretty interesting... Are those gentlemen (owners of m2max 16'') you mentioned your friends? I mean since nobody replied me here, could you ask them for its performance in general (like number stuff: battery life and average temps etc. in general according to my complaint like have they faced such issues like I have)? I would really appreciate that. But anyway, thank you for replying.

 

[iMacDragon]

the 19 hours is specifically for watching video, 15 hours of light web browsing, anything more demanding, and brighter screens, will drop it quite a bit quite fast. at full peak demand battery would be 1-2 hours.

My 'real' usage has varied anywhere from 6 to 15 hours or so, depending.

 

[Daniel505]

the 19 hours is specifically for watching video, 15 hours of light web browsing, anything more demanding, and brighter screens, will drop it quite a bit quite fast. at full peak demand battery would be 1-2 hours.

My 'real' usage has varied anywhere from 6 to 15 hours or so, depending.

Hello, IMacDragon. Thank you for replying.

I wish I could see those numbers you mentioned (6-15) in 'real' usage. I would be more satisfied. I mean probably if I will use it like in super-"tender"-mode to tasks and workload it might last for 6-8 hours but nothing more (and it probably would be from 100% to 0, which is not healthy afaik, I prefer to keep it in range between 80-15/20). But I haven't tested it just for watching video or web browsing strictly since I need mbp for work mainly. Don't even know how I suppose to plug in hub with peripherals and devices on a daily basis to work remotely from socket, since its too greedy in terms of consumption.

 

[JouniS]

The MBP 16" has a 100 Wh battery. 4-6 hours from 80% to 20% corresponds to 10-15 W, which sounds like a light to moderate workload.

When I work indoors, I get up to two working days of battery life out of my MBP under a light workload. "Light" means that the computer is effectively idle almost all the time. When I work outdoors, battery life decreases to one working day. The difference is due to increased screen brightness. Under heavier workloads, the battery rarely lasts a full day.

 

[Daniel505]

The MBP 16" has a 100 Wh battery. 4-6 hours from 80% to 20% corresponds to 10-15 W, which sounds like a light to moderate workload.

When I work indoors, I get up to two working days of battery life out of my MBP under a light workload. "Light" means that the computer is effectively idle almost all the time. When I work outdoors, battery life decreases to one working day. The difference is due to increased screen brightness. Under heavier workloads, the battery rarely lasts a full day.

Hello, JouniS. Thank you for replying.

When I last time checked wattage consumption under my workload it jumped from 5 to 22W depending on certain task being processed. I wonder why under 15-20% CPU usage mac start roasting fan to 2500-3000RPM and temps up to 80-100 easily. I've also recently installed Resident Evil Village (cracked) just to see how GPU cores and this Metal graphics doing, and some performance cores were up to 110C like in a minute, while whole system was extremely hot and fans were almost maxed. In OBS if default preset of decoding "software x264" is chosen - insta 25-30% cpu usage in activity monitor (which seems to me low, but in macos it's probably not?!) and fans are audible in this case 2000RPM+.


I wish I was just a morron and doing something wrong instead of spending 4K+USD on a machine that giving me a headache with issues mentioned above. I tried dozen different scenarios, borrowed hubs from other vendors, and cleaned/wiped system like it fresh installed. Bad luck for me that authorized tech services here where I live can only rely on a software sent them by Apple, without taking in a count practical experience.

 

[iMacDragon]

25-30% is basically 3 cpu cores fully pegged probably, definitely not light

And software video encoder decode are notorious for being cpu intensive generally, unless need absolute quality definitely would want to use the hardware video codec units