New MacBook Pro – is my battery performance right?

[Yuzu]

Bought a brand new 16" MacBook Pro M2 Max a couple weeks back, set it up and started using it properly this week. Based on some online sources I should be expecting around 18 hours on a single charge which I assume means 18 hours of active use i.e. not including periods where the MacBook is closed and in sleep mode? If this is the case I'm only getting around 5 hours.

I fully charged the MacBook yesterday, unplugged it and monitored the battery performance over a 24 hour period and took note of the battery percentage at various intervals...

Yesterday
1pm = 100%
3.30pm = 70%

MacBook was closed at 3.30pm and reopened 9.30am this morning.

Today
9.30am = 66%
11.00am = 44%
11.30am = 39%
1pm - 10%

At 10% I had to put it on charge again. So roughly 5 hours of active use. I use the MacBook for graphic design so I'm running Adobe Creative Cloud apps (mainly illustrator and photoshop) plus safari with a few tabs open and Apple Mail, and that's about it.

Do these numbers look at all right to you?

 

[curnalpanic]

Those 18 hours are the absolute maximum when doing nothing (except watching movies) on the Mac. Power consumption will go up as you run various apps. Especially Photoshop feels like it could drain your battery real fast.

 

[Crow47]

From your source:

Instead, we open a series of pages (some static, some dynamic, some with video) from popular websites we’ve scraped and stored on a Raspberry Pi; this process continues until the laptop’s battery has run down completely.

Sounds like they're evaluating battery life based upon a web-browsing workload. As with many battery tests, take the results they offer with a grain of salt. Web browsing as a workload can be highly variable. A site primarily comprised of static text and images won't use many resources -and the battery will last longer as a result. They're being coy about a lot of important variables here (screen brightness, sound volume, connected devices, background apps, etc) which makes me further skeptical of their results.

On the other hand, sites with a lot of dynamic content: videos, ads, interactive sections will use significantly more resources and drain the battery faster. They aren't terribly descriptive as to the proportional makeup of the content used for testing; it's impossible to know the exact makeup of test with the information they've provided.

At a minimum, your workload is more intensive than the workload in LaptopMag's test. Adobe Creative Cloud and its apps can and will absolutely work your machine harder. These apps will work the processor, memory, storage, and graphics, as well as any AI acceleration done thru the app itself.

As well, the web content in the background contributes to battery life. Anything that's streaming will work the WiFi module, which drains power. How bright is your screen? That drains power. Do you have music playing thru the laptop's speakers? The speakers need power to operate. Different video codecs across the internet will play on your computer with varying levels of efficiency. Do you have anything on Bluetooth? BT needs power to operate. Do you have Time Machine backups being done? Backups to iCloud drive? Again, those will work the networking hard, using power.

5 hours of active use with your workload sounds just right. And that's a very respectable time to get out of the battery, IMHO! Other PCs will almost certainly fare worse.

 

[benwiggy]

Take a look at Activity Monitor, and see what's eating CPU (and the Energy tab). I suspect that Adobe's stuff is not that efficient. If it's a brand new machine, then it might still be indexing Spotlight in the background, and other one-time jobs -- Time Machine backup, cache filling, etc.

 

[herbert7265]

Not a pro, may be wrong, but the testing of battery life is done under certain circumstances which are (more or less) clearly described.

See here on the Apple webpage:

MacBook Pro

MacBook Pro with M3, M3 Pro, and M3 Max chips. Up to 22 hours of battery life. The world’s best laptop display. Now in a new color: Space Black.

www.apple.com

Also here on the link you provided:

MacBook Pro 16-inch M2 Max battery life results are in — it lasts how long?!

The new MacBook Pro just won't die

www.laptopmag.com

In the case of the test Apple is performing, they even describe settings applied to the computer during the test like screen brightness.

From my point of view, these tests are done under defined and controlled circumstances and without applying (a lot of) real world performance load on the computer. In our real world usage on the other side we work under (completely) different circumstances. We may use different settings, for example for screen brightness, we may have different tasks running, also in the background, and when we then do real world work with programs like Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop the situation is completely different.

If, on the other side, a battery life of 5-6 hours, doing such tasks, is good or not is something I cannot say. Maybe is does not look so good on a first glance, but maybe compared to other laptops it is still better, I don’t know.

Herbert

 

[Chancha]

The 18 hour talks as mentioned above are "mixed" usage which usually entails hours of idling, like literally leaving a webpage open while you talk with a colleague or drinking coffee. This may be a misleading index but for a lot of real professionals this is how they work.

For your reference: Just last month I happened to take a 2019 16" i9 to a print shop to deal with an urgent pre-press issue. In a pinch I forgot to take a type-C power brick but the MacBook was at full charge when I left. Once there, I had to do constant amendments with Photoshop, InDesign, and Acrobat Distiller, all of which take CPU cycles, and then screen had to be set bright-ish just to be able to see things properly in their brightly lid shop. I quickly went to 20%-ish battery and had to borrow type-C power banks from people there but none of them had enough wattage. I ended up having to use a power bank which charges slower than I could drain, and I had to tune brightness down to just one square every second I could, scrap every last drop out of the MacBook. You may think the above was like a 10 hour marathon but no, the whole thing happened within 3 hours, lol.

So, 5 hours of real Adobe CC work while not ideal still sounds reasonable. In fact it is extremely impressive compared to my i9 scenario above.

 

[TinyMito]

Also if you are using Adobe Cloud sync data, and if you have a slow upload/download internet. It will drain the battery overtime faster. If you have 1Gbps connection, upload would be done in 2min and idle.

 

[Honza1]

Screen brightness is really important. In my observations high brightness will shorten my battery life by 5-6 hours easily. And obviously the load on cpu, which you can get from Activity monitor, "Energy" tab. That way you can find out what to blame and if it can be fixed. My mixed use is 15+ hours (M1 Pro), but I do not load cpu by any stretch, mostly e-mail and office stuff.

 

[NeonNights]

Just received my new MBP 16 M1 Max. It is last generation but equipped with 32-core GPU, 64GB RAM, and 4TB storage. I have been extremely impressed so far by its battery life!

Charged it to 100% then started installing all my apps (Final Cut, Affinity suite, DaVinci Resolve, DxO Photolab, etc.). After 1.5 hrs of downloading 20-25 GB of software and personal files, installing apps and OS updates, I was still at 95% battery!

The next day I used DxO PhotoLab6 with DeepPrime to denoise 306 21MB Sony RAW photos and it finished in 13min 50sec and only used 4% battery. I never heard the fans but knew they were on because I could feel a stream of warm air coming out of the vents. I love this M1 Max more than the MBP M2 Max I returned. The 32GB M2 Max finished the same batch of 306 photos 7 seconds faster but was noticeably hotter and fans kicked on loud. I remember my legs starting to sweat when I first set up the M2 Max 16" while using it on my lap, but the M1 Max 16" stayed cool to the touch. I'll report back once I use the M1 Max for a full day or do some video editing.

 

[NeonNights]

As a follow-up to my post above, I've had my M1 Max MBP 16 for a week so far and am just charging it for the first time now. Altogether, I got 11 hours of battery life this past week with 50% brightness and light-to-moderate use (email, some HDR YouTube/Netflix, browsing web, and installing all my photo/video editing and development software). It isn't the rated 18-hours of battery life but is close to my M1 MBA (12-13 hrs) under similar use.