Pure Battery life/power consumption: M1 Pro 32GB RAM 1TB SSD vs M1 Max 64GB RAM 4TB SSD

[brosenz]

From the perspective of pure Power Consumption/Battery Life, in normal daily usage or idle/sleep mode, would the additional hardware in the Max, compared the Pro specs in the subject line:

+16 GPU cores (total of 32)
+32G RAM (total of 64G)
+3TB SSD (total of 4TB)

Have an impact in the Power Consumption or energy used?

When idle those extra pieces of hardware have to be powered up and energized, even if they are not being used, maybe a small amount of power but something at the end, or is it that efficient, that even, if they are not being used, they will draw 0 power?

Or, would the Pro configuration, be more efficient in Power Consumption? Is the MacBook Pro capable of fully shutting down the components not being used?

Thank you

 

[bill-p]

Max is going to draw more power than Pro. I had a 16" Max vs a 14" Pro and recently compared the 14" Pro against a 14" Max. Battery life was:
16" Max = 14" Pro > 14" Max

So go Pro if you care about power consumption in real use. Otherwise go Max if you need more performance for your use case.

 

[Sanpete]

In general, when not in use, additional components draw very little power. Comparisons between the Max models and Pro models showed from 0-15% additional power usage for the Max for the same amount of work, depending on the test. When they're doing more work, they draw more power, of course.

The choice between 16" and 14" will affect battery life more than any other decision, by a lot.

 

[brosenz]

In general, when not in use, additional components draw very little power. Comparisons between the Max models and Pro models showed from 0-15% additional power usage for the Max for the same amount of work, depending on the test. When they're doing more work, they draw more power, of course.

The choice between 16" and 14" will affect battery life more than any other decision, by a lot.

Thanks for the feedback, I am comparing a Pro vs a Max configuration on the 16" only, I think the 16" has better thermals and is much quieter and the fans barely kick in.

 

[Sanpete]

They're both quiet normally. What do you intend to use it for?

 

[brosenz]

They're both quiet normally. What do you intend to use it for?

Normal office work plus development with Xcode

 

[ApfelKuchen]

Power consumption is the result of needing more power.

The power needed to maintain the contents of SSD is minimal compared to computing. While there's clearly more power needed to maintain 1 TB vs. 2 TB, there are countless other ways you might "waste" the same amount of power doing other tasks. It's likely to have no meaningful impact on battery wear over time.

RAM consumes power while working - the work of writing/reading is going to consume significantly more power than maintaining idle contents in RAM.

Battery life is affected most by how often you are actually operating on battery. If you're spending most of the time plugged into the wall, then the battery will go through far fewer charge/discharge cycles, which extends life.

You're overthinking the wrong aspects of power consumption.

 

[Sanpete]

Xcode can warm it up. You're not likely to see any very significant advantage from the Max over the Pro in the 16" size for Xcode as far as performance goes. The extra GPU cores don't matter there. The Max does have a larger heat sink and some extra memory bandwidth, so you may get some small improvements. Or you may not.