Question about MBA M3 battery life

[brinkeguthrie]

've read 'up to 18 hours,' which seems rather generous. I've got a new M3 MBA 16/256. Cycle count = 6.0.) Use it for web browsing, email, playing Apple Music, and some video streaming, but not a lot, I use the iPad for that. On a full 100% charge, I take it down til I get the 'you're going to need to recharge.' What's a solid no BS estimate of how many hours the battery goes?

 

[Ybersetzer]

You can be sure of 8 hours – that's with full screen brightness and light use as described by you. But if the screen is indeed at full brightness, you can't count on much more. Now, with overall lower screen brightness and energy saving mode, I'd say 10 to 12. (Yes, you can eke out 14 and more hours, but screen brightness might be unacceptably low.)

 

[brinkeguthrie]

Well, I've backed it down to about 70% brightness, and there's a thing where it checks mail and stuff automatically overnight- I turned that off. Also enabled energy saving mode. How do these energy settings look to you?

 

[jdb8167]

've read 'up to 18 hours,' which seems rather generous. I've got a new M3 MBA 16/256. Cycle count = 6.0.) Use it for web browsing, email, playing Apple Music, and some video streaming, but not a lot, I use the iPad for that. On a full 100% charge, I take it down til I get the 'you're going to need to recharge.' What's a solid no BS estimate of how many hours the battery goes?

Apple uses 1 tick below 50% brightness to test the battery life. With 100% brightness you will get far less than 18 hours.

I use my M3 MacBook Air every workday on battery. If I start at 100% I usually have 30%-40% battery remaining by the end of the day. This is with laptop on for nearly all of 8-9 hour day. I write web-based apps for work. While not crazy battery intensive it still is reasonably busy in bursts with multiple cores (transpiling React to JavaScript) and running NodeJS based servers.

 

[krspkbl]

I have 15" model and In my use case I mostly keep it between 20-80% and it easily lasts me 14-15 hours. I think the most I've used it in one sitting is about 8 hours. The battery barely moves in sleep mode so that's not an issue.

The few times I've charged to 100% i've seen as much as 20 hours estimated battery life.

I only use mine indoors so no bright sun therefore low screen brightness (maybe about 7-8 clicks up). All I really use it for is browsing the web, watching youtube/netflix, spotify, basic excel stuff. I'm not the kind of person to have a million tabs open. at most 10 but usually only 2-3.

The advertised battery life (15-18 hours) in my experience is quite cautious of Apple. Your use case may vary but I'd be surprised if anyone got less than 15 hours...unless they were pushing it real hard.