Real Life Battery Consumption - M1 MacBooks

[0906742]

Full brightness will kill your battery. Period.

First couple of days I kept some rough notes. I mostly had brightness at or around half or slightly lower. My preference tends towards brighter, but I was in dimly lit spaces, mostly.

No specific app usage, mostly just web (reddit, Facebook, wiki, YouTube) and Netflix or Apple TV. I was using AirPods, so there are some notes re battery life on those. Bit of Mail.app usage. Notes were usage or observations,
20:00 100%. Web, Apple TV (PIP). AirPods @ 98% or so.
21:00 99%
21:20 98%
22:00 95%.
22:30 93% 5 min blanked screen, downloaded small app, setup +finger id
22:45 92% Facebook
23:00 91% TV
23:30 89%
24:20 85% AirPods @ 10%
01:00 81%. AirPods charged to 90%
02:00 76%. —sleep——

08:30 wake.
0830 73% Apple TV, web, Facebook
0900 67%
0930 62% (photos high energy usage in background)
10:00 59%
10:30 55%
11:00 52%
11:15 Plugged in.

Incredible battery life in your unit!

My MBA M1 just 2 hours of use with brightness max. -6 clicks (50%) battery 100% > 89% (real percentage 84,5% in Coconutbattery). There seems to be some strong units out there and then much weaker ones or what is causing this???

 

[CheesePuff]

Incredible battery life in your unit!

My MBA M1 just 2 hours of use with brightness max. -6 clicks (50%) battery 100% > 89% (real percentage 84,5% in Coconutbattery). There seems to be some strong units out there and then much weaker ones or what is causing this???

Everyones use case is very, very different. What applications are you running? What background services do you have installed? Apple makes it very clear how they achieve their battery testing indicated in the footnotes of the product page.

 

[0906742]

Mainly just Safari with 3-5 tabs open and some music playing from Youtube in one of the tabs. Not much on the backround, occasionally CoconutBattery, terminal and notes.

 

[Le0M]

Maximum display brightness on the 2010 MacBook Air was 300 nits.
Maximum display brightness on the 2020 MacBook Pro M1 is 500 nits.

In addition, your 2010 Air's display's backlight most likely lost some of its illumanation capabilities in the past 10 years, and the display is at this point most likely down to no more than 250 nits.

If you want a fair comparison set the 2010 to maximum and the 2020 to 50%.

The MacBook Air late 2010 has much higher nits than you think. In fact, I can barely find a difference while keeping them next to each other at full brightness. Since Apple doesn't specify this on it's page, I found this:

Source:

The 2011 MacBook Air (11 & 13-inch): Thoroughly Reviewed

www.anandtech.com

 

[Le0M]

a 5x improvement is not great??!

5 times better than a 10 yo battery used every day? Not that impressive.

 

[mj_]

That which you're referring to is the 2011 MacBook Air, not the 2010 MacBook Air. The 2010 MacBook Air has 306 nits on average.

Either way, I have nothing else to add. If you want to believe that a 5x better battery is not much of an improvement and expect 20+ hours on maximum brightness then so be it. There's nothing I can say to convince you otherwise

 

[Le0M]

What you're referring to is the 2011 MacBook Air, not the 2010 MacBook Air. The 2010 MacBook Air has 306 nits on average.

Either way, I have nothing else to add. If you want to believe that a 5x better battery is not much of an improvement and expect 20+ hours on maximum brightness then so be it. There's nothing I can say to convince you otherwise

Also, please don't put your words in my mouth, so to speak, since I never expected 20h at full brightness.
The reason I opened this thread is because I'm not the only one feeling a tad disappointed with battery life, considering all the hype and reviews that were behind it. That's all.

 

[OSB]

Brightness matters. As noted, I was getting 2W while browsing forums at low brightness (that's my comfort level). I posted on another thread before and with the same workload, power consumption was at ~2.3W with brightness at 25-30% (I use Siri to set display brightness so it's exact) and 7.3W with brightness at max.

Also, the M1 MBA has a 49.9Wh battery. Seemingly small differences in power consumption have a profound effect on battery life.

3W: 16.63 hours
4W: 12.48 hours
5W: 9.98 hours
6W: 8.32 hours

This. The thing you need to remember about backlight drain is that it's constant irrespective of whatever else you're doing; your processor *might* peak at 15W, but in typical usage it's very rarely up there, and rarely for very long. Whereas if you crank the screen brightness, even if you're just staring at a static page of text, it's costing you the full power allocation constantly.

 

[redcaptrickster]

I'll start.

Using a MacBook Pro M1:
Safari for 30 min watching youtube
Safari for Netflix, 2h 15m
No other apps opened
Tot of 2h 45m
Brightness at 16 clicks (max)
Volume at 16 clicks

Battery went from 97% to 65%

Don't know what to say. I've been on my MBP M1 since 5 AM (with Amphetamine running indefinitely) and my battery is at 45% nine hours later. Slack, Safari, Outlook, and VScode are all running and have been the entire time, in addition to several 30-minute Zoom meetings occurring during that time. Looks like I'll get at least get another five hours out of the battery today.

Something HAS to be eating your charge or a defective battery?

EDIT: Your screen brightness must have something to do with it. I can't even imagine having the screen that bright. My brightness is at 50% and sometimes it seems too bright.

 

[matrix07]

5 times better than a 10 yo battery used every day? Not that impressive.

5 times mean thing that would last 4 hours 10 years ago now last 20 hours. That's mighty impressive considering battery has never advanced that much (we still use same old Li-ion battery from 10 years ago)
5 times is 500%. That means in 10 years it's 50% better each year and that's not impressive? Wow.

 

[Apple_Robert]

In perfect laboratory controlled settings, the M1 MBP is estimated to get up to 17hrs of web use. I have seen you talk about 20hr battery life. If that is what you are expecting every day with your normal use, forget it. It isn't going to happen.

 

[leman]

Brightness at 16 clicks (max)

At max brightness, the display is a major power consumer. It will burn through battery like nothing. I use mine at around half brightness and I only need to charge it up once in two days.

 

[dmccloud]

5 times better than a 10 yo battery used every day? Not that impressive.

Then you have extremely unrealistic expectations. Also, running max brightness on your monitor will definitely lead to significant decreases in battery life. Right now, powermetrics is showing that my machine is drawing 384 mW of power for the package (which is the M1 SoC). At 4W, the screen (at max brightness) would be pulling just over 10x the wattage from the battery that the SoC is pulling. So yes, running the screen at max brightness will have a significant impact on overall battery life. Apple's own tests were based on 50% brightness, so your testing methodology runs counter to Apple's, and is less representative of real world usage than Apple's methodology. This is why you're getting so much pushback over your observations, they're not based on the same methodology as Apple's testing (which means they are not even comparable scenarios), and you are expecting orders of magnitude HIGHER improvements in battery life than what existing technology can provide.

 

[Quackers]

My mid 2012 retina MacBook Pro was rated at 300 Nits at maximum brightness (which probably means it actually achieved less than that in reality).
500 Nits is 66% more than that. That's a lot of extra power used and, as said above, that's all the time it's switched on.

I like a bright screen. I have mine at about 75% brightness as I've re-trained myself (and also use dark mode, which doesn't really help).

 

[TrueBlou]

5 times better than a 10 yo battery used every day? Not that impressive.

Sadly battery technology has not developed at anything like the rate of the rest of the technology world.

Sure, there have been changes to chemical structure and cathode materials to increase efficiency, enable faster charging and improve safety.

But when you compare the advances in the technology which uses Lithium-ion Batteries since their introduction 30 years ago, they are still dinosaurs by comparison.

Until new battery technology comes along - and it will, we’ll all be using solid state batteries and laughing at the pitiful performance of Lithium-ion batteries in the future - a fivefold increase in duration over 10 years isn’t that bad by comparison to the rest of the technology landscape. Given what they have to work with.*

* Vastly over simplified, to save me ten paragraphs of writing


For what it's worth, I'm quite happy with my battery so far. Right now I'm at 53%, it was last on charge 2 days ago on the evening of the 28th, when I decided to do a test. So it was fully charged by 7pm and only used for about half an hour. I then left it for 17 hours to check battery drain, of which there was none whatsoever.

Ive used it for almost 6 hours since, some Youtube in Safari, email, installing and uninstalling software, some writing and coding in Xcode. The rest of the time, just over an hour, was video capture and editing. During which the MacBook Air also powered my Live Gamer Portable 2 Plus and my RetroTink 2X-Multiformat. There was also a few Time Machine backups during this time.

Screen brightness is always at 50% on my MacBook, I don't work in the dark and I live in Scotland, so there's not exactly an abundance of overly bright sunshine at this time of year Keyboard backlight is always on, albeit at a very low level. WiFi, Bluetooth and everything else enabled. In fact, the system is very much as it was when it came out of the box, I don't change much other than screensaver and screen off time, which I increase as I find the default values kick in too soon.

Not a massive amount of use, certainly less than I would normally do, but life has a nasty habit of getting in the way sometimes But compared to my wife's MBA 2020 (Intel i5) even that use is much better than I'd get out of hers.

 

[CheesePuff]

5 times better than a 10 yo battery used every day? Not that impressive.

you are clearly expecting outcomes that were never promised by anyone, Apple or reviewers, and no idea why you set your expectations so high. 5x battery performance over a 9 year old machine is astounding, and you need to go back and reset your expectations.

 

[eelpout]

I'm lucky if I idle at 5-6 watts on my 2020 MBP (i5) at 120 nits. 2 watts is pretty impressive.

listening to Sirius XM on a tab easily brings that up to 9 watts (and add a DAC and that's another watt).

 

[LFC2020]

At max brightness, the display is a major power consumer. It will burn through battery like nothing. I use mine at around half brightness and I only need to charge it up once in two days.

Spot on, I use my M1 pro at half brightness or just under half brightness, can go over a week without needing to charge the beast, I use my Mac mainly for safari.

Sounds like the OP is expecting miracles while running his M1 Mac at max brightness.

Max or high brightness will eat up battery life like no tomorrow, doesn't matter how good and efficient these Macs are.

 

[gottajibboo]

Yo macrumors. First post. I've lurked the last few years as I've been wanting to purchase an apple computer. I kept hearing about rumors of upgrades and kept waiting for the next model which was rumored to be something better. At the announcement of the M1s, I decided to pull the trigger. I picked up a M1 MBP, 16gb, 1TB. This is my first Mac, ever.

Overall, I love the machine. Almost everything about it has been amazing. I started it from scratch and have been slowly setting it up the way I think will be best.

My only complaint so far, which led me to this thread, has been the battery. It is NOT bad, but it just doesn't seem to be living up to what was advertised and what other users are posting in threads like these. I use it mainly for internet (safari) and photo editing/organization.

For example, since my last charge to full on Dec 25th, I have had 8 hours of on screen time (I was on a backpacking trip for 3 days and it sat closed) and I am down to 11%. I would consider this to be very light usage, pretty much just safari browsing. This is a far cry from the folks who are bragging about driving theirs hard for 8 hours and only being down to 50%, so I'm trying to figure out if this is normal. How can I best understand what is driving my power consumption?

Thanks.

 

[MacBird]

Sadly battery technology has not developed at anything like the rate of the rest of the technology world.

Very true statement, current battery technology really holds back progress, not just with laptops.

 

[Apple_Robert]

Yo macrumors. First post. I've lurked the last few years as I've been wanting to purchase an apple computer. I kept hearing about rumors of upgrades and kept waiting for the next model which was rumored to be something better. At the announcement of the M1s, I decided to pull the trigger. I picked up a M1 MBP, 16gb, 1TB. This is my first Mac, ever.

Overall, I love the machine. Almost everything about it has been amazing. I started it from scratch and have been slowly setting it up the way I think will be best.

My only complaint so far, which led me to this thread, has been the battery. It is NOT bad, but it just doesn't seem to be living up to what was advertised and what other users are posting in threads like these. I use it mainly for internet (safari) and photo editing/organization.

For example, since my last charge to full on Dec 25th, I have had 8 hours of on screen time (I was on a backpacking trip for 3 days and it sat closed) and I am down to 11%. I would consider this to be very light usage, pretty much just safari browsing. This is a far cry from the folks who are bragging about driving theirs hard for 8 hours and only being down to 50%, so I'm trying to figure out if this is normal. How can I best understand what is driving my power consumption?

Thanks.

Screen on Time is just a pixel of the total picture. Battery life depends on brightness, apps used and what kind of actions in those apps. If you were surfing the internet via Hotspot, that would affect battery as well.

You shouldn't let your battery run down to 11%. That is not good for the long term health of the battery. if you can keep it between 30 - 80% that seems to be the sweet spot range.

 

[MacBird]

I process RAW files regularly and depend on correct brightness levels. I noticed that a good ballpark brightness level for most Mac laptops for that task is to set it between the two letters 's' of brightness in System Preferences > Displays. I also don't use automatic brightness for that reason. YMMV

 

[gottajibboo]

Screen on Time is just a pixel of the total picture. Battery life depends on brightness, apps used and what kind of actions in those apps. If you were surfing the internet via Hotspot, that would affect battery as well.

You shouldn't let your battery run down to 11%. That is not good for the long term health of the battery. if you can keep it between 30 - 80% that seems to be the sweet spot range.

Good to know on the battery %. I'll keep a closer eye on my brightness and what apps I'm using for the next charge.

 

[redcaptrickster]

Good to know on the battery %. I'll keep a closer eye on my brightness and what apps I'm using for the next charge.

Also look in your menu bar at the top and see if any apps are running agents in the background that could be consuming battery life.

 

[Le0M]

I never thought brightness would be such battery killer even nowadays. But it must be it. I mean, almost everybody pointed that out.
I use dark mode in every app I can, because I feel it's way better for the eyes - they won't strain that much - but on the other hand because of that I also need for higher brightness.
I guess I'll just use light-mode during day time, and dark mode at night to avoid eye pain, and see how well the battery will perform that way.

At this point I wonder if microLED display will have a major impact on battery.