Real Life Battery Consumption - M1 MacBooks

[Zazoh]

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.

The Photos app will do background process to organize and synch to cloud if you have that on. Once it has caught up, battery life improves.

Best on display to let Apple manage brightness automatically. If you are using outside in bright light, that will use more power.

Because with photos you need to know the brightness levels if you are adjusting for printing you may want to plug in so that you can crank the brightness to get the true light levels of the images.

 

[sunseeker]

I also use maximum brightness. Battery seems to drop 50% over the course of about 3 hours.
At times it goes longer, but I'm fine with this.

In my case, the use of 100% brightness constricts my pupils, meaning less of the periphery of my lens is in play.
This results in greater contrast, better sharpness and less fatigue.

 

[Krevnik]

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.

LCD backlight tech hasn’t really changed much in the last 10 years. The big savings there was going from CCFL backlights to LED backlights in the 2000s. With the M1, brightness is a bigger percentage of power spent compared to recent Intel machines.

MicroLED can be more efficient, but more because it can turn down/off parts of the backlight. So it depends a lot on the content.