Tell us about your legendary M1 MacBook Air/Pro battery life so far.

[LFC2020]

Still can't believe how good the battery life is on my M1 MacBook Pro, third day of usage, smashing safari, benchmarks, watching videos, 4K videos, just hit 50%

My 2016 13" pro would of needed to be charged twice by now.

Apple silicone is a breath of fresh air, absolute game changer.

How's everyone else finding battery life? ?❤️?

 

[Johnnyangel]

I spent about three hours this morning installing software. Battery went from 100% to 96%.

 

[anshuvorty]

I had it for close to 24 hours now. I was able to get around 10 hours of "real world" battery life just by doing my normal workflow: watching Youtube, Zoom calls, ~20 Safari Browser tabs open, listening to podcasts using PocketCasts. In all, the battery went from 100% > 19% in these 10 hours and then plugged the laptop back in the charger to fully charge it and test it again.

It was insane that I never needed to plug in!

I am tracking battery life again, just to be sure, this time, with Chrome being the web browser as the default (M1 version).

Specs: MBA base config - 256GB SSD + 8 GB RAM.

 

[ratspg]

Got my MBA 16/1TB laptop yesterday at 3pm. Out the box it had 69% battery life. Almost 25 hours later.... Installed all my apps, Updated to 11.0.1, added some iPhone/iPad apps.... still haven't taken the charger out of the box, 18% left. This is amazzzzzzing!!!! IT slept for the evening, but that's about it.

 

[MK500]

I launched Coconut Battery to see how it was working. I wanted to see how my charger was doing. Charging well at over 40 watts; and I was quickly full and unplugged. But this was the real eye opener: I watched my "discharging with" wattage for a while.

2.3 to 7 watts. The power I draw with a ton of windows open doing work is 2 to 7 watts. And usually toward the low end.

This chip is INSANE.

 

[anshuvorty]

Got an update, now that my battery is once again close to completely discharged:

• In this 2nd battery life test, I used Chrome exclusively (M1 version)
• 100% charged at 1:45pm
• 21% charged at 6:56pm
• battery life so far: 5 hrs and 11 min (still better than a comparable x86-64 laptop)
• usage: a little bit of everything: multiple (~ 15 tabs open), Youtube TV streaming, Youtube, and Zoom

I guess Safari is still the better option in terms of battery life, but we shall see.

 

[mediaprodguy]

I picked up my MBP machine around 5pm yesterday. I haven't attached it to a power cord yet. 48% charge remaining at the moment. Last night, I watched YouTube videos, streamed music. Today, it mainly sat in "sleep mode" until 5pm and I am using it currently to read up on everyones comments.

Love the machine so far - I am nervous about running into some software install issue once I start to load on some programs. I am slow rolling the install of applications hoping other pioneers work out the possible kinks first.

 

[vanasian]

I am so impressed about this base MBA. I charged it last night and started using it since around 8 am. I did a lot web surfing and watched some YouTube 5k M1 reviews. Then watch some movie and TV shows, and more web surfing. Now it's 8 pm ,I used more than 7 hours today and I still have 61%. Wow.

 

[LFC2020]

Well into my third day, still have 39% left. ??

 

[eelpout]

Got an update, now that my battery is once again close to completely discharged:

• In this 2nd battery life test, I used Chrome exclusively (M1 version)
• 100% charged at 1:45pm
• 21% charged at 6:56pm
• battery life so far: 5 hrs and 11 min (still better than a comparable x86-64 laptop)
• usage: a little bit of everything: multiple (~ 15 tabs open), Youtube TV streaming, Youtube, and Zoom

I guess Safari is still the better option in terms of battery life, but we shall see.

your drainage seems to be higher everyone else's in this thread and not much better than my '20 i5 MBP.

Wonder what's different?

 

[Tankmaze]

your drainage seems to be higher everyone else's in this thread and not much better than my '20 i5 MBP.

Wonder what's different?

This is the problem : "I used Chrome exclusively (M1 version)"

Safari is always better.

 

[anshuvorty]

Ok, another round of battery tests almost complete. The battery has been drained down to 31%. I haven't plugged it in since yesterday, and the anecdotes that the battery doesn't decay during sleep (like the Intel-based systems) are true! I left the laptop to sleep overnight and for 1-2 hours today, and the battery % didn't change or hardly changed, unlike on the Intel-based Macs!

If you want specifics about the battery life during sleep, here are the facts from my latest experience:

• I once again used Safari exclusively for this round of testing.
• 9:50 pm (on 11/18/20) - 100% (disconnected from the charging cable and put to sleep)
• 9:12 am (on 11/19/20) - 93% (resumed from sleep; I'm sure by this time, if an Intel-based Macbook were to resume to sleep, the battery would be far less)
• 5:46 pm (on 11/19/20) - 31% (closed the lid and put to sleep)
• 9:53 pm (on 11/19/20) - still 31% (opened the lid and resumed from sleep; just insane! I have been so habitually indoctrinated to plugging in a laptop to charge after around 3-4 hours. It just feels strange, weird, and otherworldly to continue using a laptop for literally 24 hours without plugging it in! Insane is the operative word. I don't know how else to describe it!)

Rest assured, if you travel and prefer putting your laptop to sleep to preserve battery life, know that the battery life will remain intact!

Insane what Apple has done with this new platform! All the little details were taken a look at. It seems like nothing was missed! Such a great little machine! This is the Mac, perfected, IMHO. It is what Jobs would've wanted and would've been proud of. I'm sure of this; if he was still with us today. The machine boots instantly, the battery life is near perfect, and sleep works as intended.

 

[SlCKB0Y]

This is just so weird to see. I'm just web browsing but I still can't get my head around it (Using iStat Menus)

?

 

[Zazoh]

One intel app I use to connect to work is a battery hog. Depletes to 20% in 8 hours. But can go a few more hours with Safari after that.

 

[anshuvorty]

Just insane battery life, every time I see it, I just can't believe it....

• In particular, when the machine is put to sleep by closing the lid, the battery drain doesn't happen, unlike the Intel-based machines, where battery drain does happen, even when the machine is sleeping with the lid closed! The only way Intel-based Macs don't lose battery life is if you do a complete shutdown! Just look at these stats at the almost nonexistent battery drain when the machine is put to sleep by closing the lid:
  • 11/18/20, 9:50pm - 100%​
  • 11/19/20, 5:46pm - 31%​
  • 11/19/20, 9:53pm - 31%​
  • 11/20/20, 3:04pm - 100%​
  • 11/21/20, 4:54pm - 46%​
  • 11/22/20, 12:22am - 43%​

 

[acidfast7_redux]

I expect about 12 hours with my normal usage pattern but just plug it in overnight.

The lowest I can get the battery to go with a full office day is 9h of use include more than 4h of Zoom and that only brings it down to around 30%

Thread and data are here:

Full-day video conferencing battery test (2020 M1 MBA 8C/7G/8GiB/256GiB)

Hi! I'll keep track of what I'm doing today all day. Start is 09.11am and at 100% charge.

forums.macrumors.com

 

[Six0Four]

On my Air 8gb i'm getting about 9 hours watching tons of youtube videos, 10 chrome tabs open and the brightness set to about 300 nits. I'm happy with it.

 

[nameste]

Do the mba and mbp uses same battery?

 

[Zazoh]

Do the mba and mbp uses same battery?

No.

 

[ArPe]

I took the Pro off the charger and watched AppleTV in bed. After 20 minutes when the episode ended the battery was still 100%. ?? I thought it must be a bug but it finally started moving.

On an Intel I would have lost 5% or more in that time.

 

[ajaan]

Battery life has been excellent during daytime, as advertised. However, this morning when I opened up the MBA from the sleep, battery had drained from about 75% to 33% in the eight hours I'd been asleep. The only apps open when I put the MBA to sleep were safari (3 tabs) and mail. Any ideas why it drained like this overnight?

 

[acidfast7_redux]

Battery life has been excellent during daytime, as advertised. However, this morning when I opened up the MBA from the sleep, battery had drained from about 75% to 33% in the eight hours I'd been asleep. The only apps open when I put the MBA to sleep were safari (3 tabs) and mail. Any ideas why it drained like this overnight?

I've noticed no drain at all overnight, which was surprising to me.

 

[iKrivetko]

Battery life has been excellent during daytime, as advertised. However, this morning when I opened up the MBA from the sleep, battery had drained from about 75% to 33% in the eight hours I'd been asleep. The only apps open when I put the MBA to sleep were safari (3 tabs) and mail. Any ideas why it drained like this overnight?

It might have been installing updates or something of the sort. Or some process had gone rogue.

 

[badsimian]

My MBA was on 85% this morning - seems that is all it charged up to overnight. Now down to 60% after a couple of hours usage...not as amazing as I was expecting tbh but fine really. I am never that far away from a power outlet and it might still be indexing etc I suppose. Worth it to get function keys and silent operation.

 

[Zazoh]

Battery life has been excellent during daytime, as advertised. However, this morning when I opened up the MBA from the sleep, battery had drained from about 75% to 33% in the eight hours I'd been asleep. The only apps open when I put the MBA to sleep were safari (3 tabs) and mail. Any ideas why it drained like this overnight?

Indexing and syncing? Does activity monitor show anything?