M1 battery life

I’m about to go to bed, after working off and on all day on my M1 MBP.

My battery’s at 57%.

I no longer need to charge overnight. I’ll be able to work all morning tomorrow as well and then stick the laptop on a charger for an hour or so at lunch.

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I managed to get the fan to blow like crazy and deplete the battery in a few hours.

If you hate your battery, run Lightroom Classic. :smiley:

At night, I did “normal” stuff (write, mail,…) and you get the impression the battery indicator is broken, because it must be stuck. :smiley:

I’m thrilled with the battery life on my M1 MBA. I worked on a paper for about 4 hours yesterday before checking the battery after a full charge - I was at 65%. It’s mind boggling how good the power consumption is.

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Aaaah I knew I should not have visited this thread :grin: I want one so badly (but I’m holding off for the M2…)

Your experience looks awesome. Happy for y’all :blush:

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I’ve decided I need to take a break from Apple-centric podcasts. All the hosts are raving about the M1 and I’m cracking…
I know I’ll get an Air, but it really shouldn’t be now for financial reasons.

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You’re missing out on a lot… :wink:

Then again, I have a 16" MacBook Pro… :cry:

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Haaa
I have a 2016 15’ fully decked out and I shudder to think of the price I paid for this machine (which I still love). But the battery life is what it is, and butterfly keyboard. I’d love the smallest form factor for travel. But I’m not travelling, so there’s little point (yet).

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My wife also has a fully decked out version of that machine. She still loves it and it works well, but the computer says that the battery needs to be serviced (even though it is still chugging along). She is also fine with the worn out butterfly keyboard, which has never needed to be replaced. It works for what she does, like Google Sheets in Safari and Mozilla Firefox while lounging outside.

It was a very expensive machine, but now she is eyeing an Apple Silicon Mac (along with me). :sweat_smile:

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Did you happen to get a screenshot of iStat or Activity Monitor? Just curious about the wattage and number of active cores you saw. You can definitely still make it work hard with the right app (or by making your own app.)

Didn’t look at the power consumption, but I had 8 cores constantly near or at 100%.

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I experienced a mixture of two things: a hardware failure (my beloved life partner 2011 MBP) and the rave reviews by podcasters. I feel your pain on the latter. When the new iPhones drop I practically have to hide for a month.

I have found air battery kryptonite… Firefox.

Mozilla Firefox isn’t optimized for Apple Silicon yet, but an M1 version is on its way.

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My MacBook Air was doing fine… until I installed Dropbox.

Now, don’t get me wrong, using Dropbox is fine…after it finishes the initial setup.

But that initial setup? I configured with 100% “Keep all the files online and don’t download anything locally” and it still sent the CPU into the red for quite awhile.

Then again, quoting this page:

Dropbox, Inc. writes:

The performance of the Dropbox desktop app can decline if you have more than 300,000 files synced to your computer. This is a soft limit and depends highly on the hardware specifications of the computer running the app. Some customers can sync more files without issue.

I have 416,850 files in my Dropbox, and I’m only using 1.3TB out of 2TB, so clearly I’m apparently not the normal use case for Dropbox

That being said, I still think the real flaw is that Dropbox isn’t written to be efficient and never really has been. I don’t expect that to change, however.

What I can’t get over is that every time I put my finger on the Touch ID button, the computer is cool to the touch, even when driving a 27" 4K monitor. Using the Touch ID button my my 16" MacBook Pro was always warm, sometimes hot with the same configuration and monitor.

Moving to SSDs from spinning hard drives was a “once in a lifetime” switch in terms of actual daily performance. The M1 probably doesn’t quite match that, but it’s pretty darn close.

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100% the reason I’m not using Dropbox on my new MBA. Like you I have a *significant amount of files there and am offloading them in batches to iCloud from another Mac.

I simply don’t have the spare devices in my free account. :slight_smile:

:scream::exploding_head:

How does one get so many files!?

I think a lot of the issues with Dropbox are due to it being written in Python, which is a very inefficient language for desktop applications. Python programs eat CPU and RAM, especially when compared to native apps.

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Honestly, I’m not even sure myself, but I never seem to have the time to clean it out, so…

Precisely. It’s not so noticeable for day-to-day operations, but that initial setup is a beast.