Note the 14 also gets pretty hot compared to the others.
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14 MBP battery is the worst in this comparison
- Thread starter flapflapflap
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Note the 14 also gets pretty hot compared to the others.
The 16" M1 Max actually had the worst battery life in this test, no?
Edit: Nvm, just got to the 'Light Use' section. I see. Still very good compared to the Intel predecessors - just not as good as its bigger brother (which has a much larger battery) and little brother (which is far less powerful).
Edit: Nvm, just got to the 'Light Use' section. I see. Still very good compared to the Intel predecessors - just not as good as its bigger brother (which has a much larger battery) and little brother (which is far less powerful).
I don't agree with his findings. My 14" under "light use" basically will still have >80% battery remaining.
It looks to me like either his 14" is still busy indexing or there is some other issue at play. I've found that there was a problem with WindowServer maxing out one CPU core on my 14" and causing excessive battery drain until restart. It happens randomly and doesn't go away even when all apps and processes are closed. Even restarting Finder doesn't help.
Once I resolved that, my 14" battery life has been excellent. I can get it down to his "light use" result if the screen is at 90% brightness, though.
It looks to me like either his 14" is still busy indexing or there is some other issue at play. I've found that there was a problem with WindowServer maxing out one CPU core on my 14" and causing excessive battery drain until restart. It happens randomly and doesn't go away even when all apps and processes are closed. Even restarting Finder doesn't help.
Once I resolved that, my 14" battery life has been excellent. I can get it down to his "light use" result if the screen is at 90% brightness, though.
I agree but at the same time, I think we need move forward and forget about the intel days. The M1 was released last year and it’s almost as if we are providing excuses and defending Apple for giving the 14 sub-par battery, the worst actually, in the entire M1 lineup.
How many hours of light use netted you with >80% battery and did you use Low Power Mode?
I don't use Low Power Mode. And I get around 10-12 hours with the same "light use" as his. No way it'll go to <80% in 2 hours.
Thanks for sharing. For all you other 14 owners, please share how your battery has been performing!
It's not really an "excuse", it's basic reasoning and physics. The 14" with M1 Pro is ~2x more powerful in both CPU and GPU and powers a larger, more pixel-dense display that gets significantly brighter.
They were able to make the battery 20% larger to partially compensate, but again you now have to render and display 45% more pixels. And you have to provide backlight for a 15% larger area, which draws more power. And you're doubling the refresh rate, which draws more power. And your CPU is more powerful, so it draws more power. And your GPU is more powerful, so it draws more power. And your backlight is brighter in HDR content, so it draws more power. Are you getting it? It's actually astonishing that the 14" MBP offers so many more features and capability with an extreme increase in power and only drops the battery life by a few hours. You're looking at it the wrong way.
The focuses of the 13" MBP and 14" MBP are clearly different, evidenced at the most fundamental level by the chip design with 50% of the M1's cores being efficiency cores while only 20% of the M1 Pro's cores are efficiency cores. The 13" MBP is geared towards consumers who want longer battery life while still getting good performance, but the 14" MBP's first priority is performance... battery life comes second. You *have* to make those tradeoffs when designing and engineering these machines.
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The same battery drains you describe above also apply to the 16 and its larger screen, but the 16 appears to have better a better battery/performance ratio. Apple could have done better and they will with the next version for the 14.
In the end, the light use battery test results for the 14 are unacceptable for me. It’s LIGHT USE and it still cannot clear 10 hours.
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Still, I would pay just a tad more for the 16” if just for the battery life and better thermals. Deal with the size difference and you get a way more immersive screen and better speakers as well. The 14” is a non starter for me given these trade offs and relatively small price difference.
Yes, lets not forget that the 16 has better thermals. This reviewer in the video notes the 14 runs very warm and many in this forum have noticed the same.
depends how much you carry it around and value portability.
In my experience with the 14" so far, it has performed beyond all expectations.
16" has basically a 67% larger battery compared to the M1 MacBook Pro and almost 2x the capacity of the MacBook Air. Under light use, it's reasonable to expect it to not lose more than 30% battery run time compared to the M1 MacBook Pro, which gets excellent run time.
The 14" when compared to the MacBook Air only has about 40% more battery capacity but it has to power a CPU/GPU that's twice as hungry. So battery life undoubtedly has to take a hit.
I'm still questioning this video's results. You can look at results from all other reviews and they all get closer to my numbers. Even Apple got closer to my numbers.
I have a 14 Max coming from a 16" intel MBP:
Under heavy load, I would never ever even think about not having my power brick with me on either machine. Any code compiling, any video editing, anything that turns up the heat on either machine is heavy load.
Second - at best my 16" would give me an average of 4.5-5h of battery life. And that's under medium use, so just some minor dev work, YouTube etc.
Third - For the past week, I've had to grab my charger exactly twice. The first was the second day where I didn't properly connect MagSafe and it dangled and my laptop had been syncing cloud services all day, and the second time was today. I decided to really beat it up running some pretty complex non-M1 optimized code. It took 6.5 hours to go from 95% to 19%. I grabbed my plug and in 63 minutes I was back up to 100%.
Was I expecting to get 17h of battery? No. But the fact that I can get close to 10 or 11 with light use, 6-7 of medium to heavy (my heavy) is incredible.
No, not really.
Going from 13" M1 to 14" M1 Pro, these are your differences in power consumption:
- 45% more pixels
- 15% more backlight area (with mini-LED [more individual lights] instead of LCD)
- 2x CPU performance (and 1/2 as many efficiency cores to run the system going from 4 to 2)
- 2x GPU performance
- 2x refresh rate
- 2x+ brightness
- 20% larger battery to compensate
- 30% more pixels
- 30% more backlight area
- 43% larger battery to compensate
It's really easy to see why the battery life figures turn out the way they do.
people always find something to complain about, to allow them to post things.
Despite not loving the design of the new MBP, in every other aspect these computers are exceptional.
The way I see it, the 16" is a non-starter for me. It's bigger and heavier than all MacBooks produced in the past decade, even if just by a small amount. I did get an M1 Max 16" in to test for a week before returning. it's just... too much!
Sure, I can totally deal with the size difference but the weight difference is very significant. I can easily one-hand the 14" even when its lid is open, but that's not possible with the 16", not because I'm not strong enough but because weight balance is much worse.
While the 16" has better speakers with slightly more bass than the 14", it doesn't honestly get louder. It's just... fuller sounding.
That and the 14" is easier to charge, can be fast-charged with all of its ports... MagSafe or otherwise, and can be coupled with a much smaller charging brick makes the whole setup much more breathable for me.
For the weight difference, a 14" MacBook Pro + 12.9" iPad Pro setup makes more sense for me as I do travel abroad quite often, and it's great to be able to bring this much performance with me in a package this light. The 14" MacBook Pro and 12.9" iPad are also able to serve different purposes and together can totally last way beyond the 16" on battery.
My personal experience, going from MBP 2017 13” to MBP 2021 14”, is that battery life is amazing. In fact, after all the hype with the iPhone 13 Pro Max battery life, I was “meh”, while the MacBook has exceeded all I expected. I guess these kind of tests are much more focused on software like FCP instead of Xcode. The later is my case, and I’m blown away.
Surf the web, watch Youtube, etc...
Also, look: it's the WindowServer issue again.
This happens like... twice or thrice a day. You can see it's clearly wrecking battery life. Restarting the machine is the only thing that helps.
When I'm not seeing this issue, the machine does last a long time. If/when WindowServer becomes like this, the machine barely lasts 7 hours, exactly the same as the result you're seeing in that video.
I don’t mean to undermine your analysis, but Apple could have done better and I will be proven right when the next version features better battery life.
If you were trying to undermine it then you wouldn't be successful. You're offering zero counter-points or explanations for your complaints.
How could they have done better? Well they could've made the chassis even thicker and heavier to put a larger battery in. I'm sure that would've gone over well. Or they could've kept the screen resolution the same. Or they could've gimped performance.
Really, how do you think they could have done better? Obviously the next version will have better battery life due to the inherent efficiency improvements of the N5P and N4 chip processes (as displayed by the longer battery life in the iPhone 13 series), but the M1 Pro and M1 Max use the same N5 process as the M1.
Doing better in 18 months with a completely different chip architecture does not "prove you right" in the claim that they could've done better with an M1-based processor today with those features, in that chassis, with that battery size.
Pro & Max are performance based chips, and the new MBP screen accommodates for Mini-LED and ProMotion. Can't have it all. It still outperforms the battery life on most laptops.
You ever seen the battery life on laptops like the Alienware X17? That's 4-5 hours and the battery on that is massive. If you're going to be upset that you have to plug your laptop in after potentially 8-9 hours then don't buy the 14.