Do you think Apple Silicon 16 MBP will have 30 hours battery life?

[tonyr6]

I am wondering since the current Air's and Pro M1 13" get around 15 hours of battery, and they have about 4000 mah battery. If they keep the same battery that is in the current Intel 16" MBP could it get 30 hours of battery life. If so I will sell my current MacBook for the new Silicon 16" MBP.

 

[Fred Zed]

Even if they could, they wouldn't.

 

[tonyr6]

Even if they could, they wouldn't.

Why? They could use the same size battery.

 

[Apple_Robert]

I don't think the M 16" will offer anywhere near 30 hrs battery.

 

[leman]

No. The 16” has a bigger display (and other components) that will consume more power. That will negate any advantage of the bigger battery. I’d expect around the same battery life as the 13” model now, maybe an hour or two more.

 

[jdb8167]

I'd expect any follow on Mac Mx notebooks to have 18-20 hour battery life. Apple will probably use any extra battery capacity on the larger notebooks to add cores for both CPU and GPU. Apple needs to have the higher end notebooks be more powerful than the existing M1 Macs. Bigger, denser and brighter screens, more and faster RAM, more CPU cores, and more GPU cores are going to chew through a 80-90 Wh battery in comparison to a 50 Wh battery on an Air for example.

 

[jz0309]

nope, I would guess 15-18.
Why would you want/need 30?

 

[Fred Zed]

Why? They could use the same size battery.

Because Apple doesn’t roll that way. Incremental updates yearly to increase revenue.

 

[russell_314]

No because they would rather make it slimmer then put a 30 hour battery. People say they don’t want slim and light but that’s not what sales figures say. The only exception to that is gaming laptops and even those can be slim and light if you have enough money

 

[Krevnik]

If they can match the 13” M1 MBP, I’d be happy. TBH, I wouldn’t mind if the new 16” had the MBA wedge, 4 USB-C ports and a fan. That would be a nice machine for my uses, but it sounds like the PowerBook G4 form factor might be making a comeback.

 

[Zazoh]

No. They’d do it for the watch first.

Disclaimer: I don’t wear a watch. I don’t need to track things.

 

[InwardMomentum]

It will , if you buy a battery pack

 

[senttoschool]

No. The 16” has a bigger display (and other components) that will consume more power. That will negate any advantage of the bigger battery. I’d expect around the same battery life as the 13” model now, maybe an hour or two more.

Macbook Pro 13": 58.2-watt-hour battery
Macbook Pro 16": 100-watt-hour battery

3" of extra screen is not going to make much of a difference.

Other components? Like what?

The 16" Macbook Pro, if it keeps its 100wh battery, can reach around 30 hours of battery life or maybe even more. The M1X will have the same efficiency cores which are cores that get used for Apple's battery benchmark. The extra cores of the M1X won't consume power in Apple's battery benchmarks.

The only question is, would Apple do it? Do users want 30 hours of battery life or a lighter laptop?

 

[senttoschool]

I'd expect any follow on Mac Mx notebooks to have 18-20 hour battery life. Apple will probably use any extra battery capacity on the larger notebooks to add cores for both CPU and GPU. Apple needs to have the higher end notebooks be more powerful than the existing M1 Macs. Bigger, denser and brighter screens, more and faster RAM, more CPU cores, and more GPU cores are going to chew through a 80-90 Wh battery in comparison to a 50 Wh battery on an Air for example.

Extra cores matter very little because it's the efficiency cores that get used in Apple's battery benchmark.

 

[motulist]

Just get a power bank battery if you want ultra long time between recharges. I bought a 50,000 mah bump battery and that bad boy keeps me chugging along for many extra hours of high-end use doing video editing.

 

[thenewperson]

Because Apple doesn’t roll that way. Incremental updates yearly to increase revenue.

This is a weird thing to say when the M1 Macs used the same batteries. It's also doubly weird because all rumours point to this not being an incremental year.

 

[leman]

Macbook Pro 13": 58.2-watt-hour battery
Macbook Pro 16": 100-watt-hour battery

In other words, the 16" has a battery that's 70% larger.

3" of extra screen is not going to make much of a difference.

Display power consumption scales with area, and a 16" is around 50% larger (the diagonal to area relationship is quadratic, not linear).

Other components? Like what?

For one, RAM. M1 machines use two RAM modules (with separate channels). Whatever SoC goes into the 16", it will ned to use at least four (or maybe even six) independent RAM modules/channels if Apple want's to offer a competetive graphics solution. Then, the SoC itself will use more power (larger caches, linger/wider interconnect etc.). 3x3 Wifi instead of 2x2. More Thunderbolt repeaters. Maybe some other things I am missing (especially on the power delivery side).

The 16" Macbook Pro, if it keeps its 100wh battery, can reach around 30 hours of battery life or maybe even more.

I think the increased baseline power consumption from factors I listed about is about right to eat up that 70% battery capacity advantage As I wrote before, I'd expect around 22 hours battery life, but not more.

 

[senttoschool]

In other words, the 16" has a battery that's 70% larger.



Display power consumption scales with area, and a 16" is around 50% larger (the diagonal to area relationship is quadratic, not linear).



For one, RAM. M1 machines use two RAM modules (with separate channels). Whatever SoC goes into the 16", it will ned to use at least four (or maybe even six) independent RAM modules/channels if Apple want's to offer a competetive graphics solution. Then, the SoC itself will use more power (larger caches, linger/wider interconnect etc.). 3x3 Wifi instead of 2x2. More Thunderbolt repeaters. Maybe some other things I am missing (especially on the power delivery side).



I think the increased baseline power consumption from factors I listed about is about right to eat up that 70% battery capacity advantage As I wrote before, I'd expect around 22 hours battery life, but not more.

Sorry, not buying it.

With a 50% larger display, does it require 72% more power?

Does 3x3 Wifi require 72% more power than 2x2? Does Apple's battery bench use a 2x2 router or a 3x3 router?

Does having more RAM interconnects/caches increase the power requirements of the SoC 72% when only the efficiency cores are running?

Keep in mind that Apple crammed a 100whr battery in the 16" because it needed to power Intel's unbelievably inefficient 8-core Coffee Lake. When the chip boosts, it can easily go above 100w. The 13" never even bothered with more than 4 Intel cores.

Lastly, just because you cram more cores/caches into a CPU, doesn't mean that it requires more power to run. For example, Zen3 5800u (8-cores) needs only 15w while Zen3 5600x (6-cores) needs 65w. Apple can lower the clock speeds of the M1X if battery life is important.

I believe 30 hours of battery life is easily possible while being much faster than the 13" MBP. But whether Apple would do it is another question. My guess is that Apple will optimize for 24 hours of battery life so they can market it as an "all day, all night" device.

 

[leman]

With a 50% larger display, does it require 70% more power?

No, but it requires around 50% more power. These things add up.

Does having more RAM interconnects/caches increase the power requirements of the SoC 70% when only the efficiency cores are running?

It will increase a certain constant baseline power consumption of the SoC by a factor of at least 2-3, yes, even with advanced power gating. It's not much in absolute terms, M1 consumes around 0.5-1 watt at it's minimum, so larger 16" SoC will consume around 1-3 watts or so, but it does add up. As I show below a mere difference of 1.5 watts is enough.

You need to understand that the power consumption is a sum of multiple factors, some of which are constant (like the minimum baseline RAM, cache support etc.), some of which are dynamic (like CPU cores scaling up and down). We are talking about idle power consumption, which is the power consumption when all the dynamic factors are turned to minimum. And this minimum constant power consumption is going to be higher.

Sorry, not buying it.

It's because you are randomly guessing based on your gut feeling instead of actually looking at numbers. Let's do some math. For example, notebookcheck measured 8.6 watt average idle power consumption on 2020 13", and 12.1 watts for the 16" model. Let's be optimistic and assume that only half of that difference is because of the larger display. That's 1.75 watt extra drawn by the larger display all the time — you know what, let's actually round it down to 1.5 watts.

Now:

20 hours for 13" M1 with 60 watt-hour battery = 3 watts idle power draw (which is a funny figure given that Apple themselves state M1 Mini idle power consumption at 6 watts, without any displays).

16" with 100 watt-hour battery at (3+1.5) watts = 22.(2) hours

As you can see, a mere 1.5 watts extra power draw is enough to completely negate any benefit from the large battery...

Keep in mind that Apple crammed a 100whr battery in the 16" because it needed to power Intel's unbelievably inefficient 8-core Coffee Lake. When the chip boosts, it can easily go above 100w. The 13" never even bothered with more than 4 Intel cores.

Now you are all over the place. Are we talking about idle power consumption or power consumption under load? In idle, the 8-core Intel CPU doesn't consume any more power than a 4-core one. It's another issue that the baseline idle consumption is significantly higher compared to M1.

 

[The Game 161]

nah I think 20

 

[ArPe]

You’ll push it harder. In real world terms that still means up to 10 hours if you’re pressuring the system.

 

[Fomalhaut]

Extra cores matter very little because it's the efficiency cores that get used in Apple's battery benchmark.

Apple may well not make great use of the performance cores in their battery benchmarks, but that is meaningless for real-world usage that *will* use the performance cores...unless all you do is look at your idle computer without actually using it to do any work...

So is the "30-hour" benchmark you are referring to in comparison to the claimed 20 hours for the MBP13? i.e. maybe 15-18 hours "real" usage? This is more achievable but I would expect 10-12 hours on productivity usage on a new M1 MBP16. For reference I get about 5-6 hours on my current late-2019 i9 Intel MBP16 - for my usage (DevOps / development, document editing, streaming media, video conferences, lots of browser tabs). I would be very happy to get through a working day without having to carry my power brick with me.

 

[senttoschool]

Apple may well not make great use of the performance cores in their battery benchmarks, but that is meaningless for real-world usage that *will* use the performance cores...unless all you do is look at your idle computer without actually using it to do any work...

So is the "30-hour" benchmark you are referring to in comparison to the claimed 20 hours for the MBP13? i.e. maybe 15-18 hours "real" usage? This is more achievable but I would expect 10-12 hours on productivity usage on a new M1 MBP16. For reference I get about 5-6 hours on my current late-2019 i9 Intel MBP16 - for my usage (DevOps / development, document editing, streaming media, video conferences, lots of browser tabs). I would be very happy to get through a working day without having to carry my power brick with me.

We're not talking about "real-world usage" since everyone uses their laptops differently. The number of hours people are debating here are/will be Apple's official numbers.

 

[senttoschool]

No, but it requires around 50% more power. These things add up.

I'm not a display engineer but it should not require 50% more power since I assume that there are fixed power costs to a display that does not need to scale or scale linearly.

It will increase a certain constant baseline power consumption of the SoC by a factor of at least 2-3, yes, even with advanced power gating. It's not much in absolute terms, M1 consumes around 0.5-1 watt at it's minimum, so larger 16" SoC will consume around 1-3 watts or so, but it does add up. As I show below a mere difference of 1.5 watts is enough.

Where did you come up with figures for 1-3 watts for M1X?

That makes it anywhere from 0x more to 6x more idle powerful consumption. This seems like a number that's completely made up.

Let's assume it's in the middle and the M1X requires 3x more idle power on average than the M1. Could you find an example of a big.Little SoC design increasing its idle power by 3x by adding more performance cores?

It's because you are randomly guessing based on your gut feeling instead of actually looking at numbers.

No one knows what the real numbers are. You don't have actual numbers and you're using gut feeling numbers. See above.

Simple extrapolation and the fact that the whole point of efficiency cores is to keep casual power usage around the same would suggest that Apple can easily get 30 hours of battery life if they kept the 100whr battery size.

20 hours for 13" M1 with 60 watt-hour battery = 3 watts idle power draw (which is a funny figure given that Apple themselves state M1 Mini idle power consumption at 6 watts, without any displays).

When Apple runs its battery bench, the laptop is not sitting idle. So clearly, the assumptions are already wrong here.

Let's just admit that both of us know very little about this topic. You're confident that Apple can't get 30 hours on the 16" even with a 100whr battery. I'm confident that Apple can but I'm not confident that Apple would optimize for 30 hours.

 

[leman]

I'm not a display engineer but it should not require 50% more power since I assume that there are fixed power costs to a display that does not need to scale or scale linearly.

Most of display power costs come from the backlight and it scales linear with area... again, power usage measurements for laptops with different display size are available. Screen size alone (from 13" to 15") adds couple of watts.

Where did you come up with figures for 1-3 watts for M1X?

Lowest M1 power consumption (based on Appel powermetrics) is around 0.5 watts. As I said before, later Mac SoC will have more RAM chips, wider buses and more cache — all that stuff costs active power.

Let's assume it's in the middle and the M1X requires 3x more idle power on average than the M1. Could you find an example of a big.Little SoC design increasing its idle power by 3x by adding more performance cores?

I fail to understand what big.LITTLE has to do with this discussion. Apple's implementation has unique characteristics. You can't just take some random ARM SoC and extrapolate from there.

No one knows what the real numbers are. You don't have actual numbers and you're using gut feeling numbers. See above.

We have plenty of actual numbers from third-party measurements and diagnostics tools. Average idle power consumption for various Apple laptops (including M1) are a known quantity.

Simple extrapolation and the fact that the whole point of efficiency cores is to keep casual power usage around the same would suggest that Apple can easily get 30 hours of battery life if they kept the 100whr battery size.

Efficiency cores are there for background tasks and other low-priority stuff. You focus on efficiency core but leave out everything else.

When Apple runs its battery bench, the laptop is not sitting idle. So clearly, the assumptions are already wrong here.

Of course it's sitting idle, on low display brightness to boot. How else are you supposed to get 20 hours out of M1 Pro? Again, 20 hours with that battery capacity means average power draw of 3 watts. Notebookcheck measured average power usage on idle at over 5 watts.

Let's just admit that both of us know very little about this topic. You're confident that Apple can't get 30 hours on the 16" even with a 100whr battery. I'm confident that Apple can but I'm not confident that Apple would optimize for 30 hours.

In the end, if you are serious about a certain claim, you have to provide at least some evidence that supports it. All we've heard so far is "I think", "I believe", "big.LITLE here or there". There is a lot of measurement data out there. I argue that based on my most optimistic estimate, 3.3 watt average power usage for a 16" model is not practically achievable with current display technology. If you don't find that argument compelling, please show your estimate.