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I can see there is an opportunity for someone to develop a new app for the M1 Pro/Max chip with the switch on and off Low Power base on plugged in or not. It's like Intel all over again!
I actually created a shortcut to turn on Low Power Mode on my iPhone whenever battery was below 50%.

I also found this shortcut to enable low power mode on Mac OS - direct link

I'll try it and share my experience with it.
 
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I gather from your signature that this is the 14", so that's quite impressive. What is the current state of M1 optimization for TensorFlow/PyTorch/etc.? From what I can tell the Metal/GPU optimization still sounds like a work in progress for most programs except the few creative-oriented ones showcased by Apple, and I suppose this would be particularly beneficial for the M1 Pro/Max as opposed to the original M1.

Yeah, it definitely is. There are some packages that still do not work / work well natively on M1 machines, with no GPU acceleration, but over the last year, there definitely have been significant progress. I guess with the new pro machines, I hope that this will give greater impetus for some of these packages to be optimized / updated, since not many in the research / scientific community typically use an MBA or mac mini for daily work.

My test would be that everything in LAPack through either openBLAS or atLAS work as trouble-free as on old intel machines, and we see the expected speed ups compared to the older gen machine, and by that time, it would be mission accomplished. But things should progress pretty rapidly now that far more people from the research community would be onboard.
 
I'm getting anything from 9-12.5 hours on low power mode. I bought the base 14" as I kind of figured that although the binned SoC would consume exactly the same energy as the 10 core the fact that I'm only loading up 8/14 cores would make it pretty efficient on battery. It seems that way, battery life has been very good and not far off my base MacBook Air.

I've purchased it as my everyday laptop with some light work including cloud based coding, occasional Photoshop work, Office and web surfing.

It's a really quick device even in base config. I only purchased is as a replacement for my Air due to occasional memory pressure on 8gb RAM and the bigger display.
 
I'm getting anything from 9-12.5 hours on low power mode. I bought the base 14" as I kind of figured that although the binned SoC would consume exactly the same energy as the 10 core the fact that I'm only loading up 8/14 cores would make it pretty efficient on battery. It seems that way, battery life has been very good and not far off my base MacBook Air.

I've purchased it as my everyday laptop with some light work including cloud based coding, occasional Photoshop work, Office and web surfing.

It's a really quick device even in base config. I only purchased is as a replacement for my Air due to occasional memory pressure on 8gb RAM and the bigger display.
How much were you getting on your M1 Air?
 
How much were you getting on your M1 Air?
Around an hour more between worst and best cases so around 10-13 usually. The base MBP 14 is a noticeably quicker device as well. Everything feels snappier I'm assuming due to the speed of the SSD and increased RAM. I was going to go for a higher spec 14" but for my use cases this has been perfect so far.
 
Yeah, it definitely is. There are some packages that still do not work / work well natively on M1 machines, with no GPU acceleration, but over the last year, there definitely have been significant progress. I guess with the new pro machines, I hope that this will give greater impetus for some of these packages to be optimized / updated, since not many in the research / scientific community typically use an MBA or mac mini for daily work.

My test would be that everything in LAPack through either openBLAS or atLAS work as trouble-free as on old intel machines, and we see the expected speed ups compared to the older gen machine, and by that time, it would be mission accomplished. But things should progress pretty rapidly now that far more people from the research community would be onboard.

I also use the Python data ecosystem.

On my 2015 MBP 15" 16GB the thing heats up and fans go crazy for some tasks such as training nets or indexing text data.

How do you find the 2021 MBP regarding heat, fans and noise?
 
Normal mode, web browsing and an hour of logic pro through multiple days, bluetooth was off, screen brightness was about 30-50 percent usually and by the end the battery was at 22 percent. Got about 12 hours of screen on time. I got about 12 hours on M1 Air with almost an identical use, except logic pro, so I'm impressed so far. I also felt zero heat, didnt hear the fans noise once. I imagine I could easily get a longer battery life if I just put it in low power mode the entire time, but I would only use that in cases where I didn't have an outlet around or something, otherwise whats the point of getting all of this performance power.
 
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Normal mode, web browsing and an hour of logic pro through multiple days, bluetooth was off, screen brightness was about 30-50 percent usually and by the end the battery was at 22 percent. Got about 12 hours of screen on time. I got about 12 hours on M1 Air with almost an identical use, except logic pro, so I'm impressed so far. I also felt zero heat, didnt hear the fans noise once. I imagine I could easily get a longer battery life if I just put it in low power mode the entire time, but I would only use that in cases where I didn't have an outlet around or something, otherwise whats the point of getting all of this performance power.
Which CPU/GPU config are you running?
 
I also use the Python data ecosystem.

On my 2015 MBP 15" 16GB the thing heats up and fans go crazy for some tasks such as training nets or indexing text data.

How do you find the 2021 MBP regarding heat, fans and noise?

Yeah, my 15" does that too, and for some very resource intensive programs, it actually drains battery even with power plugged in.

The 14" MBP is completely the opposite. Even under full load, I hardly notice the fans go on, unless it has been under load for a considerable period of time (varies, say 10 minutes or in that range). Where I work is not completely quiet, so I can't say if you would notice it in a bedroom; but I definitely notice more of the fan of the projector 25 feet away across the room compared to the fan of the 14" in front of me.
 
I have a 14" 10-core 16 GB. I was on track for >12 hours yesterday but didn't do any video calls. Today it was the same... until I just had a 1-hour Zoom call. My battery dropped 15% in that hour vs. ~7-10%, which has been typical. This is in normal power mode.

I'm not sure why Zoom/FaceTime seem to drain the battery more on this machine than they did on my M1 Air, but I'm pretty sure that's the case.

Still, I will likely get 10 hours even with another couple of Zoom calls, and that's good enough for me.
 
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I'm currently doing work outside on a sunny day with the screen at max brightness. Simple text-based things, bluetooth audio, no low power mode enabled, etc. and on track for 4.5 hours of use which is not that far off from what the 13" M1 MBP got me with the same max brightness and text-based work (on average that clocked in around 5 hours of continuous use in that scenario). the screen brightness really does them in.

14" M1 Pro with 32gb ram / 2tb ssd
 
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As the usage between users differs so much i can only tell of my usage and the difference to my M1 Air.
I use it on battery for some recording, websurfing and writing tasks and there we have:

14 Inch M1 Max 32GB: ~16 Hours (20 was my max)
Air M1 8GB: ~20 (22 was my max)

My screen brightness is always pretty low so my numbers are higher then usual.
 
I've just had my MBP barely a week, so it's not the world's most accurate opinion, but I use mine untethered all day, every day, for one thing or another, and I've not yet come close to running out of battery before running out of day. That's good enough for me. My previous laptop was a 13 inch MacBook Air that got through maybe half the day before needing to be charged. I've been using this one all morning since about 6:00 a.m. and it's 75 percent charged at half past noon.
 
As the usage between users differs so much i can only tell of my usage and the difference to my M1 Air.
I use it on battery for some recording, websurfing and writing tasks and there we have:

14 Inch M1 Max 32GB: ~16 Hours (20 was my max)
Air M1 8GB: ~20 (22 was my max)

My screen brightness is always pretty low so my numbers are higher then usual.
Wait you’ve gotten 16-20 hours on a 14 max?!? Is that one click on the brightness? Low power mode? I’ve seen reports of 9 hours with just the m1 max at idle…
 
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Wait you’ve gotten 16-20 hours on a 14 max?!? Is that one click on the brightness? Low power mode? I’ve seen reports of 9 hours with just the m1 max at idle…
6 Clicks and i also use dark mode everything also every website with a plugin. Maybe bightness is the key here but when in the same idle test an M1 Air gets 17 hours and a 14 inch M1 Max gets 9 hours i say there was something wrong.
 
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As the usage between users differs so much i can only tell of my usage and the difference to my M1 Air.
I use it on battery for some recording, websurfing and writing tasks and there we have:

14 Inch M1 Max 32GB: ~16 Hours (20 was my max)
Air M1 8GB: ~20 (22 was my max)

My screen brightness is always pretty low so my numbers are higher then usual.

That’s a lot! What are your numbers when actually using the machine for typical light tasks ( e.g. web browsing, video playback, reading/writing documents?
 
That’s a lot! What are your numbers when actually using the machine for typical light tasks ( e.g. web browsing, video playback, reading/writing documents?
That was with super light usage.

I loose between 5 - 8 Percent per hour with reading, writing, surfing and recording. So the worst case of light use is 12,5 and the best case is 20.

But the display with 50% or 60% brightness will drain quite a bit faster. Also there is no hard cap (like using an M1) except low power mode but that does not stop the chip from going crazy on some workloads. so it would still be great if some M1 Pro user could use low power mode for a while.

For me the max is overkill. I bought it for the bandwidth, monitor support and "light gaming" if apple really does some move.

So when the pro is getting 15 hours with 50% brightness and my usage i think i would get the M1 Pro. The bandwidth does less than i thought.
 
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I'm still seeing some strange battery patterns. I had settled into about 12-13 hours with my typical usage and brightness settings. But then this morning, I was down to 58% after only about 2.5 hours of use. And it was just normal web browsing, email, and some Google docs. No idea what led to such a significant drop.

Any ideas?
 
But the display with 50% or 60% brightness will drain quite a bit faster. Also there is no hard cap (like using an M1) except low power mode but that does not stop the chip from going crazy on some workloads. so it would still be great if some M1 Pro user could use low power mode for a while.

As a programmer, every 15-30 minutes there is some runaway process I need to kill. And it's really all over the place - as much as folks bash chrome, I see it pretty often from Safari. But sometimes it's things you wouldn't expect - npm for instance was hung up even though it has been many minutes since I ran it.

With my 16" i9 it's usually obvious because the fans go crazy. With the 14" not so much, so I've added the time domain process load graph as well to my iStat topbar to more readily distinguish between a blip and a runaway.

Agreed about the brightness being a real drain. As my home has tons of window and it fairly sunny, I usually have the brightness maxxed out and get more like 7'ish hours doing that.
 
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I'm still seeing some strange battery patterns. I had settled into about 12-13 hours with my typical usage and brightness settings. But then this morning, I was down to 58% after only about 2.5 hours of use. And it was just normal web browsing, email, and some Google docs. No idea what led to such a significant drop.

Any ideas?

As I just mentioned above, most likely a runaway process. I'm a big fan of iStat menus to track things like this.
 
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As I just mentioned above, most likely a runaway process. I'm a big fan of iStat menus to track things like this.
Thanks, I'll check out iStat Menus. I looked at Activity Monitor and Window Server was at 120% CPU. Not sure if that had anything to do with it.
 
As I just mentioned above, most likely a runaway process. I'm a big fan of iStat menus to track things like this.

I agree. Monterey in general just feels really badly coded. It's definitely fast, but there's a lot of memory leaks and bugs, even bugs in software that I hadn't experienced on Big Sur.

I've had pretty good battery life, but yesterday also managed to run through 40% of the battery in 2 hours. For me, it was Edge and as soon as I restarted Edge, things became ok.

Also, now that you mentioned iStat, I really hope the next version of Monterey does something about the disappearing icons on the menu bar if you have too many of them! I can't believe they didn't think of a solution for it! I am using Bartender for now, but I don't like it as much.
They increased the spacing between icons in Big Sur and then gave us a notch which just hides extra icons lol (and yes I have checked behind the notch and they are not there).
 
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