(HELP!)New M4 Mac Book Pro Dying in 6 Hours With Light Web Browsing

[Jill_]

 

[MacCheetah3]

Are you willing to give some examples of “light Web browsing” because I can’t recall (m)any nowadays.

In other words, six hours of constant/frequent (modern) Web surfing does not seem strongly unreasonable/poor.


EDIT:
Even though Apple claims:

• Up to 16 hours wireless web

That’s “up to” and there are plenty of factors. As already pointed out.

What is the screen brightness set to?

1. Testing conducted by Apple August through October 2024 using preproduction 14-inch MacBook Pro systems with Apple M4, 10-core CPU, 10-core GPU, 24GB of RAM, and 1TB SSD. Wireless web battery life tested by browsing 25 popular websites while connected to Wi-Fi. Video streaming battery life tested with 1080p content in Safari while connected to Wi-Fi. Display brightness set to 8 clicks from the bottom and keyboard backlight was off. Battery life varies by use and configuration. See apple.com/batteries for more information.

THere’s also Wi-Fi strength, other apps (e.g., it does appear you had VSCode open at least at some point), etc.

Looking further over your screenshot, “Time on battery” is 11:14 and estimated runtime remaining is 3:24. And, unless I’m mistaken, that would imply ~14 hours of runtime (not 6) with Safari being the vast majority of usage.

…. I didn’t realize @Apple_Robert already pointed this out.

What is the screen brightness set to? Time on battery shows 11hrs. If the time shown is accurate, that means the Mac will get 14hrs of battery usage which, is not unreasonable.

 

[Apple_Robert]

What is the screen brightness set to? Time on battery shows 11hrs. If the time shown is accurate, that means the Mac will get 14hrs of battery usage which, is not unreasonable.

 

[Jill_]

Thanks for all of the replies, everyone! The essential problem turned out to be Python, which was CONSTANTLY running one core at 100% and causing the battery to drain rapidly. By changing this, my Mac is now reading 10 hours at 50 percent charge, and reliably seems to get about 14-20 hours on a charge depending on brightness. Thanks you all for your help!

 

[goldmac2006]

Thanks for all of the replies, everyone! The essential problem turned out to be Python, which was CONSTANTLY running one core at 100% and causing the battery to drain rapidly. By changing this, my Mac is now reading 10 hours at 50 percent charge, and reliably seems to get about 14-20 hours on a charge depending on brightness. Thanks you all for your help!

Knew it would be the VS code 👈! My Mac usually only drains a lot when I’m playing resource intensive games on Roblox or running VMs on VMware fusion.

Safari only takes a mere ton of battery.

 

[MacCheetah3]

Knew it would be the VS code 👈!

I saw the high energy usage of VS Code — I even mentioned it:

[...] other apps (e.g., it does appear you had VSCode open at least at some point), etc.

However, I’m not familiar with processes being grayed out. And my research didn’t bring up anything definitive as to what it indicates, some say permissions, misconfigurations, or the process just isn’t capable of being monitored for energy usage. So, I didn’t pursue it strongly.

 

[goldmac2006]

I saw the high energy usage of VS Code — I even mentioned it:


However, I’m not familiar with processes being grayed out. And my research didn’t bring up anything definitive as to what it indicates, some say permissions, misconfigurations, or the process just isn’t capable of being monitored for energy usage. So, I didn’t pursue it strongly.

Exactly. 👍 and OP said they were coding a lot in python on that app

 

[orbital~debris]

No consolation, but 6 hours about 50% better than my work laptop (a Microsoft 'Surface' of some sort).