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M2 MBA's Big Superpower: Efficiency Cores = Incredible Battery Life on Low Power Mode

mrmister said:
I realized yesterday that my new M2 MBA has a superpower I don’t see people here mentioning, and it is a game changer.

The M2 chip’s big advance isn’t in raw horsepower—the performance cores, though it is about 20% faster than an M1.

It’s the EFFICIENCY cores, which Apple focused on for this chip.

(Yes, I know this is a Max Tech video. They annoy me as well—but they do all the tests you need to watch to hear about how this is.)


TLDR: If you use Low Power Mode when on battery, you get 2/3 of the power…and increase your battery life an incredible amount, far outpacing what the M1 can do on Low Power Mode.

It’s a game changer. I haven’t been able to do benchmarks yet, but I think for low-key tasks that my MBA is often doing (posting on these forums, reading my mail, working on documents) it is going to do something like double the battery life.

And as you can see from the performance tests—you lose very little power!

THIS is the reason to get the M2 over the M1. THIS is what we should be focusing on. THIS is the superpower of the M2 chip, and where the emphasis went in designing it.

Try it out, and report back how it’s working for you.
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I run mine on Low Power mode. I'm getting the best battery life this side of Texas!
 
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That's pretty awesome to see. My M1 still lasts through the entire work day so additional battery life is pretty diminishing returns for me at this point.
 
mrmister said:
"Max's video states that LPM is some kind of secret mode when it isn't. The option is easy to see and turn on if one wishes."

I think you're being pendantic—if that's your whole complaint, it's just that you don't like their titling. I really wish we'd stay on the big news that M2 efficiency cores are AMAZING.

"No, I don't have data to back up my personal opinion stated as such."

I mean, ok...but their video takes time to detail the voltages and exactly how much power it uses, and the difference between an M1 Air and an M2 Air. I think saying "it's no big deal" should require more than just "I have an opinion".

"I also haven't dodged anything."

I mean, you think battery life isn't important, which seems bonkers to me, but you are commenting here a lot?
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People complain too much about YouTube titles and thumbnails when that’s what you need to be successful in YouTube.
 
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I'm struggling to understand why one would even need to consistently enable LPM to save battery life. If you're traveling, and away from a charger, then sure. But the battery life on this thing is remarkable enough without LPM turned on.
 
In fairness, I finally got Apple Silicon—maybe people are right and I won’t care about even more battery life. In the past battery has mattered a lot for me.
 
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profcutter said:
A frame rate like it’s 1980… Have you used an 8 bit machine?
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I have. I kinda miss the days when I could hit “redraw” on a light AutoCAD file and spend the next eight minutes walking down to the office canteen to brew some tea, chat with a cute Secretary, and look over the production line before going back to my office to see the results. Or waiting 10 minutes for a redraw on a Tektronics vector display while hoping that the paper tape in the PDP-8 wouldn’t jam. Which was much better than when I would hand in a 1/2” stack of punch cards to the computer center and get a 1” thick printout of my WATFIV program result the next morning, too.

When you have experienced watching each character in a text stream coming over an 80-baud acoustic modem hooked up to the ARPAnet on a green screen on your Lear-Siegler glass TTY, an M2 Air seems pretty quick.
 
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Toratek said:
I have. I kinda miss the days when I could hit “redraw” on a light AutoCAD file and spend the next eight minutes walking down to the office canteen to brew some tea, chat with a cute Secretary, and look over the production line before going back to my office to see the results. Or waiting 10 minutes for a redraw on a Tektronics vector display while hoping that the paper tape in the PDP-8 wouldn’t jam. Which was much better than when I would hand in a 1/2” stack of punch cards to the computer center and get a 1” thick printout of my WATFIV program result the next morning, too.

When you have experienced watching each character in a text stream coming over an 80-baud acoustic modem hooked up to the ARPAnet on a green screen on your Lear-Siegler glass TTY, an M2 Air seems pretty quick.
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Right, the processing was terribly slow, but to even talk of frame rates is a bit… optimistic, since they usually couldn’t even do full motion graphics. Most animation, when it happened, was sprites.
 
johannnn said:
It is confirmed that low power mode on MBA limits the screen to 30 fps [
https://www.reddit.com/r/MacOS/comments/qnw6ao
]. No way am I gonna pay more than $1000 on a laptop and then have a refresh rate like it’s 1980.
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I think you are confusing frame rate of video and refresh rate of the screen. Or maybe that statement is confused and the meant to say 30Hz Refresh rate instead of 30FPS Frame rate.
 
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azentropy said:
I think you are confusing frame rate of video and refresh rate of the screen. Or maybe that statement is confused and the meant to say 30Hz Refresh rate instead of 30FPS Frame rate.
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It's not a 30 Hz refresh on my M2 MacBook Air. No noticeable lag when moving windows which is usually the easiest way to discover that your display is stuck on 30 Hz.

Edit: The website is here: https://www.vsynctester.com.

It seems to only be 30 fps on video playback so it isn't measuring refresh rate in general. But low power mode definitely affects video playback.
 
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Cryates said:
I'm struggling to understand why one would even need to consistently enable LPM to save battery life. If you're traveling, and away from a charger, then sure. But the battery life on this thing is remarkable enough without LPM turned on.
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I don't really notice any significant improvement in real world battery life when I enable LPM on my M1 Macbook Pro. If I'm just doing light tasks, the processor uses very little power anyway.

It's when I fire up more computationally expensive stuff that the difference instantly becomes very obvious.
 
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