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MBP 14 battery sucks. Why?
- Thread starter Xolp
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The ProMotion display works in a progressive mode. It doesn't always set the display to 120Hz, but it goes down when the extra Hz is not required, so I don't think that this is the reason for the worse battery. I think that the more performance cores are the main reason here.
This is a quote from the Gizmodo review:
gizmodo.com
So it seems that the 14" model will just have above average battery life. Turning ProMotion off helps, but not that much. I guess people with a 13" M1 MBP will have to consider if the extra power and display is more important to them than battery life and portability.
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gizmodo.com
So it seems that the 14" model will just have above average battery life. Turning ProMotion off helps, but not that much. I guess people with a 13" M1 MBP will have to consider if the extra power and display is more important to them than battery life and portability.
I guess this is what it comes down to for me. Can I do a full day's work? Will the battery last for a cross-country flight? Given that it can charge 50% in just 30 minutes, in what situations would I need more than 8.5 hours of battery life?
It's not just the extra power and display, for me, it's also the far better speakers, the ports, and the 1080p webcam.
The 2022 Macbook Air might be a good middle ground option (though I doubt it will have better speakers or ports other than Thunderbolt).
Question: why are we seeing such dramatic differences in battery life tests? Is it just screen brightness? I use my Macbook Air with the screen set 8 notches to the left. I think that's closer to what was used in the Tom's Guide testing?
I don’t see any differences in the various battery tests. They are all pretty consistent. I also find it interesting that “journalists” like Jason Snell posted reviews with not a single mention of battery life.
Gizmodo says turning off ProMotion gets an extra hour of battery life during their video rundown test.
You still have a larger, brighter, and a higher resolution display. That will account for most of the battery life difference.
iFanr measured 5W SoC package power when playing back 4K HDR on M1 Max.
CPU cores are definitely not the reason behind the battery life difference.
One hour more doesn’t get most of the battery life difference. The difference is at least 6 hours when comparing it to the 13” M1 MBP. Is that a showstopper? I guess not, but since I don’t need the extra CPU power, it makes me consider keeping my 13” M1 MBP.
Really? Engadget's review said the 14" got 12:35 on their battery test. Tom's Guide said it got >14 hours. That seems meaningfully different from the 8:39 mentioned in the Gizmodo review.
In addition, such a big gap between Apple's usually quite accurate claim and real-life performance is quite unusual. We now have 3 reviews so far with battery runtime, one below 9hrs, two above 12hrs. I dunno why people start panicking now. I bet we gonna land in the region of 10-11hrs in the end, which is perfectly fine for me considering the overall package.
Do you have specific examples of poor reporting by Gizmodo? Or did Apple make a mistake by sending day one review units to them for the past several years?
For reference, this web rated the M1 MacBook Pro battery lasting 16h 32min.
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Apple MacBook Pro 14-inch (2021) review
A mightily impressive creative laptop from Apple
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The new 14-inch MacBook Pro delivers incredibly fast performance, a gorgeous display and lots of useful ports.
There must be something bad with their computer, or maybe some background process/indexing going on. 6h 30min is horrendous and it doesn't make any sense, 10h less than the M1 MacBook Pro 2020 haha
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Apple MacBook Pro 14-Inch Review
The 14-inch Apple MacBook Pro occupies a new sweet spot among pro content-creator laptops: far more capable than consumer-class alternatives, yet much less expensive than its 16-inch sibling and bulkier Windows workstations.
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In conclusion and before we get more testing, I think is safe to asume that the 14" model will get 2-4h less of battery than the M1 MacBook Pro 2020 in similar settings. If this is the case, for me it's totally worth it, I'm upgrading from a rMBP 2015 13" that gets around 6-8h with light usage and less than 6h when using music production software (ableton live, traktor).
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I'm happy to see this because I usually run closer to 150 nits brightness. I wonder if some of the tests with lower battery life had higher brightness. I think someone mentioned one of the tests was at 250, as is Apple's estimate.
For reference, this web rated the M1 MacBook Pro battery lasting 16h 32min.
There’s also low power mode to consider. It only kicks in when unplugged and basically reduces screen brightness and clock speed.
For reference, this web rated the M1 MacBook Pro battery lasting 16h 32min.
I like Laptop Mag and Notebook Check for battery tests. The latter hasn't done a review yet for the new MBP's.
after watching and reading some reviews I'm seriously considering canceling my 14" order and just getting last year's 13" M1 MBP instead (when a refurb comes up for my config). Part of the reason being battery life and the other, similar single core performance between the M1 and M1 Pro. For photo work, the multi-core and GPU improvements won't help that much in Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop. The improved memory performance will help and the screen would be nice, but not sure it's worth it overall. :/
( oh and I agree with Laptop Mag about the missing USB-A... I use mine quite a bit on my HP Spectre
)Picking up a base 14 inch in 2 hours! So I guess we'll know soon. Will be testing it today with some light web dev work, VSCode, Chrome, Safari tabs, etc. Want to know if I can get a full work day out of it. If not, Apple have a very generous return policy.
Gizmodo was the source of the iPhone 4 leak (prototype pre-production phone left at a bar). They were blacklisted by Apple for publishing a pre-launch first impressions. Note pre-launch (phone hadn't even been officially announced). Apple didn't send them review units for years after that... Gizmodo was forced to do meta reviews based on other site's reviews. Not sure when Apple put them back in good standing.
This is from Apple's website when testing battery life.
For those that are on wireless web mostly for MBP, the 11 hour battery life seems accurate. The key here being that the display needs to be in the middle brightness setting (8 clicks from bottom)
Oh, there’s no doubt that particular result is accurate as it goes but it doesn’t follow that with different usage patterns, the disparity between 13 and 14 MBP would never vary significantly. So I’m reserving judgment until I do my own real world testing.
the updated 14 inch mbp has additional performance cores and 2 less efficiency cores. nit brightness 8 clicks from bottom could be higher than the 13 inch mbp as well. promotion will lessen battery life, and the higher resolution no doubt.
I think I read somewhere that disabling promotion extends battery life a bit. Worth a try.
I want to know this, and how is heat on the top of the keyboard. I like that about the air, the cool typing surface when doing mundane task.