MBP 14 battery sucks. Why?

[thadoggfather]

Does anyone know how the battery of the 14" MBP compares to the M1 MacBook Air? I know the battery life with the Air is less than the M1 MBP, but not sure how it compares with the new 14" MBP with M1 Pro or Max.

I wonder this too

 

[petvas]

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.

 

[petvas]

This is a quote from the Gizmodo review:

The one area where the MacBook Pro underwhelms is battery life. The 14-inch model I tested with M1 Max lasted 8 hours and 39 minutes on Gizmodo’s video rundown battery test, which is a little above average for a laptop, but doesn’t come close to touching the incredible battery life on last year’s M1 MacBook Air (14:02) or M1 MacBook Pro (18 hours). I retested with ProMotion turned off and eked out an extra hour, but given that ProMotion is turned on by default (and you definitely want to use it), the battery life is a bit of a letdown.

Anecdotally I also found the battery life to be very average. I have to use Google Chrome for work, because Kinja hates Safari, and unfortunately, Chrome is still an absolutely ridiculous battery hog. Over four hours of work in Chrome, the MacBook Pro’s battery life plummeted from 100% to 60%. I can definitely still get a full day’s work done with battery to spare, but it’s not quite the beast that the M1 MacBook Air was in my testing.

The Ultra-Powerful New MacBook Pro Is Top Notch (Sorry, Sorry, Trying to Delete)

The MacBook Pro is finally everything you want a pro machine to be.

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.

 

[badlydrawnboy]

I can definitely still get a full day’s work done with battery to spare, but it’s not quite the beast that the M1 MacBook Air was in my testing.

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?

 

[petvas]

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.

 

[JPack]

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.

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.

 

[petvas]

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.

 

[badlydrawnboy]

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.

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.

 

[DNichter]

I’ll wait to test my own workflow for battery life, but I wasn’t expecting any type of increase compared to the M1 air due to the screen. Compared to the 2017 MBP that I’m coming from now though, it will be a nice improvement.

 

[EnderTW]

Gizmodo doesn't have a great track record in being fair to Apple. Don't trust their publication.

 

[Rashy]

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.

 

[JPack]

Gizmodo doesn't have a great track record in being fair to Apple. Don't trust their publication.

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?

 

[ignaciobarrena]

MacBook Pro 14 review

Practically perfect, just missing a USB-A port

www.laptopmag.com

MacBook Pro 14 battery life​

Apple estimates that the MacBook Pro 14 can last up to 17 hours of fullscreen video playback and 11 hours of wireless web browsing. This is due to the efficiency of the M1 Pro chip. When we ran the Laptop Mag Battery Test, which consists of continuous web surfing over Wi-Fi at 150 nits of brightness, the MacBook Pro lasted an impressive 14 hours and 8 minutes with the Promotion. refresh rate enabled.

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

www.techradar.com

Battery life​

When Apple launched the MacBook Pro 13-inch (M1, 2020), it boasted that it had the longest battery life ever in a MacBook, and our tests confirmed that, so when Apple revealed that the 14-inch could beat the 13-inch by whopping seven hours, we couldn’t wait to try it out for ourselves.

Apple claims that the MacBook Pro 14-inch can hit up to 17 hours when playing fullscreen videos, and 11 hours of wireless web browsing. In our own battery benchmark tests, where we played a looped 1080p video until the battery ran out, we found it lasted a very impressive 15 hours and 58 minutes, not too far off Apple’s 17 hour claims. The MacBook Pro 13-inch (M1, 2020) lasted 13 hours and 22 minutes in the same test.

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The 14-inch MacBook Pro blends incredible power with all the right throwbacks | CNN Underscored

The new 14-inch MacBook Pro delivers incredibly fast performance, a gorgeous display and lots of useful ports.

us.cnn.com

There’s one area where our particular 14-inch MacBook Pro unit didn’t blow us away, and it’s battery life. Apple’s new laptop lasted just over six and a half hours on our continuous 4K video playback test, and we got roughly the same amount of endurance during a typical day of using Slack, Chrome and Outlook while occasionally jumping to heavier creative apps.

That’s only a fraction of what we got from the M1 MacBook Air (14:12) and 13-inch MacBook Pro (16:30), and behind the 8 hours and 14 minutes we saw on the Surface Laptop Studio. Our battery result is also a far cry from Apple’s rating of up to 11 hours of wireless web browsing and 17 hours of video playback. It’s possible that the speedier 120Hz ProMotion display is eating up some extra battery life here, so you may want to lock the refresh rate to 60Hz if you want the best possible endurance. Your mileage may vary based on how you use the new MacBook Pro, but I personally struggled to get through a full workday on a charge. The good news is that the MagSafe 3 charger often fully juiced the laptop in less than an hour, so you’ll want to keep it handy on the road.

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.

www.pcmag.com

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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).

 

[badlydrawnboy]

MacBook Pro 14 review

Practically perfect, just missing a USB-A port

www.laptopmag.com

For reference, this web rated the M1 MacBook Pro battery lasting 16h 32min.

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.

 

[yitwail]

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.

There’s also low power mode to consider. It only kicks in when unplugged and basically reduces screen brightness and clock speed.

 

[eelpout]

MacBook Pro 14 review

Practically perfect, just missing a USB-A port

www.laptopmag.com

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 🙂 )

 

[tomswift99]

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.

 

[alee]

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?

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.

 

[kp98077]

So I should have stuck with the M1 air maybe ….

 

[badlydrawnboy]

Another review quoting 14 hours of battery life at 150 nits. I’m optimistic.

 

[aohus]

[*]Testing conducted by Apple in September 2021 using preproduction 14-inch MacBook Pro systems with Apple M1 Pro, 8-core CPU, 14-core GPU, 16GB of RAM, and 512GB SSD. The wireless web test measures battery life by wirelessly browsing 25 popular websites with display brightness set to 8 clicks from bottom. The Apple TV app movie playback test measures battery life by playing back HD 1080p content with display brightness set to 8 clicks from bottom. Battery life varies by use and configuration. See apple.com/batteries for more information.

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)

 

[yitwail]

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.

 

[aohus]

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.

 

[yitwail]

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.

 

[1rottenapple]

Does anyone know how the battery of the 14" MBP compares to the M1 MacBook Air? I know the battery life with the Air is less than the M1 MBP, but not sure how it compares with the new 14" MBP with M1 Pro or Max.

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.