MBP 16 M1 pro safari battery drains 1% every 5-10 minutes!

[aibo82]

Hi

I have to say so far I am unimpressed by the battery drain just light brewing using only just safari with half brightness. It seems to be I'm dropping 1% every 5-10 minutes is that normal?

The battery status says safari is using significant energy? all I'm doing is browsing this site, amazon,ebay etc nothing that intensive.

Its an MBP M1 Pro, 32gb, 1Tb running Monterey 21.1 and Safari 15.2

no other apps are open any idea?

Thanks

 

[crazy dave]

Can you post a screenshot of activity monitor or top to see if there are other processes that standout? Im assuming you’ve had the computer long enough that spotlight indexing is finished? Some people mentioned a core audio bug in another thread. Something to look at. As an aside sometimes I get energy warnings from Safari for the forums of macrumors.com - not sure what that says about this site .

Is it wireless or wired? Is it closer to 5 or 10 minutes? The 16” promises 14 hours of battery life on wireless. To a first order dropping 1% every 10 minutes would actually be better than that, while every 5 minutes would be just less than 8 hours and obviously not as good.

 

[aibo82]

Can you post a screenshot of activity monitor or top to see if there are other processes that standout? Im assuming you’ve had the computer long enough that spotlight indexing is finished? Some people mentioned a core audio bug in another thread. Something to look at. As an aside sometimes I get energy warnings from Safari for the forums of macrumors.com - not sure what that says about this site .

Is it wireless or wired? Is it closer to 5 or 10 minutes? The 16” promises 14 hours of battery life on wireless. To a first order dropping 1% every 10 minutes would actually be better than that, while every 5 minutes would be just less than 8 hours and obviously not as good.

Thanks

Im running it via wifi, I have not used the computer that much apart from shifting large files its on about its 6th full charge.

this is currently I'm going to change it up gain now

 

[crazy dave]

Thanks

Im running it via wifi, I have not used the computer that much apart from shifting large files its on about its 6th full charge.

this is currently I'm going to change it up gain now
View attachment 1946637

Hmmm … nothing stands out to me. How long total usage (not sleeping or even unused) are you getting between charges? or maybe another way, starting your battery anywhere from 20-90% how much battery is used after an hour of web surfing? The estimate of 1% drops after 5-10 minutes provides too much variance to know if this is normal, expected battery life or quite bad or something in between.

 

[satcomer]

Turn your Display down when on battery! The display is largest battery hog on laptop just below the processor!

 

[BreakYurAnkles]

check the cpu processes as well in activity monitor.

use it for a few hours unplugged with normal usage and see how much % is used up.

5-10 minutes like others have said just isn't enough information/data to think its really bad.

If its not lasting anywhere close to what is reported, you might try using it in safe-mode and see if its something with your software.

If it sucks while in safe-mode then there's probably something wrong with the hardware.

Good luck.

 

[Vanarak19]

That's 8-16hrs of use. While 8 is a little low, maybe something is using the CPU a good deal. 16hr is reasonable on the 16MBP. I get about 8-11hr on my 14MBP.

 

[white7561]

8mins per percentage is usually fine for me on 16" . I'm using it at 8 clicks of brightness from below . Watching videos it's usually like that. But yeah the display is the real battery hog. Like for real.

 

[aibo82]

check the cpu processes as well in activity monitor.

use it for a few hours unplugged with normal usage and see how much % is used up.

5-10 minutes like others have said just isn't enough information/data to think its really bad.

If its not lasting anywhere close to what is reported, you might try using it in safe-mode and see if its something with your software.

If it sucks while in safe-mode then there's probably something wrong with the hardware.

Good luck.

Hi

done a more fare test over an hour period I looked around amazon,ebay,bit of YouTube video, checked emails and this website and I dropped about 7-8% battery with the brightness 8 clicks from the bottom.

So is that in the ballpark for the expected battery life?

Thanks guys

 

[crazy dave]

Hi

done a more fare test over an hour period I looked around amazon,ebay,bit of YouTube video, checked emails and this website and I dropped about 7-8% battery with the brightness 8 clicks from the bottom.

So is that in the ballpark for the expected battery life?

Thanks guys

Roughly, yes. A 7-8% drop in an hour would mean it should last about 12-14 hours for web surfing and a little video. That’s close enough to the promised 14 hours that I’d say everything is likely fine with your machine.

 

[jkozlow3]

Hi

done a more fare test over an hour period I looked around amazon,ebay,bit of YouTube video, checked emails and this website and I dropped about 7-8% battery with the brightness 8 clicks from the bottom.

So is that in the ballpark for the expected battery life?

Thanks guys

IMO, yes, you're in the normal range for a new MBP. 7-8% per hour = 12.5-14 hours of usage. You're probably not going to do much better than that in real-world usage. Most people don't need to go more than 12 hours of continuous use without access to a charger.

Apple's published battery life numbers are accomplished under a very specific set of circumstances.

You might squeeze out slightly more battery life if you:

• Do a fresh restart of your machine
• Keep your screen brightness fairly low (i.e. below 50%)
• Don't run any Intel applications (note the "kind" column on the CPU tab of Activity Monitor - any Intel applications will use more battery most likely)
• Use Safari instead of Chrome and do light browsing (not dozens of tabs or sites that use a ton of memory, etc.)

 

[jdb8167]

Don't run any Intel applications (note the "kind" column on the CPU tab of Activity Monitor - any Intel applications will use more battery most likely)

Why do you think that? Outside of the first run translation to Arm64, a Rosetta 2 binary is still running the same Aarch64 instructions as a natively compiled application. The translated binary won’t run quite as fast as native Apple silicon but it isn’t going to use any more battery than any other application using CPU resources for the same period of time.

 

[appleArticulate]

1% every 10 minutes? That's fantastic battery life.

 

[jkozlow3]

Why do you think that? Outside of the first run translation to Arm64, a Rosetta 2 binary is still running the same Aarch64 instructions as a natively compiled application. The translated binary won’t run quite as fast as native Apple silicon but it isn’t going to use any more battery than any other application using CPU resources for the same period of time.

I'm far from an expert, but there have been tons of discussions here over the past 1+ year since M1 macs were released about how numerous people saw battery life improvements when not running Intel/non-native Apple apps. YMMV

 

[crazy dave]

I'm far from an expert, but there have been tons of discussions here over the past 1+ year since M1 macs were released about how numerous people saw battery life improvements when not running Intel/non-native Apple apps. YMMV

Why do you think that? Outside of the first run translation to Arm64, a Rosetta 2 binary is still running the same Aarch64 instructions as a natively compiled application. The translated binary won’t run quite as fast as native Apple silicon but it isn’t going to use any more battery than any other application using CPU resources for the same period of time.

While someone should do a formal study, I think the worst offenders in this regard would be things like non native electron apps or other applications where Rosetta can’t fully precompile the translation. Thus it always has to do the translation just in time. It’s also possible that the Rosetta translation in some cases may be quite poor and use more power for less performance than it should.

 

[jdb8167]

I'm far from an expert, but there have been tons of discussions here over the past 1+ year since M1 macs were released about how numerous people saw battery life improvements when not running Intel/non-native Apple apps. YMMV

There is a concept called "race to idle" where getting a task completed in the shortest time and then allowing the CPU to go into an idle state will save power. And there is no doubt that software that is translated from x86-64 to Aarch64 will take a bit longer to reach idle as it is less optimized but it is very unlikely that the difference is significant enough that a user will see less battery life. There may be exceptions for certain very long period tasks like exporting a video or rendering a 3d view.

For tasks that use Rosetta 2 that run in relatively short bursts, there won't be a difference in battery life. Avoiding all Intel software isn't necessary.

 

[jdb8167]

While someone should do a formal study, I think the worst offenders in this regard would be things like non native electron apps or other applications where Rosetta can’t fully precompile the translation. Thus it always has to do the translation just in time. It’s also possible that the Rosetta translation in some cases may be quite poor and use more power for less performance than it should.

Yeah, I was a little too absolute. I'm mostly complaining about the myth that users have to avoid all Intel applications or their battery life will suffer. I would hope that most electron apps are updated now with native versions as well as things like Premier and Blender.