Tahoe kills your battery faster

[Love-hate 🍏 relationship]

Reading through the comments, I think this is due to running the tests at max brightness. The mba m1 only goes up to 400 nits unlike the newer macbook air models which could explain that.

Ideally this test should have been done with all screens calibrated to the same nit output. But I still think the test is useful for comparing each machine tahoe vs sequoia.

Makes sense, display is still the biggest culprit .

 

[nmt1900]

It is one more argument against taking any random Youtube video as reliable factual proof of anything.

 

[ppetrovic]

In my case, it turns out Electron apps, once updated to the new version do not drain the battery too much anymore, but putting a laptop to sleep and then waking it up will cause the battery usage to skyrocket for whatever reason, even if no Electron apps are running at that point. I have a 14" M4 Max MacBook Pro.

26.1 update better fix this, otherwise it converts my laptop to a de-factor desktop machine that has to remain on the charger all the time since going from over 12+ hours of battery life to about 4 hours is not fun. Luckily, I work 100% from home these days, but still, if I wanted a desktop machine I would've just bought a Mac Studio instead.

 

[TechnoMonk]

Something off here.

What test(s) were run that made the M1-M4 last ONLY about 6 hours, anyway?

Strikes me, prima facie, as some sort of strenuous, processor-intensive task(s) that likely bear little relationship to how people use their devices in normal, mixed daily operations.

Certainly must not be similar to anything I use my MacBook Air for — which routinely gives me double to triple the reported battery life.

For sure, the lose of about an hour is a chunk of time, but that could well have a minor impact on overall if the intensive task(s) make up only part of one's day. For example, if one only does it (them) for a hour, the loss is only 10 minutes!

Given the bizarre times, benchmark differences, and behaviors of those laptops, with M1 & M4 lasting about an hour (or two) longer than the M2 and M3 regardless of OS — and the strange inversion of performance for the M3 MBA, makes the entire testing suspect. What else is running or going on with those laptops?

Does the tester explain that? Certainly not watching a random YouTuber to find out, but maybe someone else who did can fill us in!

Do they even have well-established, good bonafides?

In any event, one test by one person does not a case make!

It’s click bait garbage. I can get my M4 max at 100% GPU and CPU if I make it render some sites that max the GPU/cpu. And also developers need to update their apps to optimize for newer os.

 

[dmccloud]

In my case, it turns out Electron apps, once updated to the new version do not drain the battery too much anymore, but putting a laptop to sleep and then waking it up will cause the battery usage to skyrocket for whatever reason, even if no Electron apps are running at that point. I have a 14" M4 Max MacBook Pro.

26.1 update better fix this, otherwise it converts my laptop to a de-factor desktop machine that has to remain on the charger all the time since going from over 12+ hours of battery life to about 4 hours is not fun. Luckily, I work 100% from home these days, but still, if I wanted a desktop machine I would've just bought a Mac Studio instead.

I've been running the Tahoe betas since WWDC on my MBP, and I'm still only charging my machine every 2-3 days. The only time I even bring my charger is when traveling out of state.

 

[ppetrovic]

Lucky you - my battery lasts between 4 and 6 hours most of the time, whereas before macOS Tahoe it could easily last 10+ hours, typically 12 hours with medium-intensive usage (no local LLM AI inferencing, no compiling several million lines of C code, etc.).

The battery lasted around 3 hours until the Electron private API got fixed, then it improved somewhat but still isn't nearly as good as it used to be.

26.1 update can't come soon enough for me.

 

[Silvestru Hosszu]

There is something happening with M1 Macs on Tahoe.

I have 2 laptops. A M2Pro MBP 14 which after a few days settled down and it is cool on normal office task and no noticeable battery degradation.

The second laptop is a M1Max MBP 16 which was cool on Sequoia but now is much warmer on same workload and battery life degraded significantly.

 

[BigMcGuire]

My M1 Max MBP 16' is really happy on Tahoe. (I do parallels, 2 browsers, and light gaming in the afternoon).

Anything going haywire in the activity monitor? I noticed the first few days after Tahoe install - the indexing was going nuts - even a few days after it was still working.

 

[avro707]

M2 MBA 15” battery life is fine in Tahoe.

 

[Moka Akashiya]

Games with lighting enabled will always consume more power than those with it disabled. The same is true for macOS, which arguably has more complex UI "shaders". Battery life can still be good if you rarely rerender windows when they're moved or shown, but Tahoe will never be better at this UI power consumption segment than Sequoia. And they both will likely be worse than disabled transparency in Sequoia (assuming this option skips multi-layer calculations there, because, as far as I know, it has no effect in Tahoe).

 

[eelpout]

I'm not sure if it's my new refurb Macbook Pro (2024), Tahoe or Microsoft Edge but my Mac is always completely depleated of battery every time I leave it alone and DON'T close the lid first. :/