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Tell us about your legendary M1 MacBook Air/Pro battery life so far.

Here’s something. I can use all kinds of pro apps on the Pro and it barely gets warm.

I just tried Sidecar between the Pro and an iPad and that made it noticeably warmer than anything else I tried. After disconnecting Sidecar the temps went back to normal.
 
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nameste said:
Do the mba and mbp uses same battery?
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Few seconds on google would of gave you the answer you're looking for.

Screen Shot 2020-11-23 at 7.07.26 am.png
 
Yesterday I purposely was trying to kill the battery just to get a full cycle/calibraton and it was tough! It took me all day with streaming multiple 4K and 8k videos, playing Netflix along with every single app open
 
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After 24 hours of watching 4K porn videos, I used mine to jump start my car!
Watching was not contiguous. //one or both of these is a lie.

It’s better than the last MacBook I had and better than the Pixelbook Go I had. Pretty impressive stuff when you consider how responsive and snappy they are.
 
I am literally getting Chromebook level battery life out of a machine that benches higher than the current i9 MBP 16. It is crazy. I am gobsmacked.

Admittedly I am coming from a 2015 rMBP as my previous daily driver. That has lost half its battery capacity according to CB and on Catalina even during light usage (literally just running Chrome and Music/Tidal) the max I'd get out of it is 1.5 hours.

So any new laptop would have been better than that old thing. But I also use a Chromebook and more recently my iPad Pro for travelling (Covid not withstanding). So I'm used to amazing battery on those.

The MBA is seriously better on battery than my Chromebook, almost on par with my iPad Pro (depending on what I'm doing with it), and just generally an all-round battery beast.

I can use this thing for a day straight running Chrome with 10-20 tabs, playing music through YouTube, Music, Tidal, or VLC, multiple messaging apps, my VPN client, and Little Snitch. I'll have 35-40% left by the end of the day with that usage.

This is especially impressive when half of that is running through Rosetta 2. I fully expect battery to get even better when all my daily apps are ported to native ARM.

I'm yet to give it a proper test when putting more load on the CPU, like using Logic Pro or iMovie, but I will be doing that very soon and I expect equally amazing results. I would not have even dared to open iMovie on the old MBP without it being plugged in. It'd die in 30 minutes. On this I have no worries.

Also curious to see how it fares with Transmission running in the background which is part of my regular use on the MBP but I can't do it on my MBA yet until 11.1 comes out due to a bug that causes Transmission to crash LS and potentially cause a kernel panic. It's been confirmed fixed in the 11.1 beta so just awaiting the official release.

Anyway, overall impressions are extremely positive. This is amazing stuff and it's only the first gen!
 
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Zazoh said:
After 24 hours of watching 4K porn videos, I used mine to jump start my car!
Watching was not contiguous. //one or both of these is a lie.

It’s better than the last MacBook I had and better than the Pixelbook Go I had. Pretty impressive stuff when you consider how responsive and snappy they are.
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lol watching 4k porn... what is this 2017? why arent you watching the 8k stuff?
 
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This re-assures me there is something wrong with my battery...? I get barely 6-8 hours so far at the most. Just regular browsing, nothing taxing system too much.

Laptop is one week old tomorrow, so it definitely had a chance to settle down and stop indexing. I have read it's impossible to reset SMC on M1 laptops.

Any advice?

Thanks
 
inc0gnito said:
This re-assures me there is something wrong with my battery...? I get barely 6-8 hours so far at the most. Just regular browsing, nothing taxing system too much.

Laptop is one week old tomorrow, so it definitely had a chance to settle down and stop indexing. I have read it's impossible to reset SMC on M1 laptops.

Any advice?

Thanks
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It really depends on apps in my experience thus far. Contrary to my above reply, I did a 90 minute Jitsi videoconference on Sunday afternoon with my family and my battery dropped from 99% to 70%, so I would look at what you are running closely before you assume there is a battery issue.
 
darkharbour said:
It really depends on apps in my experience thus far. Contrary to my above reply, I did a 90 minute Jitsi videoconference on Sunday afternoon with my family and my battery dropped from 99% to 70%, so I would look at what you are running closely before you assume there is a battery issue.
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It's just a few Safari tabs and Mac Mail client. That's it! Losing a 1% every 4-5 minutes.
 
I found an instance where the M1 MBA battery sinks like a stone - WiFi. I was doing a CCC backup from new (30mins or so) and the battery decreased from 100% to 85% over 15mins. Now, 4 hours later (no special serious WiFi since) it's down to 70%. That's not much better than the Intel 2020 MBA that it replaced.

System says battery is at 100% with 2 cycle count.
 
darkharbour said:
Haven’t done a full battery test on my MBA yet, but I used it unplugged for some web browsing and a couple small photo edits last night and after nearly 4 hours I was still at 90%.
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youre not going to get 40 hours of battery life.
do people actually believe these claims ?
 
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fourchannel said:
youre not going to get 40 hours of battery life.
do people actually believe these claims ?
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I never claimed to think that the discharge rate would stay linear throughout, I was only posting an actual use case as an example. As I said in a later post, it also varies greatly (as would be expected), but it’s miles ahead of my previous 16” MacBook Pro and definitely outpaces my 2017 MacBook 12”
 
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