Small but yet draining from my experience as an MBP user. Every time I run VMs in general from Linux, MacOS, and Windows on Apple Silicon, my battery seems to drain a lot faster as VM environments always assume it’s on power adapter mode but in reality I’m using a MacBook Pro unplugged and on battery. Is there anyway to add power status in VM environments such as battery percentage from the host of my Apple silicon MacBook Pro? Parallels can do it but Apple Hypervisor Framework can’t. This is one of Apple’s limitations that causes huge power consumption over time always thinking it’s on AC adapter mode. Hopefully Apple is aware about this and adds battery mode into VM environments to not just show battery but also have better power consumption when using VM environments too. But I shouldn’t get my hopes up due to security reasons of Apple Silicon SMC.
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Why hasn’t Apple add battery reporting for virtualization framework?
- Thread starter 808AppleDos
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Set the Mac energy mode to "Low Power". The guest OS will still think it is on full-fat computer hardware, but Mac should throttle itself, and with it, the VM. AFAIK the VM can't override this setting. If it is set to AUTO then the VM will cause the Mac to run at full speed, and drain the battery faster to keep the VM performant (it is still a Mac function as it sees a VM is running and so increases performance to run the VM faster).
What is the guest OS? The only other thing I can suggest is to use external disks sparingly with the VM as they can't be put to sleep. Disable anything in the VM that doesn't need to run.
What is the guest OS? The only other thing I can suggest is to use external disks sparingly with the VM as they can't be put to sleep. Disable anything in the VM that doesn't need to run.
