M1 MacBook battery life so good Apple thought indicator was broken
9to5mac.com
9to5mac.com
"When the first test chips came back from the lab on the 26 April 1985, Furber plugged one into a development board, and was happy to see it working perfectly first time.
Deeply puzzling, though, was the reading on the multimeter connected in series with the power supply. The needle was at zero: the processor seemed to be consuming no power whatsoever.
As Wilson tells it: “The development board plugged the chip into had a fault: there was no current being sent down the power supply lines at all. The processor was actually running on leakage from the logic circuits. So the low-power big thing that the ARM is most valued for today, the reason that it's on all your mobile phones, was a complete accident."
Wilson had, it turned out, designed a powerful 32-bit processor that consumed no more than a tenth of a Watt."
https://www.theregister.com/Print/2012/05/03/unsung_heroes_o...
After a few days of use, my take: It's good. It's not the messiah-of-tech that I was led to believe, but it's good.
Honestly, I think the hype is overblown. If it wasn't for the hype, I might have thought this machine was amazing. But the expectations being set by all this hype is crazy town.
Not trying to take away from the real technical accomplishment. I'm sure if I put it through the ringer with benchmark tests, it would beat everything with flying colours.
But my day-to-day experience using it hasn't been much different than my previous 2016 Macbook Pro. Yet so many reviews make it seem like everything is so fast that you simply have to experience it to believe it, that every action you take feels faster and better. And that, in my own experience, is proving to be a load of B.S.
It’s that I can do the same things at the same speed as an Intel MacBook, but:
* The machine is dead silent (literally no sound coming from it)
* The battery life is incredible
I’m not sure if it’s as simple as this, but I guess if they said: we don’t mind blaring fans and 6 hours of battery life, then they could clock the M1 so high it would have truly insane performance.
I was really hoping the iMac would do as you say.
- After a few hours of developing an Angular app using ng serve kernel_task consumes insane amounts of CPU time, resulting in extreme lag and completely locking up the device on an attempted restart (not even the touchpad clicks anymore).
- Sometimes MPEG4 videos just would not play until after a reboot
That said: Besides some minor UI glitches it's really, really solid. x86 compatibility is perfect. The GPU is good (again, not amazing, but Minecraft runs at good settings).
Over all it's not revolutionary. Slow software is going to be slow on these too. What they pulled off is amazing ecosystem wise, but as an end user you can be happy about some non-revolutionary pretty good decent spec bumps.
I just worry about the SSD's life. I'm already about 20TB down after a few weeks.
If my understanding of how mac works is correct, this is caused by overheating and basically is throttle mode.
It's also why it's the go-to to blame for performance issues - it's the symptom not the cause. Your laptop isn't running warm because kernel_task is at 80% - but vice versa.
Over 8 cores this figure can start to look crazy. (eg 80% kernel_task can be 8 cores * 10%)
I was still very impressed even with my tempered expectations. For the kind of work I do, it's just as capable as the 16" MBP was - but with no heat, no noise, and real all-day battery.
I have had good luck with dosbox games though. Many games on gog run fine on mac.
The Macs now have the same GPU and Graphics API that developers already have to target for iOS devices, where there is a significant market share and amount of revenue in play.
(There are exceptions.)
Apple would not be able evolve the OS, silicon and Vulkan API in unison (like they do with Metal) because they don’t control the API.
In the end it would be a poor experience for end users.
It would be nice if they supported open source efforts though.
(MS doesn’t maintain the Vulkan API in windows, do they? Similar issues would apply.)
I don't think they update Metal in past OS releases either. You're lucky to get bug fixes.
The games or the game engines?
If Apple gave a bunch of money to port Unreal, Unit, etc, would that help the situation?
The power and size required for "serious gaming" GPU's on mobile is far too significant to fit into a mac size at this time. The term "gaming laptop" is a meme - by the time you've spent $2000 on a gaming laptop you've just bought a jet engine the shape of a brick that does half the work of a desktop at double the price and is terrible for productivity outside of specific use cases. (Like presenting 3d renders or something)
I suppose you could do it if apple were to support proton, and if amd/Nvidia were to standardize their external GPU implementations such that you can just plug in your egpu and have at it. But afaik they're very expensive and use case fitted.
TBH the macbook air would make a better switch than the switch as far as multiplayer portability goes. The switch screen is too small to play something like smash bros on it with friends, and the 'travel dock' solutions are too clunky IMO.
I really doubt it, Apple's model of constant updates requiring constant developer upkeep is incompatible with single purchase games. Only exploitative games as a service with recurring revenue can thrive on a model of endless upkeep. Its a big reason (besides Nintendo's first party quality, an attribute Apple has not demonstrated it is capable of) why the App store is defined by low quality p2w service games.
I'd wager you could easily game on an M1 if the game has support and you are willing to make some graphics concessions.
The future of gaming on mac will probably be Apple Arcade and streaming services.
But isn't that good thing for game companies? They don't have to compete with those old games anymore.
This morning I configured it to hibernate after 30 minutes, so I hope that fixes the problem.
It's comical how bad Windows S5 sleep is. Laptops waking up and running while they're in a bag should be the kind of bug that prevents an operating system from being released! But here we are in 2021, years after Windows 10 was released, and this is still common place.
My next laptop will absolutely not be a PC.
But yeah seriously, Modern sleep is one of the primary reasons I'll never get another Windows laptop after this.
It's worth noting that the stories about crazy battery life (getting through 4+ full days on one charge) come when you use the Apple apps and don't have the brightness too high. If you have the brightness high and use Chrome/lots of non-Apple stuff then you'll have good but not insane battery life. If you set the brightness to a medium-low level and use Apple apps then you'll get ridiculous battery life - I managed to use 17% battery for a full working day the other day (Safari, Sublime, a node server, Postgres, the notes app, and two terminals open.)
When I bought the thing I told myself that using Apple apps was what came with the territory, and I'm actually not missing much. The Safari devtools are great. I do miss uBlock Origin (the alternative for Safari seems to be AdGuard which is not great.) But Safari is a solid browser - certainly snappier than Firefox on Windows or Linux, competitive with Chrome, and I haven't run into any compatibility issues yet.
I think it's interesting to hear the number of developers switching from Linux to macOS as they get M1 Macs. Personally I was a diehard Arch-on-a-beefy-Thinkpad guy (two extended batteries, three SSDs, etc etc) and in the first day of using this Mac I was completely won over. It all just works so seamlessly, performance is great, battery is incredible, screen is gorgeous, speakers are by far the best I've ever heard on a laptop, and shockingly I actually like the keyboard. The webcam is your average laptop quality (aka not great, and a disappointment in contrast to the rest of the hardware.) I do miss the pageup/dn keys, but aside from that, as almost all the M1 reviews end, "this is the best computer I've ever used."
I finally realized I use it more like a Kindle. Unfortunately I'm busy and I'm almost always on my work MBP (Intel) so my usage of the M1 is light.
But we have a Surface Pro (i5) that gets the same style of "light" usage. The difference with the M1 is crazy. I don't bother to plug it in very often. It uses so little battery in light usage that it doesn't drain much, then it's suspend logic is so well done that it doesn't lose much for days and days sitting there. The Surface Pro goes right back on the charger pretty much immediately when you're done with it by comparison, cause you can't trust it's going to have battery if you don't, and when you use it even for something light it burns through lots of battery by comparison. My i7 MBP for work of course chugs down battery at an incredible velocity compared to both, but it gets harder usage.
So in effect it gets treated like a kindle, I plug it in every week or two. That's very new, and it seems weird and took adjustment.
Leading up to and since the M1 Macs were released, the tech community went from skeptical, to intrigued, to excited, and if you were to completely remove Apple's hype machine, these machines stand on their own.
As an M1 user, I can attest to the ridiculously good battery life, and others in this thread are sharing similar anecdotes (I'm on an Air, so I'm not even on the best battery life available).
It is with this context that a statement from Apple's VP of marketing on the same topic is somewhat interesting. The performance and battery life surprised many of us in the tech community, and this anecdote seems to confirm that even at Apple, execs were/are downright surprised at how good this thing is.
If this statement was released before these machines launched, or if performance/battery weren't stellar, then a statement like this from a marketing VP might ring hollow. But in the context of this product's success, I think it's more interesting.
I no longer have any kind of battery anxiety, it probably lasts a couple of days or more (9 or 10 hours a day use IntelliJ web and python dev, bit of YouTube etc) I don’t have to panic to plug it in every night and I’ve taken it away for the weekend without the charger.
I expect either qemu to get better or for apple to add some things to improve running x86-64 VMs. Rosetta 2's JIT portion (some of R2 is AOT) is worlds ahead of qemu's in terms of performance. So, the battery life and performance difference won't be forever.
Thankfully, building arm64 images for most containers I've used is pretty straightforward.
But still unimaginably better than the Intel notebooks. With Docker and the brightness up I'll get a measly 6.5 hours instead of the solid ten or so I get otherwise.
There is a recall program for an earlier model, probably doesn't cover yours (yet) but worth checking anyway: https://support.apple.com/15-inch-macbook-pro-battery-recall
That being said it's still the best laptop I've ever owned and I don't have regrets about getting the Air, but when these battery life articles come up it's just assumed that everyone has the Pro.
1) Is the user's camera on, transmitting an H.264-encoded stream?
2) Is the user using virtual backgrounds, which have a CPU minimum requirement beyond that of the rest of Zoom?
3) Is the user screen sharing, transmitting an H.264-encoded stream, with or without the full-motion video checkbox enabled?
4) How many attendees are shown on the user's screen and are being H.264-decoded to the display?
5) Does Zoom use Apple's A/V interfaces for H.264 encoding and decoding, directly or indirectly, and has Apple (not Zoom!) improved the watts used for those operations on the M1 CPU?
#5, at least, I can consider. I'm looking inside the Zoom macOS binary now and I see a variety of functions in aomhost that are, essentially, image and video stream processing functions, with custom code for _avx2 and _sse2, on my Intel Mac. Zoom supposedly released an M1 native update in December, but I don't (yet) know how to get the M1 client on my Intel Mac to inspect further.
EDIT: Found the M1 client: https://zoom.us/download, "Apple Silicon". In the M1 client, the framework aomhost, which contained x64-optimized function names, is absent; as well as libmpg123. Framework aomagent replaces ApplicationServices with ColorSync,CoreGraphics. So at least for #5, I suspect that Zoom is using Apple's encoding/decoding interfaces, since there's little chance they ported the third-party open source libraries to native macOS interfaces. They're still bundling OpenSSL 1.1.1k rather than using Apple's SSL interfaces, so presumably they only rewrote the MPEG interfaces because they had SSE/AVX optimizations.
You can turn on percentage in the menu bar, and there's several different usage graphs in multiple places.
If you want the actual milliamp-hours, load cycles, battery temperature, age, or even battery serial number, there's an api for that. You can use for example coconutBattery and get whatever data you want.
I've never had a Li-Ion device that didn't exhibit a non-linearity in terms of power draw vs percentage estimation.
100% lasts much longer than 99%, which lasts longer than 98%, down to about 92%, after which point the draw-per-percentage seems to be fairly linear.
Anecdata, I know.
But it's an interesting story.