How long can you use the M1 laptop on single charge?
For reference, the last zoom call I was on (2 hours) with nearly max brightness only drained the battery ~5%. My Intel MBP would’ve been down at least 20%.
I’ve had a range of MacBooks (2013, 2016, 2020, 2021) and it just isn’t a competition. The M1 is head and shoulders above the other models in battery life.
These things are very power efficient while actually computing, but they are extremely power efficient while idle. The whole SoC uses a couple dozen milliwatts while in active idle state (e.g. screen off, machine up and responding to pings via WiFi).
The official number is 17 hours, bu I never had to test it in real life. The crazy thing is charging to 50% in 30 minutes, and 50% is enough to get me through my trips.
For battery longevity, in general I would charge to 90% and then use it until 20%, then recharge to 90% again. This makes the most out of the battery charge cycles, and avoid the increased stress of close-to-0% charge (bad if there for longer time) and close-to-100% charge (less bad but still better not to go there often). But maybe M1 battery system is different for some reason, I don't know.
A more reliable solution is to manipulate pmset directly, or use something like AlDente which handles it for you (the paid version has lots of extra features but the free one suffices to avoid charging above 80% by default).
Obviously when charging time arrives you need to realise yourself and plug in somewhere between 20 and 40%.
The only annoyance is the magsafe’s LED remains amber even when the mac stops charging at 80%.
On my m1 air I’ve only known it to charge to 80% after a period of several weeks where it was docked. As soon as I started using it away from power for significant amounts of time it went back to charging to 100%.
I just checked what happened last time. I went to bed around 2300, it quickly charged to 80% (getting there a bit after 2400), then stayed there until 0200, at which point it decided to charge to 100 which it had reached by 0400.
As it does every workday, and has since before I had that specific phone (which is 2 years old), the alarm woke me at 0600.
So over a 7h night it managed to spend more time at 100% than it did at 80. I’m not going to say I’m impressed, because I’m not. Based on usage pattern I could see it fail to reach 100% by 0600, but I don’t think I’ve woken at 4 once in the last 3 years.
There is zero crazy about that part, it's just 1C charging which is not even extra hard on the batteries.