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Comment by xuki | Hacker News Reader

How is the battery life? M1 laptops can easily last the whole day without plugging for most users.

I am able to get 4 or 5 hours of intensive programming done on battery power... running multiple IDEs, Android emulators, browsers, etc. I've never tried it with a normal usage pattern because I only use battery power for working.

That’s pretty bad compared to m1. Less than half the battery life.

Also Samsung laptops don’t last in my experience. They make short term tradeoffs at the expense of long term reliability.

Maybe, but 4-5 hours is solidly the point at which it doesn't matter at all to me.

I haven't had trouble finding an outlet for years, even at airports, planes, coffeeshops, etc.

I travel a lot. That’s going to be increasing by the end of the year as my wife and I live the digital nomad life flying across the US. The freedom of not having to worry about your battery life for a day of real world use is amazing. I’ve only had that over the years with an iPad before ARM Macs.

Not to mention your laptop not getting hot enough to boil eggs or sounding like a 747 when you open too ,any Chrome tabs.

The freedom of running Docker on a laptop without heating it to 60c is too tempting, unfortunately. My Macbook will get 2-3 hours of battery life over my Thinkpad, but my Thinkpad also doesn't burn my palms with regular use. It's a game of tradeoffs, but I rarely find myself reaching for the Macbook if I've got a desktop close by.

Maybe that's a skewed perspective though. I have yet to try the Pro/Max chips seriously (or the mobile 12th gen chips, incidentally), but I don't really find myself pining for them either. If my laptop is too limiting, I hop on Tailscale and dev on my desktop.

What type of battery life are you getting on an Mx MacBook?

I'm getting about 10 hours on my M1 16" MBP running a JetBrains IDE and 8 Docker containers.

FWIW I get about the same battery life on Linux with an AMD laptop. It's not as power efficient under load but not having to run a VM for docker helps a lot.

Man, the heating on my MacBook is insane. I have a Thinkpad with on board Nvidia card, beefy CPU, etc, and it can play gfx intense games at 4k and still sit in my lap comfortably.

Meanwhile my MacBook from work gets risking-burns-hot from just screensharing on a Zoom call.

Is this an arm MacBook? It sounds a lot like an Intel one.

Unfortunately, all Macbooks will get pretty hot running Docker, Apple's fan curves will always let your machine heat up before being audible.

I am not sure how accurate this is - I have run my Macbook M1 in clamshell mode for the past year and have almost never heard the fans, and never even felt heat coming off of it, despite having Docker / JetBrains full IDEs open

Running a local dev environment tends to hit ~75c for me on Apple Silicon, I think across 4 or 5 containers. I've also this same environment on my Thinkpad T460s (with a paltry i7 6600u), which settles out around 45-50c.

When depending on solar it’s pretty important to be low power, m1 drawing 10-20 watts vs something else drawing 60-80 can make a big difference on batteries

The reality distortion field of apple fans is really getting out of hand. Portable laptops (i.e. not the desktop substitude game machines) have not been using 60W for years. In fact my X1 from 2016 typically shows between 6 and 15W in powertop depending on load and has been lasting >8h on linux (it's less now as the battery has aged a bit).

I used to think like this. But after using an M1 Macbook Pro, I've changed my opinion. This is true all-day battery. You never have to think about battery anymore. It makes a big difference to my workflow, even though I'm literally 24 hours at home, never more than a few feet away from a wall socket.

I'm willing to put up with all the downsides of this laptop and the OS, just because of the battery life.

I used to think this as well, but the all day battery life on M1 really made me realize how much of a mental tether outlets used to be. It seems pretty minor, but not worrying about getting a seat at the {coffee shop/airport/lounge} next to an outlet makes working on the go a much more attractive option now.

Don't power banks achieve the same and more? They are a bit heavy,but it sounds like it should be worth it to you.

I guess so, but that's another thing you need to remember to charge. I feel like that shifts the mental tether from, "I hope there's an outlet", to, "I hope my power bank has enough juice".

I just got an M1 Pro 14” 10c 32GB RAM and while the battery life is great compared to anything else I’ve used, it’s not as amazing as I would have hoped.

I get around 6 hours from 100% with a light Webpack dev workflow + Docker for Mac running in the background (arm64 postgres and redis containers).

Is that normal? powermetrics shows package power bouncing around 500mW - 10 watts when compiling, which would suggest I should be getting a lot more battery life. Is there a utility to reliably check power consumption of the whole system? Stats.app seems to think my system idles around 5 watts and goes to 40 watts when compiling which is much higher than the package power and my screen is only 1/3 brightness.

> That’s pretty bad compared to m1. Less than half the battery life.

Not really. My M1, used for email, browsing, some xterms, some emacs, 3 or 4 video meetings and the Goland IDE, only gets about 5 hours.

When new it was a little longer than that.

That is actually terrible. I put a new battery into my 2012 macbook and I get about that much battery life with similar usage (although my compute is done on a server).

> That is actually terrible. I put a new battery into my 2012 macbook and I get about that much battery life with similar usage (although my compute is done on a server).

My compute[1] is done locally only. My personal laptop is an HP Victus, it gets around 7 hours because I don't compute locally, which makes the M1 look okay in comparison.

I always wonder about these people who claim the M1 can last a full day without needing to be charged - they can't be developing on the thing, can they? If they're not doing computations on the thing, then the battery life is quite similar to all other non-gaming laptops in that price range.

[1] If by 'compute' you mean compiling code, running it, debugging it, etc

I can run 3 copies of eve online in full brightness and full quality graphics for 7 hours on the M1.

The P-series CPU this article is advertising is not the one you want if you are concerned about battery life. The P CPUs consume as much energy as is practical, in their quest to go faster. These CPUs use 28-64W when active, while their slower U-series counterparts use 15-55W. There was a Dell laptop on Notebookcheck yesterday that had a measured 13-hour battery life and a U-series CPU.

ETA: Comparable laptops reviewed by that site get 8hr runtime from a 71Wh battery and the P CPU, or 13 hours from a 60Wh battery and the U CPU.

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