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Comment by spockz | Hacker News Reader

I am as happy with my 13” M1 mbp 2020 as you with your. My only gripe is that the screen is too small and more importantly after two years I went from a stellar 21h battery life to 13h for lightweight work and it now also seems to drain on sleep. And it seems to lose charge quicker under load.

The battery capacity is still reported as 91%of spec which does not explain this behaviour.

I hope yours holds up better.

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I recently noticed a decline in battery on my M1. It is ridiculous to complain about 10h battery life but the decline was noticeable. I fixed it by:

1) Turn off siri suggestions & privacy and all the app watching it does. System Settings -> Siri & Spotlight -> Siri Suggestions & Privacy. It turned it off for every app.

2) Turn off siri all together. System Settings -> Siri & Spotlight -> Ask Siri Toggle

3) Turn off Spotlight for everything you do not need. System Settings -> Siri & Spotlight -> Search Results check boxes

4) Turn off login items. System Settings -> Login items. Remove what you do not need from the list.

5) Turn off run in background items. System Settings -> Login items -> Allow in background

6) Remove items from ~/Library/LaunchAgents/ that you do not need. I had an old docker vnet item that wasn't needed.

Other than #6, you can do the first 5 things on all of your Apple devices and it makes a big difference in battery life. I just did the same steps with my phone and ipad.

I hope this helps your battery life a little bit.

Thank you! I have turned off a lot of background helpers from apps I don't use anymore and removed some search result types. Docker was in the background helpers multiple times. Let's see how much this helps.

In activity monitor, I also saw that Steam and iStat Menus both hand an "impact" of 50 which made them the top 2, the next had an "impact" of 5.

This might be an old issue, but try turning of the hard drive space indicator in iStats Menu. It was a major drain for me a couple years ago. After a restart, energy use went way down.

Thank you. As part of the analysis I stopped istats completely as it was one of the main consumers of power.

But I think it must still be something else as it also consumes power in sleep. And I have disabled function to wake up and check mail.

I wonder if you have installed software over that time period that is doing a lot in the background. I'd check activity monitor and see if there is anything suspicious.

I lolled while reading this.

I get like 45 minutes battery time out of my 1,5 year old Dell XPS 17. Not even enough for a meeting.

If you're this bboy gravity just want to say I'm a huge fan! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zkrej5EW3Gg

How I whish, haha

I had some major battery and charging issues while sleeping with 2 older macs that were a challenge to isolate. It turned out that in one case, the charging brick itself had started having problems and couldn't keep up with how quickly docker was demanding power. Got that replaced under warranty.

The other was just a straight-up hardware issue with the computer. I'd close the lid close to a low battery and let it stay closed long enough for it to hibernate, and then when I'd open it back up it will have completely drained and I'd get a kernal panic. They replaced it after quite a lot of back and forth until I was able to prove it.

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