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Comment by apatheticonion | Hacker News Reader

I actually think you're onto something with this. When I run compilation workloads on my M1 MBP, I get 3-4 hours battery life.

VMs and games (crossover) also bring my battery life down to 4-6 hours.

My old intel MBP would get around the same battery life when doing the same workloads (games under bootcamp Windows), it would get worse battery life sitting idle or for optimised workloads (like video playback).

Mixed workloads, I get maybe 2-3 hours more with my M1 laptop. That's not nothing, but it's not the crazy 18 hours battery life in the marketing material

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I need to go back and watch the marketing material, but I think everytime they brough up battery life, it was under conditions. Like 20 hour battery life browsing the web. 18 hour battery life with video playback. I don't think anywhere they claimed 20 hour battery life using something like Blender.

Which of course should be expected. My M1 probably gets about 18-20 hours when I am just web browsing. If I am compiling Xcode projects, half that. Messing around in C in Emacs, probably 14-16 hours battery life.

18 hours battery life is mostly marketing. Not even sure how to test that, maybe on 20% display brightness with no programs running, other than the OS...assuming it doesn't take screenlock/display off into account?

I remember reviews on youtube that showed the macbook air/pro M1 playing video (streaming?) for that long. Actually, it kept going for 20h.

https://youtu.be/KE-hrWTgDjk?t=645

Benchmarketing. It has hardware support for video codecs so it can play video efficiently in particular even though people traditionally think of that as something processor intensive.

The question is, what's the battery life when you're doing kernel compiles or GPGPU.

According to "Garry explains" on YouTube, the M1 MBP gets 3 hours of battery life looping kernel (I think) compilations until the laptop dies.

That feels about right to me too. I don't know if I'm usually just doing more computationally intensive stuff than most with my 16" M1 Pro, but I think the only way I could get anywhere near the advertised numbers is if I basically just had Safari open and the display on half brightness.

And not to beat the already long dead horse any more, but toss in some electron apps running in the background, I probably average somewhere around ~7 hours or so. I'm not convinced the 10+ hour lifetime is possible if you've got stuff like Discord/Slack/VS Code open.

But in terms of when I am doing truly evil things to it, I am surprised it lasts as long as it does, be it max CPU compiling or all of this morning when I was toying around with stable diffusion, it gets around ~4 hours or so.

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