MacBook Air (M1) Battery Test - Is it as Good as Apple Says?

Apple is claiming that the new M1 based MacBook Air provides 3 extra hours of battery life compared to the previous Intel based model. Is it true? Is the battery life as good as Apple is claiming? Let's find out.

Note: I am using the 8-core CPU/8-core GPU model with 8GB of RAM and 512GB of storage.




#garyexplains

[tdhmoose]

I got 14.5 hours straight just watching You Tube videos with a remaining 7 percent of battery left.

[mparkin]

Excellent job on providing the unique battery perspective, Gary! I was especially pleased with your parsing out of the screen power usage from the other components.

[AlexandruChindea]

1:35 - Holding Shift and Option (alt) while toggling volume or screen brightness allows you to adjust the levels in quarter increments, giving you a total of 64 possible steps for both brightness and volume.

[asianstud]

Fantastic explanation to give a potential buyer of the MacBook air M1 a pretty accurate ballpark of potential battery life to expect before purchase!! You have such good content. You should have way more subscribers!!

[martinb]

How does the continuous software build 3 hour battery life compare to a non ARM Macbook air? Otherwise really informative vid.

[saiphaneeshk.h.]

Still I'm happy they could do this with the first gen itself, let's see what improvements they can come up with in the future.
More the competition, more the innovation more the decrease in price, more the buyers have choices to get a product able device for a cheaper price.

[nickthaskater]

And this is why the mini LED Macbooks can't come soon enough.

[aashutoshtaikar]

Nice video especially the code compilation affecting battery. However very few people will be compiling large projects on their laptop. We have cicd for that. Even if they compile they won’t be compiling continuously 3hrs. Usually a big project compilation should not take more than 1 hour. If it does take more than an hour it’s possible that the code is inefficient and really messed up with lot of interdependencies. Nowadays the code bases are kept small and developers are moving away from monolithic design to a modular design.

[keco]

I’m curious how the MacBook Pro handles these battery tests

[abymohanan]

Thank you so much for this video 👍🏻👌🏻✌🏻

[DavidAlsh]

I have been enjoying the best of both worlds by adopting a remote development environment. Basically I have a PC rocking a 5950x I can SSH into and my MacBook (client) has a bunch of tooling that piggybacks off of SSH to essentially blend the remote and local environments such that it feel like you're developing locally.

A lot of the tooling is repurposed from WSL2 but rather than blending a Linux VM running in Hyper-V, it's Linux running over SSH.

I get a full day battery life with my MacBook and spend my entire work day repeatedly compiling/re-compiling projects that I am working on. Of course, that's to be expected as my MacBook becomes something of a thin client, only responsible for displaying the IDE (intellisense, language servers run on the remote), running a browser and terminal.

I did this with my old 2019 Intel MacBook and got 8 hour days out of it.

Love this workflow as it means I can carry a laptop that is optimised for portability, comfort and ergonomics - while bringing with it the power of a super computer.

[mullergyula]

3 hours of continuous software build is not a bad result.

[kpr]

very helpful and comprehensive information. Thank you :-)

[owlmostdead]

If I push my Intel MacBook 13" 2020 with the 10th gen i5 and really work without holding back it's 100% to 5% in about 50 minutes. So from 50 minutes to approx 2-3 hours would be a welcome change.

[TheBf]

You can like or dislike apple, but you have to give them credit for pushing other companies to develop efficient tech and step it up.

[lahmyaj]

Another great video about the M1/Apple gear thanks Gary 👍🏻

Bit surprised the battery life isn't better but I'd still bet this outpaces any Intel Macs easily!

[Cold-]

it would be interesting to separate the compute from the I/O stuff by e.g. using tmpfs during the build. Also doing an I/O benchmark would give a more complete result. The way it is now, it's not clear for me, wether the battery drop is a result of mostly the I/O or maybe the M1 chip using too much power under load. Tomb Raider points to the latter since the game should not be using that much I/O.

[NithilMaleveettil]

I have owned both 2020 Macbook Air (Intel and M1). Intel Macbook would go from 100% to about 20% by the end of the day (~ 4 hrs of mostly iOS development using Xcode). Performing the same activity for a similar duration, M1 has about 50% left by end of the day.

[chrisdistant]

Very interesting experiments, thx for sharing!

[majoyap]

Thank you for thus very comprehensive battery life test of Macbook air m1. I'm really considering getting this after your very informative video. 😊