appleBattery Life on the M1 Ain't No Joke!
So I've snagged a new laptop at work - a 16" MacBook Pro with 10 CPU cores, 16 GPU cores and 16GB RAM. This thing is a beast, way more laptop than I need for the work I do, but hey it was sitting on the shelf and as I'm part of the small IT team I figured I could "borrow" it until someone else might need it. I haven't really been using it for anything fancy, just my normal day to day job (which is mostly writing Terraform code and wrangling storage appliances in the cloud) so it's just like using my 2019 Intel MacBook for the most part, but with one major difference - battery life!
I've been working at the kitchen table for about an hour now, not a lot of apps open, but using Vim in a terminal, Safari with 5 tabs open (for work) and Firefox with 3 tabs open (for pleasure), Mail.app open and writing a few emails, and the whole time I've had YouTube open in a tab in Firefox playing music videos. After one hour of doing all this my batter said... 100%. I don't even know how that's possible, my Intel Mac used to only last about 6 hours unplugged during the day (admittedly with some Zoom meetings which I haven't had to contend with currently, but I'm not sure if that would make a huge difference or not). I had to keep watching videos (and editing etc) for 75 minutes before it finally dropped to 99%.
So yeah, even though I don't need 16 GPU cores, 10 CPU cores, all that RAM in this chunky chassis what I *do* love is that battery life - it's freakin' amazing. Can't wait to see where Apple goes with this new M series ARM platform, as if this is version 1 (or I guess the Pro series is kind of 1.5?) it's only going to get better from here!
UPDATE: So it's been two hours now and the battery is sitting at 95%, so it seems that while it takes a long time for the first percentage point to drop once it has it seems to steadily drop lower - 0% in the first hour and ~5% in the second. Still amazing to my mind.