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Comment by warrenm | Hacker News Reader

This is up there with the insane battery life of the M1-based MBPs

There's no reason to carry a charger from the time you wake up until you go to bed ... unless you're doing something very "heavy"

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I'll be carrying my charger with me. These numbers are great on paper, and sure they can reflect the overall trend of higher battery life, but are not examples of real world results.

I wouldn't be surprised if these results are on airplane mode with the brightness locked to the lowest setting and the volume off with no Bluetooth accessories. The title says "video streaming battery life" however the website actually says "video playback."

If I'm navigating with Apple Maps, which is using GPS (and other sensors depending on your transportation mode), along with a higher screen brightness so I can see in the daylight, I'm not going to get anywhere near 28 hours. And I wouldn't call that a _very_ "heavy" use case.

Yeah I think in terms of battery health you don't want to be doing that either, starting the day full and having it discharge all day until its mostly tapped by the end. I had a 2020 intel macbook and while it wasnt the 24 hours the m1s get, apple claimed it was good for 12 hours so I decided it would be fine to use for my 8 hour workday without a charger.

After a year and like 230 battery cycles of doing that, the battery was down 15% capacity and I was reaching for the charger by the end of the day. I feel like if I had just kept it plugged in instead of discharging it so much each day, I wouldn't have lost so much capacity in so little time.

The other way around is problematic as well. A friend of mine had a 2018 15” MacBook and had to get it repaired under warranty because the battery swelled up and made the trackpad stop working correctly. The “Genius” at the Apple store said it was because he always left it plugged in, and that the problem is fairly common. Apple has recently started allowing MacBooks that are plugged in long term to hover at around 90% battery instead of always keeping it topped up presumably for this reason.

From another comment:

Testing conducted by Apple in August 2021 using preproduction iPhone 13 mini, iPhone 13, iPhone 13 Pro, and iPhone 13 Pro Max units and software, subscribed to LTE and 5G carrier networks. Video playback consisted of a repeated 2-hour 23-minute movie purchased from the iTunes Store, tested with stereo audio output. Video playback (streamed) consisted of a repeated 3-hour 1-minute HDR movie purchased from the iTunes Store, tested with stereo audio output. All settings were default except: Bluetooth was paired with headphones; Wi-Fi was associated with a network; the Wi-Fi feature Ask to Join Networks, Auto-Brightness, and True Tone were turned off.

https://www.apple.com/iphone/battery.html

I've been running my M1-based MBP since April

I've been able to use it for well over a full work day (on the order of 12+ hours) before dropping to 30% battery (from a full charge)

And that includes 8+ hours of using VDI, streaming video from YouTube, random other web browsing, etc

My iPhone 11 (if I'm not running some poorly-optimized games) will run for over 14 hours between charges of "constant" use (streaming audio (podcasts and Pandora), YouTube, email, facebook, etc)

I'd find it exceptionally hard to believe that the two-generations-newer, more-efficient (and powerful) A15 + larger battery is not going to be more performant and long-lasting between charges

> hard to believe that the two-generations-newer, more-efficient (and powerful) A15 + larger battery is not going to be more performant

The last generation, 12, had less battery life than its predecessor :p

Nope - the 12 lasted better than the 11

It was >~300mAh smaller and unsurprisingly did not last as long -at least initially- Likely due to the 12’s 5G modem, so it may have changed with their LTE fallback optimization.

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