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Comment by lordnacho | Hacker News Reader

Got mine last week and not only is it faster, the power usage is crazy good. I took it to town for the first time yesterday, thought I'd do some coding between meetings for a few hours. Battery is still over 90%. I actually don't know what the thing sounds like with fans on, because it hasn't happened yet. My old machine from 2019 would have been down to half power at least, and the fans used to come on with just two monitors plugged in and not much workload.

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I think I'm missing out as mine drops by a very pedestrian 10% an hour. WindowServer keeps using a cool 4% of the CPU at all times, even when nothing is running.

Perhaps you have some rogue process that is causing windows server to run at 4%?

Visual studio code haha

I am not 2021 macbook pro's yet but on 2020 M1 VS Code doesn't have higher than usual impact on battery. Atleast I, with 7-8 active vscode windows throughout the day, couldn't notice.

The task manager (called activity monitor) has a power usage section. It might be syncing or if you had Firefox on it uses way more than safari.

Any chance you have Dropbox running? They are very slow to native M1 support and otherwise their app manages to really kill battery life.

I’m actually debating if I even want to do a backup and restore because of this. I don’t want my chimera of an environment.

I think I want to just use this machine fresh and just move a few files over as needed.

How are you measuring CPU usage? Presumably whatever monitoring tool you're looking at needs to redraw itself, and that's going to bring in WindowServer…

(FWIW, my WindowServer usage is generally around 3-8% when idling and I am losing about 6% an hour at the moment.)

Any background process running through Rosetta, like dropbox, or maybe your Windows server, will eat up tons of battery if they’re not running native.

I had it even worse only 5 hours of battery life in my first week of usage. It turned out OneDrive had a bug with syncing; after reinstalling (then keeping it on overnight for the sync to finish), the battery jumped to ~8-10 hours with fairly heavy usage (Parallels + Safari, though with syncing paused), which is near your current level. The Energy tab of the Activity Monitor helped me identify OneDrive as the power suck.

I’ve wondered for a while if the fans coming on due to dual monitors is a software / driver issue that could be fixed by a patch. It would save me from buying a new machine right now.

It’s because as soon as you plug in an external monitor, the dedicated GPU is used for the output and is responsible for the added heat

That part isn't a bug, though. It needs the dedicated GPU to push all those pixels, the native screen is already pretty dense.

There was a bug where something would infinite loop on a non-standard resolution, think that was fixed.

Same here, spent two hours programming on the train and it went down by about two percent.

So glad I went with the spec I did, all the power I need with room to grow.

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