MacBook Pro 14 battery drains quickly

bobabe wrote:

It seems that the battery discharges quite fast. Had only about 3-4 hrs of streaming movies. Is this normal?

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bobabe wrote:

Had only about 3-4 hrs of streaming movies. Is this normal?

Streaming video, including video-conferencing, is a very taxing activity. It works both the CPU and GPU quite hard. I always connect my Macbook Pro to wall power to watch videos.

You can see how much energy different processes are using for yourself: View energy consumption in Activity Monitor on Mac - Apple Support

Depending on the age & health of the battery, if the battery is more than three years old it is possible the battery may wearing out or failing. Usually if the battery is wearing out, the battery condition will be "Service Recommended"....sometimes that could also include a battery with a hardware failure.

I have a MBPro 14" (M2, 2023) and battery run time can vary greatly for me even though nothing really changes on my system except for the specific web browser pages I am accessing. Sometimes I can go 6-8+ hours, other times only 4-5 hours. It all comes down to the open applications & what is being accessed. Closing & relaunching the more resource intensive apps can help as does rebooting the laptop more frequently. Closing un-needed applications would help greatly as well because the more apps/windows/tabs that are open, the more energy is needed which means the battery will run down faster.

When I stress test an M-series Mac with the Display on at full brightness.....a new battery lasts about 4-5 hours under those conditions (at least for a MBAir 13" M1 2020 model). That is actually very good since the Intel Macs only last for about 1.5 hours (2 max). So a less intense load would allow the laptop to last much longer.