Macbook Air M3 battery life drains too fast.
Hello, everybody, I recently got an MacBook Air M3 16GB RAM & 256 SSD, 13 inch and the battery life is horrendous.
I remember when I got my M1 macbook air a few years back the battery life was stellar (and still is even at 84% battery health) when browsing, watching movies, reading books, and using heavy audio processing software like Ableton Live Suite, and other apps like Photoshop, Adobe Premiere, playing games like Hades, Night in the Woods, Cult of Lamb and etc. I opted for the M3 Air as I needed more ram and the extra processing power without actually getting a pro, as I'm not doing anything that heavy at this point, I'm still using my old device for media playback, Photoshop and other stuff that my girlfriend may need as she prefers using my old device than her Thinkpad.
With that in mind, in comparison with my old device, the m3 air battery life just sucks. I can barely get a full day's work (or even half day) of writing/producing even at 50% screen brightness. Since I got it I think I can get up to 7 hours max with browsing and everything else I already described. Just this night I did some work on Ableton Live, watched some videos with 60-70% screen brightness and browsed a bit, and the battery went from 84% to 60 in around 2 hours and 40 minutes. The image I've attached is from Better Battery 2 and shows this particular timeframe.
Before writing this post I made sure to do a couple of things.
- Activity monitor is not showing any abnormal energy spikes or drains and the computer isn't running hot at all. When browsing, light gaming or producing music the temperature stays between 33-40 degrees Celsius which is normal.
- I reinstalled MacOS and that did nothing, currently on Sequioa 15.2. I also did a few restarts, probably the only thing I haven't done at this point is a factory reset.
- Battery health is at 100% and 15 cycles since I got it which was at the beginning of December, no problems so far when checking with software such as AlDente, Coconut Battery, Better Battery or whatever.
- I reset the SMC as per Apple's official guidelines for Apple silicon machines (even though from what I learned the M series laptops don't actually have SMC resets).
- I checked for random processes that could have been draining the battery, didn't find anything consequential. I don't use OneDrive or whatever. Also Spotlight isn't indexing anything at this point. I did force a re-index with Onyx but that didn't change anything.
At this point I have no idea what is there left to do, I did a full cycle yesterday and really nothing happened, and I'm wondering if this is a problem with Sequoia in general, as I saw a couple of threads regarding increased battery draining since the update or if this is a problem with the M3 Air. I have no qualms about taking the device for a checkup, exchanging it for a new one or whatever, other than it's an annoying process, but I would like to know if I am missing something or it is a general issue that might be fixed in the future? I also haven't added anything that I don't use on my old Macbook, so I can't say anything like a rogue process or random software is an issue.
P.S. I know apple's claims about 14 to 18 hours of battery life are not something I should take at face value and I never have as they are extremely contextual, but judging from my own experience, the battery life shouldn't be like this even on low power mode which I use frequently.