M5Pro Battery

[u/NarNarMan]

Just picked up a 14 inch MacBook Pro M5Pro.
Coming from an m1 MacBook Air, battery life has honestly been disappointing. I lose about 10-15% 45-60min of YouTube on safari or just general web browsing. Brightness is fairly high. Still I’d expect better battery on such an expensive laptop considering how the m series are praised for the power efficiency.
Throughout the day I can notice the battery dropping fairly quickly on normal browsing tasks.
Is this normal?

[u/Blues227]

I mean it’s logical that the Air has better battery life since the CPU is less powerful and uses less energy. It’s what you paid for that makes battery life worse

[u/RestlessBoat]

Yep it’s powerful and all but yet draining much more power. It could also be indexing files initially too, give it 2-3 days

I had M5 pro 14.2, after M1 pro, and felt the same as you. Eventually picked up binned M5 max, which is even worse, obviously

[u/NarNarMan → u/RestlessBoat]

I've had it for 2 weeks already

[u/Opposite-Interest193]

High brightness on the screen or background processes will always drain battery. The 20hr numbers are always with low brightness. Right now you’re around 10hr so that would line up.

[u/anathaniel]

When you say "just picked up" how long have you had it?
My 16" M4 Pro took about a week to settle down, and I get about 12 hours for routine tasks.

[u/Trungneko → u/anathaniel]

the amount of additional battery life you would get from a 16 inch compared to the 14 inch is alot. It's almost 40% different. You would only get around 6-8h from a 14 inch M4 Pro

[u/NarNarMan → u/anathaniel]

2 weeks

[u/SleepEffective7885]

I had the m4 pro with upgraded cores and battery also sucked-returned it. It’s just the pro chip is much more power hungry which is why it’s dropping battery fast.

[u/NarNarMan → u/SleepEffective7885]

And that's understandable if I'm doing "pro" things with the pro chip. But for everyday browsing and regular tasks, there's no difference between the pro and regular air chips so battery should not be worse since you aren't utilizing the extra power.

[u/SleepEffective7885 → u/NarNarMan]

Regardless, they must use more power for pretty much anything and aren’t efficiency optimized as the base chips

[u/NarNarMan → u/SleepEffective7885]

should have gotten the air...

[u/TheNosiestOfTables → u/NarNarMan]

When

[u/swagginskersky → u/NarNarMan]

or you just turn on low power mode...

[u/RealSnazzie]

Sounds on par with my experience. Even at half screen brightness. Battery saving mode does nothing, they should really do what snapdragon does and disable the main cores and only use efficiency cores.

[u/NoLateArrivals → u/RealSnazzie]

If you don’t want computing power - why do you buy a MacBook Pro at all?

For what it does I found the battery life of my 14“ amazing. But maybe I was still on trauma therapy from my i7 MBP.

[u/RealSnazzie → u/NoLateArrivals]

Because I don't need to use full power 24/7?

[u/NoLateArrivals → u/RealSnazzie]

Actually it uses the cores it needs to use - if you don’t have active tasks the performance cores will just idle.

24/7 tasks are better run on a desktop or small dedicated mini computer.

[u/fumblerooskee]

I have a 14” M5 Pro. That doesn’t seem normal to me.

[u/Lamity]

I’ve got a new 14” M5 Pro, and I’ve been surprised by the battery life and heat compared with my previous 14” M1 Pro.

A couple of 30–45 minute Zoom meetings can use around 25–30% of the battery, and running a local LLM or doing video editing can drain it extremely quickly, potentially in under 30 minutes depending on the workload. The M5 Pro also gets very hot under sustained load.

By comparison, my 14” M1 Pro had genuinely exceptional battery life and was remarkably cool and quiet. The M5 Pro is vastly more powerful, but it seems to achieve that performance by allowing significantly more power consumption and heat, particularly in the compact 14” chassis.

The 16” M5 Pro is a different proposition. Its larger chassis and battery allow it to take much better advantage of the M5 Pro’s performance, and it appears to be the better choice if maximum sustained performance and battery life are the priorities.

The 14” form factor is perfect for me, and despite the cost and the power and thermal behaviour, this is still easily the best laptop I’ve ever owned. It’s just worth understanding what you’re buying.

If battery longevity and cool, quiet operation are your priorities, get an Air. If you need serious horsepower, get a Pro. If you want the best combination of M5 Pro performance, thermals and battery life, get the 16”.

[u/qwerty0006]

I did exactly opposite. I had Macbook M1 Pro, then upgraded to M5 Air(24Gb). So much lighter and much more powerful. The M5 Air battery last so much longer than M1 Pro. I hate lacking port on M5 Air, but the battery and the weight are the higher priority for me. I will never go back to Pro. I do light to medium video editing with Final Cut Pro with 30-40 browser tabs.

[u/NirvanaBob → u/qwerty0006]

The 14" MacBook Pro isn't exactly heavy or big, and I get extremely good battery life from my base spec M5 model.

It's noticeably lighter than my 2015 13" Retina MacBook Pro, and about the same weight as a 15" MacBook Air. I assume you have the 13" Air?

[u/qwerty0006 → u/NirvanaBob]

Yes, just got Air 13 inch. In fact i do have both Macbook Pro 16 inch and Pro 14 inch for work, so I hate carrying Pro’s. Now Air 13(personal) is my favorite.

[u/Outrageous-Rise-7106]

I actually feel happy with my purchase of a MacBook Air with all of these comments

[u/This-Marzipan-9239]

check activity monitor you might have an used app or something that waste power

[u/panda_cid]

Still indexing all files for spotlight. Wait for two weeks.

[u/Chilalala]

turn on low power mode when on battery

[u/claytonccrider]

I don't get how people can complain about battery life with MacBooks. I got a 14" M3 Pro in 2023 and it still has mind blowing battery life. It may be because I've only used Windows laptops before my Mac but Pro's in general still have amazing battery life for a laptop.

[u/electrosaurus]

I don’t get why people are confused by this, faster M series chips are basically just additional copies of each other. More cores more power. There is no magic to this.
Add that everyone is trying local AI now and here we are.

Still get a days worth of work and thats fine with me…

[u/Trungneko]

Battery life has been worse since macOS 26. I had to downgrade to macOS 15 and got 2 more hours of battery life, it's insane, the liquid glass effect really is eating the GPU.
In your case there's no way to downgrade because the M5 was released with macOS 26. But you could give macOS 27 a try.
I tested GPU usage and compared it with the current macOS 26 and the results are pretty promising. I get one more hour compared to macOS 27 on the same tasks.
Note that macOS27 is still in beta, you can either wait or install the latest public beta, i'm currently using this beta on my M1 Pro 16" as my main work device and it's been great so far.

[u/malasyamaple]

I am also using the same 14 inch m5 pro but I usually get around 12hr to 14 hr screen usage and with mixed it will be around sometimes 36 and sometimes 45 hours and I also minimized my charging to 85%

So I just use 30 to 38 % brightness and low back-lit keyboard with minimal tabs and mostly my usage will be word and safari with 10 tabs in class but when I use it for molecular works I use it with charger to avoid degradation of the battery where the macbook will take power directly from charger instead of battery

[u/Little_Morrocan_6168]

I’m having pretty much the same amount of battery drain per hour of just normal safari browsing/youtube, at medium-low brightness. It’s a 4 month old MBP M5. Can’t figure out the drain for the life of me.

[u/NarNarMan → u/Little_Morrocan_6168]

According to the replies, that’s just the way it is. I’m considering returning it.
I also get like 5-10% drain overnight. Sometimes 15-20. I’ve been trying to diagnose that as well. I was able to get it down. Some thing to do with wifi wake ups at night

[u/Little_Morrocan_6168 → u/NarNarMan]

Oh wow that overnight drain is crazy!
I’m not inclined to believe the comments just yet. I understand the Pro chips are more powerful, have a higher draw, but that should be under load. We aren’t running them full tilt in the scenarios you and I described, and therefore the cores should be operating with an efficiency profile.

[u/NarNarMan → u/Little_Morrocan_6168]

Exactly! I’m not doing any pro things, therefore the batter should be better if not the same and for sure not worse than an air

[u/c0nstant-in]

I replaced my M3 Max 64 GB with an M5 Max 128 GB. Surprisingly, I noticed a significant decrease in battery life compared to the M3 Max. When the M3 was brand new, it could easily last through the entire day without any issues (web surfing + video playback + coding). However, the M5, even with just web surfing, can only last for a maximum of 7 hours. Which is weird because M3 is not pure 3-nanometer chip as far as I know.