(upbeat music)
- Recently, Apple announced these MacBook Pros
with some bold claims.
- [Woman] Gets up to 21 hours of video playback
which is 10 additional hours.
And the longest battery life ever on a Mac notebook.
- Are you sure about that Apple?
Come on, someone had to test it.
So I set up this 16 inch MacBook Pro
which has an M1 Max chip
to play this video clip for 21 hours.
- [Woman] And the 16 inch model
gets up to 21 hours of video playback.
- [Joanna] And I did exactly what Apple said,
wifi off, and brightness at eight clicks from the bottom,
and I unplugged for a long time.
(upbeat music)
- [Woman] Gets up to 21.
- [Joanna] Okay, not quite 21 hours,
but wow, that's long enough to last you
a 15 hour flight from New York to Shanghai, and then some.
Although, if you were planning to use wifi
and chat and surf the web,
then you'd be looking at more an eight hour flight
from New York to Munich.
So why did I do all this?
Well, because the promise of a truly all day laptop is here,
and you don't even need bigger batteries to do it all.
The real savings comes from Apple's shift
from Intel chips to its own M1 Pro and M1 max chips.
So when Apple said.
- And the longest battery life ever on a Mac notebook.
- There was only one thing to do.
Testing.
These are crooked aren't they?
Okay, before I get into those test results,
let's talk about these,
which have the dream laptop design.
At least in comparison to the old MacBook Pros.
There is a full SD size SD card slot,
and an HDMI port.
Sure, the SD card still sticks out, but I'll take it.
There's a row of real function keys, RIP touch bar.
And yes, the Magsafe charger is back.
You can still charge via these USB-C ports too.
The XCR screens are bright and beautiful,
and the size of the screens
are really the main thing that separates these two.
Oh, and price.
The 14 inch starts at $2,000, and the 16 at $2500.
Really pricey.
I could live without this notch around the webcam though.
To make the bezzles around the screen smaller,
they had to fit the 1080P webcam in someplace.
Don't get me wrong, camera quality
is way better than the previous laptops,
but still no iPhone selfie camera.
The bigger leaps though are inside these machines,
with Apple's own M1 Pro and M1 Max chips.
The chips are incredibly fast,
I couldn't get these laptops to slow down
even when multi-tasking things like video editing,
gaming, and more.
And when I asked Apple's Tom Boger
what the biggest improvement in going
from Intel to Apple was, he said.
- [Tom] "I Sum it up in a very simple term
"of performance per watt.
"it's game changing."
- [Joanna] What does that even mean?
Allow me to explain with this stuff.
Let's say this container of Powerade is well, power,
or watts.
And well, I need performance.
Cheers.
Sipping the watts for power,
and then using the power to do things.
Powered up.
Intel chips based on X86 architecture
have good performance, but are more power thirsty.
So to do this high performance,
I've gotta chug more power.
Intel processor.
Apple's chips based on our arm architecture
have good performance too, but are more power efficient.
So to do this high performance, I need less power
and I can just sip the watts.
Like a fine wine.
So you get it, using its own chips
Apple gets more performance per watt,
or in other words, it can have the same battery size
as a computer with an Intel chip,
but that battery can theoretically last longer.
Okay, back to computers, and these actual tests.
The old Intel 16 inch MacBook Pro,
and the new Apple chip 16 inch MacBook Pro
both have the same 100 watt hour battery.
Take a look at this chart
on my video battery test though.
The machines with Apple chips
last at least five hours longer
on both streaming and local video playback tests.
About that 21 hours of battery life,
Apple's fine print says it got there
using a 16 inch test machine
with an M1 Pro processor,
a step down from the M1 Max in my unit.
Plus there's more that's not even in that fine print,
like turning off the keyboard backlight,
and the true tone display.
And the company said that the white background
in my video sample may have drained extra juice.
When I got an identical MacBook Pro
with the M1 Pro chip,
adjusted all the settings,
and used Apple's recommended test videos,
just $60 plus on iTunes, guess what,
21.5 hours.
But here's the thing, video rundown tests
never tell the whole battery story,
it's just not that intensive of a processing task.
It's more like stretching than jumping jacks.
Plus we all use our laptops differently.
So I kept track of the battery life
when I used Safari, Slack, and played music in Apple Music.
The 16 inch ran for eight hours,
the 14 inch for six and a half hours.
That was at least three hours longer
than Apple's Intel machines.
When I did that test with Chrome,
things dropped by an hour or so.
Nope, not the promised double digit hours.
Although when I got out this bad boy,
a 290 watt battery,
I was able to finally hit those.
And yes, I realize it's basically just like
being plugged into the wall.
The 13 inch MacBook Pro with the M1 chip
announced last year
actually lasted just as long
as those laptops in my daily use.
So I'll throw that back at you Apple.
When you say.
- And the longest battery life ever on a Mac notebook.
- If you've got wifi off,
and brightness at 50%, and videos downloaded.
But please do not confuse this with complaining.
After years of slimming down laptops
and cramming in small batteries,
Apple's got a great strategy here.
Power efficient chips and big batteries,
I just wish the fine print was large print.
- And the longest battery life ever.
- This is how I'm gonna be for all Apple events now.