Apple’s MacBook Pro M2 sent me on a journey to drain its battery

We M2 MacBook Pro review But as soon as I got the device in my hands the previous Thursday, it was clear that one of the most important things a laptop reviewer had to do was run out of battery everything.

Reader, I tried. I would use the device all evening and leave it running all night, but in the morning it would still have plenty of charge left and I would have to plug it in for testing, film it, or give it to our video. and photo crews for shooting before completely unloading. I have not had an interruption long enough to use the device continuously. This laptop lasts that ridiculously long.

However, written review and video review A solid evening and the next morning, both lively and with no plans or obligations, last Thursday gave me my first truly uninterrupted free time since the inspection unit arrived. When I got home and finished dinner around 7:30pm, I decided it was time. I was going to kill this thing. If it was the last thing I did I would zero out this stupid battery.

Quick, a little cleaning. First off, this is not the official battery life estimate, which I will eventually update the review for. This will take multiple tries and hopefully many aren’t as weird as I’ve done here. (However, our battery life test is always a ballpark estimate, and I never pretended it was anything else. Never treat a review as your only data point, etc.)

Photograph by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge

Second, I must stress that while I really want to kill this battery, I always want my battery tests to reflect. We personal workload – while there are certainly intense things I can do to drain the battery quicker, here I’ve been careful not to run anything artificially ridiculous and stick to the schedules and tasks I’d be doing on a real day (albeit partly on a busier real day).

Anyway, I closed the issue. And I kept a little diary of the process that I shared here. This hopefully gives you an idea of ​​the various things I do when draining the device and how fast the device can run out if you’re running a workload similar to mine. However, this is my personal and private diary, so please don’t tell anyone about this.

20:00: I’m in for the night I have a dozen tabs open. I got the screen at medium brightness with True Tone turned off. I have Spotify running the “Chill Pop” playlist. Battery at 100 percent. Pull the plug. let’s roll.

20:20: Still at 100 percent. I double check to make sure the battery meter is working. It’s getting dark, so I turn on the nightlight. Don’t judge me, I care about my eyes, you monsters.

20:25 The internet is boring. I open a short story that I’m working on, a Google Doc of about 20 pages. God I love how fast this thing loads Google Docs. There are a dozen other tabs still open.

8:30 PM: My friends, we are still at 100 percent. Considering that a character dies in my short story, because if this laptop isn’t going to die, someone has to die. I decide against it.

21:00: We are at 98 percent. The fear that this thing might take 50 hours gives me justified stress. like me Garmin Venus he tells me to chillax.

EVENING 9.30: 95 percent “I don’t think this thing will ever die lol,” I iMessage a friend. “Lol wow,” my friend replies. 21:30 is our intellectual time to shine.

21:45 91 percent The “Chill Pop” playlist has completed its route. I move on to “Today’s Hitler”. To stay The Kid Laroi and Justin Bieber start playing. Oh yes. Today’s hits.

22:15 I’m hitting a wall with my story, but I’ll leave the Google Doc open for inspiration. i start running PugetBench for Premiere Pro just to feel something. It’s strangely therapeutic to give full control of my computer to the benchmark and try to figure out how ridiculous it is doing. Is anything in life really in our hands? Aren’t we somehow obscure GPU effects thrown into random Premiere shots?

22:30: This, Gigabyte Aero 16 would be dying. Yet the MacBook is still very much alive. Anyway, I honestly feel like I’m not pushing this thing hard enough so I’m looking at things that might need updating. Some of my Adobe apps are out of date so I turned those downloads off. I wanted to be familiar with After Effects, so I’m playing around with it a bit.

23:59 78 percent. I still don’t understand how to do anything in After Effects, but at least I tried. I also went through “Today’s Hitler”. Creative Suite just finished updating, so I open all the apps I have at once to see if that slows the computer down. Of course not. I’ve been messing around with some photos in Lightroom that I might (but probably never will) upload to Instagram, as someone did.

12:15 PM I’m doing some Swift Playgrounds 4 because I can’t forget how cute the little animations are. I’m doing a Rosetta Stone lesson with Swift Playgrounds 4 running in the background. Look therapist, you can’t say I’m not working on myself. The screen is starting to look very bright, but don’t worry: I’m going to kill my eyes for blogs.

12:26 73 percent. I’ve run out of things to do. I watch old K-pop videos on YouTube. “What if we go to Lollapalooza?” I’m texting a friend. “We are not going to Lollapalooza,” the friend replies.

12:47: Back to the short story. I’m so tired so it’s getting a little weird. I started downloading some more Adobe software because you can be big too. I have no idea what Bridge is but I’m sure I can find a use for it.

2:13 63 percent. One night call. I’m leaving a YouTube video (“Fireplace 10 Hours Full HD”, one of my favorites, the vibrations are immaculate) as well as the “Chill Hits” Spotify playlist works. Please die I think as I fall asleep with the device next to my head. It’s in God’s hands now.

08:15 I wake up because there’s construction going on outside, this is the New York City 4-D experience. The MacBook Pro is still strong at 36 percent. I start PugetBench (I’m off in the morning) to give it something to do and sleep again.

10:26 I woke up again, this time for emphasizing that I made a mistake in a draft I prepared yesterday. It’s just something I’m worried about. I took the manuscript and read it through. No error. The crisis has been averted. Go back to bed. Laptop 21 percent, various things still working.

11:40 I wake up for the last time and the first thing that darkens me is the red battery. That glorious, glorious red. Red is the blood of laptop reviewers whose battery is nearly dead. The laptop is at 9 percent. We are very close to everyone. well close.

11:42 Time to kill this dead thing. I open Slack. I keep blowing up Spotify. I open three different email tabs, a bunch of blog posts, a video, iMessage, Sticky Notes, Lightroom. I’m starting to download a game on Steam. I’m working on my review for another computer, clicking through a bunch of other reviews in ads. Now every moment will dieI guess, with an eye on the red battery meter.

12:30 AFTERNOON: Well, the last yawn is taking a lot longer than I thought. But after 16 hours, 30 minutes and 39 seconds, the M2 is done for the MacBook Pro. Died in the middle of Tomorrow X Together’s game Can not you see me music video, as they set a building on fire. There must be a metaphor out there somewhere, but I’m too tired to find it.

Don’t worry – I’ll run it a few more times to get a more precise result.