My review of the M2 MacBook Pro went up last Wednesday. But as soon as I got the device last Thursday, it was clear that draining the battery – one of the most important things a laptop reviewer should do – would be a whole thing.
Reader, polls. I would use the device all night and leave it running all night, but in the morning it would still have enough charge and I had to turn it on for testing, let it shoot or give it to our video and photo crews before to be able to drain it completely. I did not have a long enough interrupted period of time to use the device continuously. How absurd this laptop lasts.
But with the written review and video review, both live and on a solid evening and the following morning with no plans or commitments, last Thursday gave me my first truly uninterrupted free time since the review department arrived. I decided that when I got home and finished dinner around 7:30, it was time. I was going to kill this thing. I would drain this stupid battery to zero if that was the last thing I did.
I would run out of this battery if that was the last thing I did
Quick, small household. First, this is not the official battery life rating that will ultimately update the review. This will be based on many attempts and hopefully many of them are not as … weird as what I did here. (Having said that, our battery life test is always a rough estimate and I’ve never pretended to be anything else. Never treat a review as your only data point, etc., etc.)
The MacBook Pro M2 just sits there and teases me that I won’t be able to kill its battery for a reasonable amount of time. Photo by Amelia Holovati Krales / The Verge
Secondly, although I really wanted to kill this battery, I must emphasize that I always want my battery tests to reflect my personal workload – so although there are certainly intense things I could do to kill the battery more quickly, I took care not to run something ridiculous artificially here and to stick to programs and tasks that I would actually perform on a real day (albeit a more intense real day, in parts).
Anyway, I lowered it. And I kept a little diary of the process that I’m sharing here. I hope this will give you some idea of the different things I did on the device while exhausting it, and a little idea of how fast it can drain if you perform a workload like mine. However, this is my personal and personal diary, so please don’t tell anyone about it.
20:00: I enter at night. I have about a dozen tabs open. I have a medium brightness screen with True Tone off. I have Spotify launch the Chill Pop playlist. The battery is 100 percent. Unplug. Let’s roll.
20:20: Still 100 percent. I check twice to make sure the battery indicator is working. It’s getting dark outside, so I turn on the night light. Don’t judge me, I’m interested in my eyes, monsters.
20:25: The internet is boring. I pulled out a short story I’m working on, which is Google Doc, which is about 20 pages. God, I like how fast this thing loads Google Docs. I still have about a dozen other tabs open.
20:30: Friends, we are still 100 percent. Considering that a character dies in my short story, because if this laptop doesn’t die, someone has to die. I decide against.
21:00: We are 98 percent. The fear that this thing could last 50 hours gives me reasonable stress. For example, my Garmin Venu tells me to calm down.
The challenge is accepted.
9:30 p.m .: 95 percent. “I don’t think this thing will ever die, haha,” I send an iMessage to a friend. “Wow,” my friend replies. 9:30 pm is our intellectual time to shine.
21:45: 91 percent. The Chill Pop playlist is over. I’m moving on to Today’s Hits. Stay by The Kid Laroi and Justin Bieber start playing. Ah, yes. Today’s hits.
10:15 pm: I hit the wall with my story, but I leave Google Doc open in case inspiration comes up. I’m starting to play PugetBench for Premiere Pro, just to feel something. It’s weird therapeutically to give the benchmark complete control over my computer and try to figure out what ridiculous things it’s doing. Is something in life really in our hands? Aren’t all obscure GPU effects thrown into random frames by Premiere in some way?
22:30: This is around the time when Gigabyte Aero 16 will die. However, the MacBook is still very much alive. Anyway, I feel like I’m obviously not taxing this thing hard enough, so I’m looking for things that may need to be updated. Some of my Adobe applications are out of date, so I turned off these downloads. I wanted to get acquainted with After Effects, so I’m playing with it a bit.
23:59: 78 percent. Well, I still don’t understand how to do something in After Effects, but at least I tried. I also went through “Today’s Hits”. Creative Suite has finished updating, so I open all the apps I have at once just to see if it will slow down my computer. No, of course not. I get involved in Lightroom with some photos that I could (but probably never will) upload to Instagram, as someone does.
A real musical journey.
12:15 pm: I’m doing Swift Playgrounds 4 because I can’t overcome how cute the small animations are. I’m doing a Rosetta Stone lesson with Swift Playgrounds 4 in the background. Look, therapist, you can’t say I’m not working on myself. The screen is starting to look too bright, but don’t worry: I’m going to kill my eyes for blogging.
12:26 PM: 73 percent. I ran out of things to do. I watch old K-pop videos on YouTube. What if we go to Lollapalooza? I send iMessage to a friend. “We’re not going to Lollapalooza,” the friend replied.
00:47: I’m back to the short story. I’m very tired, so it’s a little weird. I’m starting to download some more Adobe software because you might get big. I have no idea what Bridge is, but I’m sure I can find an application for it.
2:13 a.m.: 63 percent. I call it night. I leave a video on YouTube (“Fireplace 10 Hours Full HD”, one of my favorites, the vibrations are flawless), as well as the playlist “Chill Hits” Spotify. Please die, I think at the device as I fall asleep with it next to my head. It is now in God’s hands.
8:15 a.m .: I wake up because it’s being built outside, which is the 4-D experience of New York. The MacBook Pro is still 36 percent strong. I start PugetBench to give him something to do and to fall asleep (I have a free morning).
10:26 a.m .: I’m waking up again, this time because I’m stressed that I made a mistake in the draft I submitted yesterday. It’s just something that worries me. I pick up the draft and read it. There is no mistake. The crisis has been prevented. Back in bed. Laptop at 21 percent, various things still work.
Red, the blood of laptop reviewers who have almost run out of battery
11:40 a.m .: I wake up for the last time and this is the first thing my gloomy eyes see: The red battery. That glorious, glorious red. Red, the blood of laptop reviewers who have almost run out of battery. The laptop is 9 percent. We are so close, everyone. So close.
11:42: It’s time to kill this dead thing. I open Slack. I keep blowing up Spotify. I open three different sections for emails, a bunch of blog posts, videos, iMessage, Sticky Notes, Lightroom. I’m starting to download a game on Steam. I’m working on my review on another computer, clicking around a bunch of other reviews that are covered in ads. He will die at any moment, I think, with an eye on the red battery indicator.
12:30 pm: Well, the last section takes a lot longer than I thought. But after 16 hours, 30 minutes and 39 seconds, the M2 MacBook Pro is ready. He died in the middle of the release of the music video for Tomorrow X Together Can’t You See Me, just as a building was set on fire. There must be a metaphor somewhere, but I’m too tired to find it.
Don’t worry – I’ll do it a few more times to get a tighter result.
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