Apple's M1-powered MacBook is apparently quite adept at handling Zoom video conferencing, a known challenge for laptops. A helpful owner of one of the new MacBook notebooks detailed their usage throughout a long day of meetings and responded to questions about performance, features used, and even provided screenshots showing battery life.
Extended battery life is a unique benefit of using a processor with a design similar to that of a smartphone. The M1 system on a chip bundles most major computer processing components together on a single wafer of silicon at a scale of 5-nanometers between transistors. The density of the processor automatically grants better speed and efficiency. Apple didn’t simply accept that as sufficient though. The M1 chip was engineered to provide excellent performance while sipping gently from the battery.
Apple’s design strategy paid off for the end user, as explained in a recent forum thread. The MacRumors forum poster, acidfast7_redux, used an M1 MacBook Air for several Zoom video conferences and other work, solely using battery power. The post describes super fluid performance, with no slowdowns, even when using a virtual background. The M1 has already proven to be very fast, but somewhat more surprising is that the Zoom Mac app is not using native M1 code, but runs via the Rosetta 2 emulator instead. However, the most impressive news shared was the long battery life.
M1 MacBook Battery & Zoom
Apple’s M1 Mac computers are known to be fast and efficient, but owners of the new devices are beginning to share impressive early results. Zoom conferencing is known to be a burden on MacBook batteries. For example, in an Apple Discussion thread, at least four participants confirmed that their 16-inch MacBook Pro (with an Intel CPU) saw the battery drop rapidly when using the video meeting app. The original poster, akholief, asked whether it was normal for the battery to drain 65-percent in a two-hour Zoom meeting.
The M1 MacBook Air owner mentioned above, gave a periodic battery life update throughout the day, along with screenshots. The end of day summary indicated the MacBook Air was in use for over seven and a half hours, with half of that time spent in Zoom meetings. Three hours were spent browsing the internet, using Microsoft Office and reading and composing emails, and the lid was down enabling sleep mode for 45-minutes. Despite this busy day of use, the owner reported that the M1 MacBookAir still had 28-percent battery remaining. While an individual case, this M1 MacBook Air owner provided so much detail that the results do highlight the type of fast, efficient, and reliable experience new M1 Mac buyers can expect.
Source: MacRumors