Short and sweet tonight, my latest photoset is available for viewing on the Photography page. The Petasos Beach Resort and Spa would be where I’d take Jaclyn for our 10-year anniversary, if it hadn’t nearly tripled in price since we visited in 2016.
Perhaps we’re guilty of making the resort too popular.
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No matter how much everyone else says they get 18 hours of battery life, or 21 hours of battery life, or 10 hours of battery life while running every app on their Mac — no matter how often they say that, I feel like the odd man out. Always.
I think I’m a victim of OneDrive on the Mac. Searching “OneDrive for Mac battery drain” on Google brings up a variety of stories. I should add my story to the pile.
I live in OneDrive. We manage data through OneDrive. We collaborate on documents in OneDrive. We share files with others in OneDrive. After 1Password, OneDrive is key to the workflow.
OneDrive is also the reason I never achieve Apple’s claimed battery life on my Macs.
It’s probably a combination of OneDrive and Parallels actually. Parallels consumed the most power in the last 12 hours on this M1 Pro MacBook Pro, according to Activity Monitor. But it’s followed very closely by OneDrive.
The M1 MacBook Air touts 18 hours of battery life. Not with OneDrive installed. Not with Parallels running. No sir. If I left my M1 MacBook Air unplugged for the night, I’d wake up to 10% shaved off my battery. Even this M1 Pro MacBook Pro — it’s only the 14-inch M1 Pro MacBook Pro (and therefore comes with less battery life than the 16-inch) but it’s touted 11-hour wireless web battery is more like 7 or 8 hours for me. I just opened the lid to find 25% of the battery drained while the computer slept for the last 5 hours. I mistakenly left Parallels and all my Windows software running when I slept the laptop.
Surely, the seven or eight hours of battery life is an achievement in and of itself. I’ve never had a laptop that could make it through an entire workday on a single charge. I’m still impressed, given everything I said above.
I’m just not the person to comment on battery life for the new M1 Pro MacBook Pros. My workflow isn’t conducive to battery life and I’m in no position to change the workflow to do the test.
There’s a giant “but” coming though. My mentor says everything before the “but” is “bull…” — you fill in the blank.
In this case, the cliché holds water.
But… fast charging.
With the 96W charger — an upgrade over the included 67W charger on the base-base M1 Pro MacBook Pro, but included with all 10-core M1 Pro MacBook Pros — you can fast charge the M1 Pro MacBook Pro. Apple says you can fast charge 50% of the MacBook Pro’s battery in 30 minutes with these bigger chargers. For the 14-inch MacBook Pro, there are a number of ways to fast charge:
LG’s UltraFine Displays don’t make the cut. My small amounts of reading have those displays charging capabilities at 85W, just shy of the 96W requirement. My MacBook Pro is plugged into two LG UltraFine Displays for 8 to 10 hours each day.
Nevertheless, with the included charger in the box and the incredibly durable braided MagSafe cable, I can turn 8 hours of battery life into 12 hours if I charge over my lunch break.
For the first time ever, fast charging a device is more important to me than actual battery life. Until very recently, I never sported the required cables to fast charge any iPhones or iPads. This M1 Pro MacBook Pro is my first real foray into fast charging.
Fast charging has had a bigger impact on my battery anxiety than perhaps any other battery improvement I’ve experienced.
Simply put, if I can find an hour’s worth of charge time for this MacBook Pro, the general 8 hours I get turns into 16 hours in any given day. I’m always close to an outlet, be it in my office, at home, or even in my truck.
All told, the M1 Pro MacBook Pro’s battery life goes beyond meeting my needs.
It just has everything to do with fast charging and nothing to do with actual battery performance.
Fantastical is one of those hallmark App Store apps. It has been around for a long time. It has always been the best calendar app money can buy.
Fantastical 3 launched with a new subscription purchase method, turning many folks away. I was one of them — at the time, I found the subscription to price in beyond my calendaring needs. I used a combination of Microsoft Outlook and the stock macOS Calendar app instead.
There was a certain point in the early summer where my needs changed though. My time became my most important commodity (it likely always was, but I hadn’t realized it). And I became fascinated with the idea of baking dedicated “Deep Work” zones into my day. I started time blocking.
When in the process of starting a new workflow, you always have to try the best apps for the workflow. So I jumped back into Fantastical 3.
Five-plus months later and I’m still subscribed. I’m subscribed on a month-to-month basis still, but I expect this to change. Fantastical has been fantastic (!) and I think the time blocking habit is going to stick for a little while.
Here are my three favourite Fantastical 3 features and why Fantastical is quickly becoming the locked-in, end-game calendar app on my devices.
Fantastical has always had a single killer feature that no other calendaring app has surpassed: natural language parsing. It’s borderline comical how often I’ve repeated myself about Fantastical’s natural language parsing. It’s simply the best feature for any calendar app available.
It is so much easier to type “Deep Work tomorrow from 100pm to 300pm /josh’s office calendar” than it is to type “Deep Work” and use your finger or mouse to select “tomorrow”, scroll the timer to “100pm” and “400pm” and pick a calendar from a drop-down list. The standard point-and-click event creation is the most distracting form of calendaring available.
If I’m not using templates (more below), I can time block my entire day without touching the mouse.
Natural language parsing is Fantastical’s super power and I’d be remiss to leave it missing from any Fantastical discussion.
The second best event creation method inside a calendar app is Fantastical’s template method.
If you have a particular event that you find yourself needing to add to your calendar over and over, you can create a template of the event. Templates are listed out when you enter the “New Event” view and you can quickly click or tap any previously created template to auto fill a bunch of the event’s metadata.
I have templates created for each of my working day events and for most of my weekend day events. For workdays in particular, I could time block most of my days by hitting CMD + N, tapping on a template, hitting enter, and moving onto the next template. It’s super simple.
Proposed events are where Fantastical’s subscription becomes an easy business expense. I believe proposed events have already saved me hours of correspondence since I became a Fantastical subscriber over the summer. I can only imagine how many hours will be saved over the coming tax season.
Creating a proposed event is simple:
It’s really, really handy. I’ve organized meeting times for 5+ recipients in under 15 minutes. The amount of time this has saved me is nearly uncountable. And we haven’t reached our busy season yet.
Fantastical is one of the most expensive subscriptions I pay for on a monthly basis (Xbox Game Pass, Apple One Premier, and Adobe Lightroom CC outrank Fantastical). Given the cost, Fantastical has to drive value like my other expensive subscriptions.
Though I wouldn’t say Fantastical provides more value to me than Adobe Lightroom, it certainly ranks high on the list. I use Fantastical multiple times a day. It makes it look like I have my crap together when setting up meetings. It majorly cuts down on back and forth meeting setup correspondence. It ensures I don’t double-book family time each day.
I understand why Fantastical’s subscription is too expensive for many people. Calendaring isn’t for everyone. It wasn’t for me until very recently.
Now that I rely on my calendar more heavily, Fantastical has become one of my end-game apps (like Things, Day One, and 1Password) that I don’t see myself ever giving up.