Battery life for 13" and 15" Macbook Pro

[poorcody]

If you are trying to gauge your battery life, I definitely recommend downloading Coconut Battery. It can show you your power usage in Watts, updated every minute, in the menu bar. This gives you a much better sense of your battery usage than the remaining time estimate. In fact when you watch how easily the wattage usage changes (e.g. streaming a radio program increased my wattage use from around 5.6 to 8.8 watts), you begin to realize how hard it is to estimate remaining life.

I will say that after about four hours of testing, my battery life does seem to be better after the SMC reset. (I also turned off auto-brightness.) I am averaging about 10% an hour doing light-duty tasks at 50% brightness. I can go over 10 hours with just WiFi web-surfing and email. (I'm on a 15".)

 

[archimon]

Article on Battery Life from a few days ago: http://www.businessinsider.com/apple-macbook-pro-battery-life-shorter-than-expected-2016-11

If you are trying to gauge your battery life, I definitely recommend downloading Coconut Battery. It can show you your power usage in Watts, updated every minute, in the menu bar. This gives you a much better sense of your battery usage than the remaining time estimate. In fact when you watch how easily the wattage usage changes (e.g. streaming a radio program increased my wattage use from around 5.6 to 8.8 watts), you begin to realize how hard it is to estimate remaining life.

I will say that after about four hours of testing, my battery life does seem to be better after the SMC reset. (I also turned off auto-brightness.) I am averaging about 10% an hour doing light-duty tasks at 50% brightness. I can go over 10 hours with just WiFi web-surfing and email. (I'm on a 15".)

What extensions do you have installed in Safari? Did you start with a clean install of macOS when you got the computer, or did you migrate your data? Are you running the beta, or the current release version of Sierra?

 

[malikkamran]

What battery life you get watching YouTube on 15 inch 2016

 

[poorcody]

What extensions do you have installed in Safari? Did you start with a clean install of macOS when you got the computer, or did you migrate your data? Are you running the beta, or the current release version of Sierra?

Just Adguard on Safari. I used Migration Assistant to move apps and data over from an El Capitan system; didn't mess with the Sierra install that came on the MacBook.
[doublepost=1479584998][/doublepost]

Article on Battery Life from a few days ago: http://www.businessinsider.com/apple-macbook-pro-battery-life-shorter-than-expected-2016-11

Yeah I had similar experience before the SMC reset and Auto-brightness off. My latest test was at 50% brightness.

 

[catalyst07]

Imagine the battery life on the non-touchbar model after SMC reset...

#trolllife

 

[lobo1978]

After second day with non-Touch version 13" I must admit that battery life stabilise. I'm very happy with it.

Quick note to everybody freaking out here -- expect +10 hrs of normal use. Don't expect it when you are using external drives (or anything connected) or doing anything requiring power (computation, VM, compiling etc.).

+ Bear in mind that non-Touch MacBook is the actually successor to MacBook Air - it should deliver solid 12hrs IMO. MacBook Touch version will deliver up to 10hrs - it is using 28W CPU and it will use more energy if you push it (almost x2) - don't expect 10 hrs at full power.

13" noTouch MacBook has 4790 mAh battery, to reach 12 hours it must average 400 mAh. Check your reading with either coconutbattery or battery health (available at Appstore) -then you can judge if you 'get a lemon' . If screen is not at full blast and you are just browsing internet, checking emails you should get +14 hrs easily with 13" noTouch version or we should rather call it late 2016 MacBook Air Retina.

BTW - can somebody share battery capacity in mAh for 13 MacBook TouchBar??


My final test will be on Monday - In the morning I have a 3 hours lecture running through VGA projector. Every week (5 in row) with my current retina 2015 after 3 hours I had ca. 70-72% left (running from full charge).

If I can replicate it and get even better results it will be the final (real life usage) test. I could conclude and finally have a closure on this subject

I will post results on Monday.

See ya!

 

[tjleonard]

So I have been at 50% brightness and using mostly safari for the past 2 hours exactly and have only 64% battery left. Seems pretty weak still...better than before the SMC reset...

Not really sure what to do. The touch bar is great, but I rather have battery life. Part of me feels like a firmware upgrade will happen or software fix, but not really sure. We'll see...
[doublepost=1479593631][/doublepost]

After second day with non-Touch version 13" I must admit that battery life stabilise. I'm very happy with it.

Quick note to everybody freaking out here -- expect +10 hrs of normal use. Don't expect it when you are using external drives (or anything connected) or doing anything requiring power (computation, VM, compiling etc.).

+ Bear in mind that non-Touch MacBook is the actually successor to MacBook Air - it should deliver solid 12hrs IMO. MacBook Touch version will deliver up to 10hrs - it is using 28W CPU and it will use more energy if you push it (almost x2) - don't expect 10 hrs at full power.

13" noTouch MacBook has 4790 mAh battery, to reach 12 hours it must average 400 mAh. Check your reading with either coconutbattery or battery health (available at Appstore) -then you can judge if you 'get a lemon' . If screen is not at full blast and you are just browsing internet, checking emails you should get +14 hrs easily with 13" noTouch version or we should rather call it late 2016 MacBook Air Retina.

BTW - can somebody share battery capacity in mAh for 13 MacBook TouchBar??


My final test will be on Monday - In the morning I have a 3 hours lecture running through VGA projector. Every week (5 in row) with my current retina 2015 after 3 hours I had ca. 70-72% left (running from full charge).

If I can replicate it and get even better results it will be the final (real life usage) test. I could conclude and finally have a closure on this subject

I will post results on Monday.

See ya!

Per Coconut Battery, The 13" w/TB has a design capacity of 4315mAh and mine shows a full charge capacity of 4472mAh.

 

[justinf77]

I've been sitting here on the couch just using Safari for 1:50 according to Activity Monitor and I have 80% remaining. Not too bad. That would be approximately 9 hours of battery life if it holds up like this. Battery time remaining estimate continues to be all over the place.

13" TB MBP i7

 

[Impatientmac]

If you are trying to gauge your battery life, I definitely recommend downloading Coconut Battery. It can show you your power usage in Watts, updated every minute, in the menu bar. This gives you a much better sense of your battery usage than the remaining time estimate. In fact when you watch how easily the wattage usage changes (e.g. streaming a radio program increased my wattage use from around 5.6 to 8.8 watts), you begin to realize how hard it is to estimate remaining life.

I will say that after about four hours of testing, my battery life does seem to be better after the SMC reset. (I also turned off auto-brightness.) I am averaging about 10% an hour doing light-duty tasks at 50% brightness. I can go over 10 hours with just WiFi web-surfing and email. (I'm on a 15".)

I did this yesterday and it seemed to be working fine, but today it seems like my computer is using a lot of energy for no reason. It'll jump from over 8 watts to 12 with just one app open while yesterday I had many more tabs open and was running Word as well and would range from 5-10 watts. The battery seemed to get worse after I did my time machine backup but I don't know if that is just a coincidence

 

[Westbrook0]

If you are trying to gauge your battery life, I definitely recommend downloading Coconut Battery. It can show you your power usage in Watts, updated every minute, in the menu bar. This gives you a much better sense of your battery usage than the remaining time estimate. In fact when you watch how easily the wattage usage changes (e.g. streaming a radio program increased my wattage use from around 5.6 to 8.8 watts), you begin to realize how hard it is to estimate remaining life.

I will say that after about four hours of testing, my battery life does seem to be better after the SMC reset. (I also turned off auto-brightness.) I am averaging about 10% an hour doing light-duty tasks at 50% brightness. I can go over 10 hours with just WiFi web-surfing and email. (I'm on a 15".)

Hey, I just installed Coconut Battery and I'm wondering how to enable the widget on the menu bar (in the top right portion). Is there a way to do this on Sierra?

 

[Petey-ed]

Reset PRAM, Updated my Time Machine, let everything index (so I think), and kicked off most of the process intensive stuff and I'm getting this.

That was at pretty high brightness too. I'm guessing I get 8 to 9 hours in the next couple days. I'm not worried about battery life anymore.

 

[mattopotamus]

Reset PRAM, Updated my Time Machine, let everything index (so I think), and kicked off most of the process intensive stuff and I'm getting this.

That was at pretty high brightness too. I'm guessing I get 8 to 9 hours in the next couple days. I'm not worried about battery life anymore.

13" or 15"

 

[Petey-ed]

13" or 15"

13"

 

[tjleonard]

Reset PRAM, Updated my Time Machine, let everything index (so I think), and kicked off most of the process intensive stuff and I'm getting this.

That was at pretty high brightness too. I'm guessing I get 8 to 9 hours in the next couple days. I'm not worried about battery life anymore.

What was your battery life before reseting the PRAM?

 

[zhenya]

Hey, I just installed Coconut Battery and I'm wondering how to enable the widget on the menu bar (in the top right portion). Is there a way to do this on Sierra?

Open preferences and make sure the Launch at Startup box is checked. Configure the parameters to your liking. I use %wW%s which shows me the amount of power in Watts that is going into or out of the battery.

 

[thesaint024]

Seriously, people need to stop using the time estimate as a battery life indicator. It's wildly inaccurate as many have been pointing out. I have 3 screenshots within minutes of each other showing at 20% battery, 1:42 left, 2:09, 2:19. Estimate only reflects whatever you were just doing and does some weird extrapolation logic. SMC resets just clean up the consistency of the estimates, not increase battery life.

I have gone through 2 cycles and battery life has improved, but the jury is still out. Anecdotally, 6-7 hours on first charge and estimating 8+ on the second. This is not scientific at all, just rough estimates based on how long I am active on the computer. Also saw that overnight, sleep was draining about 1% per hour, which wasn't great. Need to test further. I have not been consistent the way I use the computer either. Setup activities and work during first cycle, more leisurely and battery testing activities on the second. My goal on the next cycle is just to have a "smart" profile regards to battery without completely stripping the machine of all reasonable battery using applications. This will be close to a workday on the go type of scenario.

There are a lot of factors that are probably decreasing battery. From what I've read, these things significantly affect battery life: Background activity like spotlight, time machine, outlook syncing. Screen brightness. Sierra vs. El Capitan. Applications. Keyboard backlight? Siri? Don't understand how the last two affect battery life materially.

On another note, the MBP charges up pretty fast. It looks like under 2 hours to get a full charge or close from 20%. Bottomline, take my assessment with a grain of salt. Not scientific, but I'm trying to get enough data points from what I've read and my own experience to get a real battery life estimate. So far, I am optimistic that 9 hours is doable, 10 depending on really light use, especially if MacOS related, but even maybe after my computer "settles" after syncing, indexing, etc. The screenshots of all over the place battery estimates are not helpful data points. Real life, timed estimates are very useful on the other hand.

Another data point on cycle #3. 7-8 hours depending on extrapolation methods. This time I ran the battery down to 50% and just x2 everything. I got 3:45 to 50%. That time consisted of some regular apps running in background like Mail, Itunes, Outlook, Preview, Battery Monitor, and Clock Free (for timer), and Safari running actively mostly (no extensions installed). I watched Netflix through Safari for about 1.5 hours. Brightness at 50%, which is plenty bright indoors.

I also did something crazy. I spent about 30-45 minutes downloading and installing VM Box and full Windows 10! My time includes this, and I saw that during the install and running of Windows, I was at 20-25 watts! Netflix ran at about 7 watts. Browsing and light use went about 4-6 watts. I was using Battery Monitor to see my watts used. Point being, I probably killed 1-1.5 hours of battery life during that Windows install and test. I didn't mean to complicate my testing, I just realized I wanted to check that it worked. So I probably could have gotten 9+ hours on regular "mobile" usage. I was checking stats and monitors obsessively during this test.

I'm going to run another test and call it a day. I had a bad first run due to screen brightness and background activities, but the next two runs made more sense and are approaching the claimed battery life. So hard to run consistent tests when I'm trying to set up this MBP from scratch, but I'm getting the idea.

 

[Petey-ed]

What was your battery life before reseting the PRAM?

Probably 4-5 hours.
[doublepost=1479610115][/doublepost]Latest after on the charger for a few minutes and back to 100%

[doublepost=1479610154][/doublepost]I think this whole battery life thing is way overblown. People just need to relax.

 

[callea]

Battery life is critical for me and one of the reasons I stayed with my 2013 MBA.

Would be nice to have confirmation that the new MBPs do indeed allow for moderate use for more than 10 hours.

Seems the non TB model is a go. What about the TB models people are receiving since yesterday?

You should consider you can use external battery banks with new MacBook Pros.

I confirm non TB model has great battery life.

 

[Petey-ed]

You should consider you can use external battery banks with new MacBook Pros.

I confirm non TB model has great battery life.

TB or non TB....I think these things will be fine.

 

[tjleonard]

I am only getting about 6.5 hours on a full battery charge, only using safari ...

 

[malikkamran]

Try smc and pram reset

 

[marcel500]

I am only getting about 6.5 hours on a full battery charge, only using safari ...

fully charged 6:45 min only running safari and iMessage.... 13" 16GB, 3.3 GHZ, TB...

its bad...

 

[archimon]

fully charged 6:45 min only running safari and iMessage.... 13" 16GB, 3.3 GHZ, TB...

its bad...

This seems to be the standard experience, even on the 15".

 

[PaulWog]

fully charged 6:45 min only running safari and iMessage.... 13" 16GB, 3.3 GHZ, TB...

its bad...

At what brightness?

I haven't ever really tested the 2015 Macbook Pro 13" at 60%, I always run it between 80 and 100%, so the best I get is 6.5 hours (maybe 7, I haven't measured to 0% battery) doing safari & emails & microsoft word at 80-100%.

 

[tjleonard]

fully charged 6:45 min only running safari and iMessage.... 13" 16GB, 3.3 GHZ, TB...

its bad...

Yeah, you and I have the same machine...apparently the same battery life too...
[doublepost=1479616104][/doublepost]

At what brightness?

I haven't ever really tested the 2015 Macbook Pro 13" at 60%, I always run it between 80 and 100%, so the best I get is 6.5 hours (maybe 7, I haven't measured to 0% battery) doing safari & emails & microsoft word at 80-100%.

My brightness is a tick or two under 50%. The exact same work loads and brightness from my 2015 pro to this one has this one dying a few hours before.