Battery life for 13" and 15" Macbook Pro

[Brookzy]

According to coconutBattery my usual light work tasks end up using 7.5-10 watts of power. I guess if I want 10 hours of battery I need to get that down to 5 watts. Though the display is already at under half brightness and I've cut back on everything I can. Disappointing because it means I'm getting just 5-7 hours of battery.

 

[badlydrawnboy]

Today I had a full day of work and got a chance to put my tMBP 13" though a typical workload. I've been on battery for 7 hours and have 17% left. That would suggest 8.5 hours on this charge.

I've been at 35% brightness and running Chrome, Messages, Slack, Polymail, Word (only intermittently), 2Do, Evernote, and Fantastical 2.

I think I can live with 8.5 hours. If I give up the TB, I'm sure I could get closer to 10, but I'm willing to give up that extra batter life for TouchID and the TB. It's pretty rare that I'd ever go more than 8.5 without the ability to plug in.

 

[JohnnyGo]

Today I had a full day of work and got a chance to put my tMBP 13" though a typical workload. I've been on battery for 7 hours and have 17% left. That would suggest 8.5 hours on this charge.

I've been at 35% brightness and running Chrome, Messages, Slack, Polymail, Word (only intermittently), 2Do, Evernote, and Fantastical 2.

I think I can live with 8.5 hours. If I give up the TB, I'm sure I could get closer to 10, but I'm willing to give up that extra batter life for TouchID and the TB. It's pretty rare that I'd ever go more than 8.5 without the ability to plug in.

Glad to see the changes have worked out for you.

Is brightness @35% sufficient? Is your office environment too much or too little illuminated?

 

[badlydrawnboy]

Glad to see the changes have worked out for you.

Is brightness @35% sufficient? Is your office environment too much or too little illuminated?

Most of the time. I had to turn it up when I did a little online shopping for some jeans, because I couldn't really see them clearly enough. My work environment is nice indoor light (windows), not dim and not bright. 35% seems good. If battery were not an issue 40% would probably be ideal.

 

[SRTM]

I didn't mean actually down to zero but close to it at least. I've run down to about 10% but I usually stay above 30 on all my rundowns. Those times you are quoting sound suspiciously like those bad time estimates. That's why I asked. They are truly meaningless until you have a decent feel for your battery life and consumption. Brand new computers quoting times without ever running down do not really have a feel for what those numbers mean. If you haven't run down yet, you'll see that you'll get much better numbers than the estimates. It's just not mathematically possible to have 4 hour range battery life unless you are running at 15 or so watts the ENTIRE time. That doesn't constitute light usage, but heavy CPU tasks ALL the time.

Ran it down to 5%, charged it up to 100.
I managed to get 2:45....worse than I thought. All I did was browse chrome and watch the occasional youtube video.
Yea something is definitely wrong with my battery lol. Chatting with Apple about this now.

 

[tjleonard]

Keep reinstalling Sierra until they launch a mbp with decent battery capacity and problem solved.

This reminds me the madness when people get a new phone. The solution to bad battery is always to reinstall the os.
Of course you'll get better battery on a fresh with nothing running in the background and no apps installed. But then you'll start using Dropbox and one drive and iCloud Drive and start uploading to photos and listen to music and leave the simulator of Xcode running in the background because you'll forget to close it etc etc etc.

The truth is that a small battery can't keep up with normal to heavy use. If you want good battery life then I suppose you should reinstall Sierra and don't add any programs.

You do realize reinstalling Sierra doesn't mean it has no programs right? I have every program installed as I did before the install. Say what you want, my battery life doubled. Should I have to do this when paying 3k for a machine? NO, but, it is what it is.

 

[CookieFlow]

Don't disagree with a right to complain, but you're complaining to people here who are just trying to solve the battery issue. (At least I thought that was the purpose of this thread.) I've seen you take genuine steps to solve this, so not calling you out. I don't know why it's not working for you, when many of us have documented 9-10 hours. I don't think Apple misled you on battery, I think something is wrong. And again, this SHOULD be good out of the box. But I personally didn't want to just throw up my hands and return it. I recall maybe 2 or 3 who say the fixes didn't work, but I've seen many more who swear by them. I don't know what to make of that.

I have only seen it from people running the 13", I haven't seen a single person telling that their battery life doubled on the 15" (or even improved by a significant margin)... Also kinda curious about screen brightness ect...
I have read and watched at least 10 reviews and all claim 5-6 hours of battery on the 15". I even ran my tests in similar condition to Apple's battery test and got literally half the battery life.

I do appreciate the helps and ideas, but I would definitely like to see concrete information // screenshots from people running the 15" at 75% screen brightness (12 ticks) running various programs to see if some models are faulty and need to be replaced or it's normal and then well ... it sucks...

30/35% brightness is not usable for me ... Apple claims to have done their tests at 75% which is the minimum usable in my opinion

 

[kyleeeee]

You do realize reinstalling Sierra doesn't mean it has no programs right? I have every program installed as I did before the install. Say what you want, my battery life doubled. Should I have to do this when paying 3k for a machine? NO, but, it is what it is.

Did you ever restore from backup or migrate data? Or are all your setups manual? I don't have any data to migrate, so when I get my Mac, I'll be starting clean slate. I'm wondering whether I should reinstall Sierra.

 

[tjleonard]

Did you ever restore from backup or migrate data? Or are all your setups manual? I don't have any data to migrate, so when I get my Mac, I'll be starting clean slate. I'm wondering whether I should reinstall Sierra.

I happened to migrate this time - although I've seen people have trouble even if they went "clean". I think something is wrong from the factory with the install - that way reinstall is downloading the OS again. Your choice to give it a shot though. Some people have great battery without even needing to reinstall.

 

[xmonkey]

I did a reinstall on my 15" (just installed over existing through App Store) and haven't noticed much of a difference in battery life so far. The system does feel a bit smoother, though could be placebo.

Oh ya, it also now thinks I have an Iris Pro 580 instead of the HD530 so I guess re-install if you want upgraded iGPU

 

[SRTM]

I have a Genius Bar appointment coming up soon... Hope to get this battery issue fixed asap

 

[Apple_Robert]

I have a Genius Bar appointment coming up soon... Hope to get this battery issue fixed asap

I don't think the Genius Bar will be of help, other than offering to replace it. I think a lot of it is OS related.

 

[SRTM]

Probably. Since people here are reporting battery times of > 2:45, I'd be happy to get it replaced lol.

 

[tjleonard]

Probably. Since people here are reporting battery times of > 2:45, I'd be happy to get it replaced lol.

Yeah, I'd say you have some issues if you're sitting at 2:45. No amount of reinstalling Sierra will help that! Maybe they forgot to put the other 3/4 of the battery in?

 

[Apple_Robert]

Probably. Since people here are reporting battery times of > 2:45, I'd be happy to get it replaced lol.

In my opinion, you should file a bug report with Apple about the battery. The more people that do that, the faster Apple can get an update released. It does no good to only complain here.

 

[SRTM]

In my opinion, you should file a bug report with Apple about the battery. There more people that do that, the faster Apple can get an update released. It does no good to only complain here.

Ive been chatting with apple support for 2 days. I'm sure they are aware as I have an appt setup with them about it. Just keeping you guys informed.

 

[kwandrews]

I'm not trading you mine, so you should just return yours. That goes for the others that can't figure it out. Wait for an update or just return it and get some of your life back. For the trolls who don't even have one, just get a life.

Good post above. I agree. I think it's probably a software thing. I doubt that many batteries are "bad". Sure, a few may slip through, but not this many. I'm willing to bet that another upgrade of two (10.12.2 or 10.12.3) will help. I'm SURE Apple is aware of this. There have to be quite a few of their employees using them, plus reviewers and I'm certain they do have people look at forums like this once and a while in their marketing department to "take the pulse" (most companies do and Apple should if they don't).

I'm going to just quit worrying about it so much and be patient a while longer. If the issue persists, I can always take it in and have it looked at down the road. Then, if it is a hardware issue, it should be fixed and a replacement MBP would likely have the new batteries (if that is the issue). To do so now would likely just result in the same experience.

 

[marcel500]

Ran it down to 5%, charged it up to 100.
I managed to get 2:45....worse than I thought. All I did was browse chrome and watch the occasional youtube video.
Yea something is definitely wrong with my battery lol. Chatting with Apple about this now.

What was Apple saying?

 

[NoWayBehind]

What I don't understand:

Coconut Battery shows 7000 mah max charge capacity on my 15'. iFixIt revealed the MacBook Pro battery has a rating of 11.40 V, which means my battery actually has 79.80 WH, compared to the 76.00 WH on paper and shown by Apple. It shows roughly the same 105% every time in Coconut.

How is this possible? Do others have similar ratings?

 

[monkeydax]

What I don't understand:

Coconut Battery shows 7000 mah max charge capacity on my 15'. iFixIt revealed the MacBook Pro battery has a rating of 11.40 V, which means my battery actually has 79.80 WH, compared to the 76.00 WH on paper and shown by Apple. It shows roughly the same 105% every time in Coconut.

How is this possible? Do others have similar ratings?

I think it's quite normal to have the battery come from factory a little higher than design. Had this with my 15" rMBP pro too along with the replacement batteries from Apple.

 

[marcel500]

I really thought the new public beta will make a difference since the developers got their hands on the new hardware but not much has changed expect a slight improvement on the SAFARI energy consumption side.

 

[Mais78]

Playing right now with a 13 touch bar in a store. Battery fully charged, I unplugged and battery says 6:40 remaining. I reduced brightness to 60pct, unplugged again and now it says 14 hrs

 

[JohnnyGo]

Playing right now with a 13 touch bar in a store. Battery fully charged, I unplugged and battery says 6:40 remaining. I reduced brightness to 60pct, unplugged again and now it says 14 hrs

If the new screen is 50-60% brighter in NITS than a 60-70% brightness level should give you roughly the same brightness as the 2015 screen at 90-max brightness.

Screen usage / consumption always has a huge impact on battery.

 

[Apple_Robert]

Playing right now with a 13 touch bar in a store. Battery fully charged, I unplugged and battery says 6:40 remaining. I reduced brightness to 60pct, unplugged again and now it says 14 hrs

What is important, is actual usage.

 

[Mais78]

What is important, is actual usage.

And the conclusion is? 7hrs?

For now I don't see the point upgrading from my 2015 model. Worse battery, I lose magsafe, usb ports, the SD card reader, have to bring dongles (and the battery charger..) with me (and buy them). Will buy the Cannonlake with DP1.3 so I can power a 27" 5k external monitor for my photography. Hopefully they will also bump up resolution as the 1440X displayed resolution is a fudge since the screen resolution is the the same as 2015
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If the new screen is 50-60% brighter in NITS than a 60-70% brightness level should give you roughly the same brightness as the 2015 screen at 90-max brightness.

Screen usage / consumption always has a huge impact on battery.

Not sure that is the answer, the non touch bar version has same screen and does not have this issue