Battery life for 13" and 15" Macbook Pro

[PyBeck]

Can you clarify this a little bit? I assume you mean the 0.10 watts is the idle power draw, which seems normal. When the card goes active I see anything from 4 W to 10 W usage.

For what it's worth, I have noticed a few instances where the discrete card will be activated for an obvious reason, but once that intensive process is finished the card will stay active permanently unless I reboot. In other instances, however, I've seen the card switch on and off properly. For example, google maps in a safari tab seems to trigger it, and when that tab is closed the AMD chip turns off pretty soon thereafter.

You're right, it's a little weird. I've posted an update above. And there's the sequence of events until now:

- triggered kextcache rebuild
- reboot
- power consumption is low
- get's activated for just an instant (small peak in the screenshot i posted above at last 24 hours on the right)
- power consumption gets low again
- did something, which activated the card for a longer period
- power consumption stayed high for a while (the pleateu)
- suddenly power consumption drops again
- standby
- power consumption down again

Maybe we're all too nervous and checking too frequently and they have a timer which deactivates the card after some idle time (which would make sense, but not for so long time). Alternatively there might be some trigger which deactivated it (i unplugged it a few minutes before the power consumption dropped).

But anyway, it's a situation which needs to be either clarified or fixed. It sucks to always keep an eye on the power consumption, it'd like to rely on the battery and not have to worry about graphics cards going crazy.

EDIT: I just noticed, that playing a ogg/vorbis stream in Safari is toggling the AMD too. I was playing an embedded ogg/vorbis stream in Safari and noticed that the AMD is sucking 10W, it dropped to 0.1 immediately when i pressed pause and pegged again at 10W, when i resumed. Happened both on headphones and speakers. Doesn't happen in VLC. Can someone verify this?

 

[b_scott]

Still OK after the reinstall of 10.12.1. Been using Chrome for about 20 minutes.

 

[badlydrawnboy]

Could you guys (or girls) check your disk utility, Do your disks show as Verified for SMART ? (where mine shows not supported)

I read this could be an SSD issue that has effect on the battery life

Contacted Customer Service, they've scheduled a call back tomorrow evening. want to check what others are like to compare

Mine says not supported as well.
[doublepost=1481079904][/doublepost]On track for less than 6 hours of battery life on this recent charge again. History:
- After purchase: 6-6.5 hours
- Sierra reinstall: 8-8.5 hours for 2-3 cycles
- Since then: declining battery life stabilizing at 5.5-6 hours (actually worse than when first got it)

 

[McDaddio]

Actual usage is a bit less than 5.5 hours. The forecasted battery life is accurate compared to what I am actually getting.
I was hoping it was just the estimation vs. the actual usage.

13 TB.
Light usage, 75% screen brightness
Reinstalled OS, did all the resets, rebooted, just about everything listed here.
On about 20 cycles.

Now it is either a return in January or a hope that there is some issue that Apple can resolve.

 

[malikkamran]

Actual usage is a bit less than 5.5 hours. The forecasted battery life is accurate compared to what I am actually getting.
I was hoping it was just the estimation vs. the actual usage.

13 TB.
Light usage, 75% screen brightness
Reinstalled OS, did all the resets, rebooted, just about everything listed here.
On about 20 cycles.

Now it is either a return in January or a hope that there is some issue that Apple can resolve.

Install the beta it fixes battery life

 

[tjleonard]

This is one thing I haven't done.... does this mean I'll lose all my settings/work that's currently saved? and how do I go about doing this?

No, do no do a clean install, just a reinstall. Boot into recovery mode and then reinstall that way. Do not format your drive, and you will not lose anything.
[doublepost=1481085085][/doublepost]

Against what @malikkamran says.

If you do a proper full reinstall of booting into internet recovery, cleaning the hard drive (Erasing it) and then reinstalling MacOS to do a completely fresh install then yes, youll loose all settings

Back up everything onto an external hard drive and then copy back on after reinstalling MacOS

You only need to reinstall. Not "erasing" anything. A lot of people on this thread, including myself didn't lose a thing and this worked great.
[doublepost=1481085262][/doublepost]

@tjleaonard

As you know I reinstalled Sierra and saw an improvement from 6-6.5 hours to 8-8.5 hours. However, I'm back to getting around 6 hours per charge. In fact, yesterday I got 5:45 (I let it run down to 4%). Granted, there was about 8 hours of standby time during the day yesterday, but given that Apple rates standby of 30 days, 8 hours of sleep should not have a significant impact on battery life.

I'm done tracking with Battery Health 2 and Activity Monitor, reducing brightness to 35%, using Safari instead of Chrome, etc.. I never had to do any of that with my MacBook Air—it just got great battery life right out of the box.

I will keep this until the day before the extended holiday return policy permits. If Apple hasn't issued an update by then that fixes this problem, I'll probably return it for the non-TB version. I will really miss TouchID + 1Password, but I couldn't care less about the TB itself. There's nothing it can do that I can't do faster with a keyboard shortcut.

I can understand. I can also so there is a bug with standby, and another way people are helping this. The standby has used a decent amount of battery which is weird but I haven't done anything here to try to fix that.

 

[badlydrawnboy]

No, do no do a clean install, just a reinstall. Boot into recovery mode and then reinstall that way. Do not format your drive, and you will not lose anything.
[doublepost=1481085085][/doublepost]
You only need to reinstall. Not "erasing" anything. A lot of people on this thread, including myself didn't lose a thing and this worked great.
[doublepost=1481085262][/doublepost]
I can understand. I can also so there is a bug with standby, and another way people are helping this. The standby has used a decent amount of battery which is weird but I haven't done anything here to try to fix that.

I did the standby fix but it didn't seem to help. Set hibernate to only 5 min instead of 3 hours.

 

[Nar1117]

You're right, it's a little weird. I've posted an update above. And there's the sequence of events until now:

- triggered kextcache rebuild
- reboot
- power consumption is low
- get's activated for just an instant (small peak in the screenshot i posted above at last 24 hours on the right)
- power consumption gets low again
- did something, which activated the card for a longer period
- power consumption stayed high for a while (the pleateu)
- suddenly power consumption drops again
- standby
- power consumption down again

Maybe we're all too nervous and checking too frequently and they have a timer which deactivates the card after some idle time (which would make sense, but not for so long time). Alternatively there might be some trigger which deactivated it (i unplugged it a few minutes before the power consumption dropped).

But anyway, it's a situation which needs to be either clarified or fixed. It sucks to always keep an eye on the power consumption, it'd like to rely on the battery and not have to worry about graphics cards going crazy.

EDIT: I just noticed, that playing a ogg/vorbis stream in Safari is toggling the AMD too. I was playing an embedded ogg/vorbis stream in Safari and noticed that the AMD is sucking 10W, it dropped to 0.1 immediately when i pressed pause and pegged again at 10W, when i resumed. Happened both on headphones and speakers. Doesn't happen in VLC. Can someone verify this?

The chip getting stuck in the "on" position is a problem, for sure. Especially when it's seemingly random. I don't know how coding like that works, but I would assume what you said - that there's a timer built in that powers down the graphics chip after being unused for a certain amount of time. However, I did see iStat menu reporting a switch back and forth pretty quickly (within seconds of loading/closing a certain tab), so I'm not sure how it works. Regardless, if the chip stays on the system as a whole draws about 50% more power in my case.

My most recent charge has been the best yet - I'm at 7:14 hours on battery with 22% remaining, most of it in Safari, Quickbooks, Mail, Messages, and Spotify. I wouldn't consider this usage for me to be "light", but I haven't been pushing the processor at all. In fact, for about 1 hour total of those 7 hours I've had a few youtube videos play picture-in-picture (love that feature), and I've streamed half of a movie to an Apple TV over wifi. So it's been used for sure. Maybe my battery doesn't suffer the same issues - judging by the other responses recently it seems there are many others who are having a rough go of it. Hopefully it gets sorted soon.

 

[montanaco]

For the past two days I've been getting about ten hours on my 13" touchbar MBP. So strange, I was only getting about 4-5 hours before hand. It seems like by far Chrome was causing the biggest issue, and this last beta update seems to have helped out as well. Super happy!

 

[bizack]

The chip getting stuck in the "on" position is a problem, for sure. Especially when it's seemingly random. I don't know how coding like that works, but I would assume what you said - that there's a timer built in that powers down the graphics chip after being unused for a certain amount of time. However, I did see iStat menu reporting a switch back and forth pretty quickly (within seconds of loading/closing a certain tab), so I'm not sure how it works. Regardless, if the chip stays on the system as a whole draws about 50% more power in my case.

My most recent charge has been the best yet - I'm at 7:14 hours on battery with 22% remaining, most of it in Safari, Quickbooks, Mail, Messages, and Spotify. I wouldn't consider this usage for me to be "light", but I haven't been pushing the processor at all. In fact, for about 1 hour total of those 7 hours I've had a few youtube videos play picture-in-picture (love that feature), and I've streamed half of a movie to an Apple TV over wifi. So it's been used for sure. Maybe my battery doesn't suffer the same issues - judging by the other responses recently it seems there are many others who are having a rough go of it. Hopefully it gets sorted soon.

There definitely is not a timer that powers down the GPU. That's not how GPUs work. There's logic to dictate which GPU is utilized based on the needs of the OS (which speaks to the drivers which speaks to the hardware).

 

[fodaveg]

For the past two days I've been getting about ten hours on my 13" touchbar MBP. So strange, I was only getting about 4-5 hours before hand. It seems like by far Chrome was causing the biggest issue, and this last beta update seems to have helped out as well. Super happy!

do you know when 10.12.2 final is going to be released?

 

[manuchis]

Hi everyone. I have a 13" with touchBar and i7. Doing nothing serious it estimates 6hs with only 4 cycles. Let's see in some days what is going on.

 

[Jamieblufc]

Hi everyone. I have a 13" with touchBar and i7. Doing nothing serious it estimates 6hs with only 4 cycles. Let's see in some days what is going on.

Ive the same 13" i7, On to cycle 6 and last night was the first time battery estimates seemed to be around correct. (75% brightness)

Showing between 8-9 hrs with web browsing on safari (multiple tabs), spotify playing and skype running in the back ground.

I do find though twitter is a real hog with it constantly trying to update in the background

 

[PineAppleMac]

do you know when 10.12.2 final is going to be released?

There are rumors that probably next week.

 

[mfarben]

I'm back to 10.12.1 , the Disappearance of the Battery Estimate freaked me out , plus I had a freeze Bug with Photoshop CC .....
With just browsing I have this estimate, which is really really tiring.
Bad thing is , the holiday return policy doesn't affect me, because I ordered on Oct. 28 .... :-/

 

[manuchis]

Ive the same 13" i7, On to cycle 6 and last night was the first time battery estimates seemed to be around correct. (75% brightness)

Showing between 8-9 hrs with web browsing on safari (multiple tabs), spotify playing and skype running in the back ground.

I do find though twitter is a real hog with it constantly trying to update in the background

Yes, twitter is a battery killer, but in surprised that iTunes as well.

Of course Chrome is a hell burning out my mbp

 

[mercedes27]

So i looked at the behavior of the battery and discharge rate. To me biggest problem is adobe Flash player plugin. With this I get only 4-5h of usage. [up to 1400mAh sometimes]. When I use only Safari 1/2 brightness and email - I consistently get about 8-9 hours [discharge rate 300-700mAh with some slight peaks on bith sides].
When I play Hearthstone - discharge rate goes up and I get only about 3,5h of usage. [consistently about 1200mAh].
So the main problem is that battery is small and getting consistently 8-9hours means, that your average discharge rate should be around 500mAh - which is certainly possible. Just look at the activity monitor and look for the problem. If you have issues even with only Safari running - look at the plugins.
I hope, there will be update with 55 to 60Wh battery, but right now, we have to live with what we have. If I compare this 13" TB BTO 16/512 with my MacBook Retina 13" late 2012 [base model with OWC 480SSD], new MacBook is slightly better. I have around 6-7hours runtimes with the old model, however, when use high demand SW, my run times are better with the old machine.

 

[Jamieblufc]

You only need to reinstall. Not "erasing" anything. A lot of people on this thread, including myself didn't lose a thing and this worked great.

Yes you wont loose anything but then you're still using the factory partition for the SSD which could still be buggy and have an effect on the MacOS performance and then battery. Erasing and reinstalling you'll then know its clean install.

Each to their own but id prefer a complete clean install to installing over something already there

 

[JohnnyGo]

I already read a few posts where installing the latest beta solved the battery life problems some of the TB MBP users were experiencing.

 

[marcel500]

I already read a few posts where installing the latest beta solved the battery life problems some of the TB MBP users were experiencing.

Definitely not the case, not even close. Not a single change

 

[mfarben]

Definitely not the case, not even close. Not a single change

Same here, no change

 

[tjleonard]

Yes you wont loose anything but then you're still using the factory partition for the SSD which could still be buggy and have an effect on the MacOS performance and then battery. Erasing and reinstalling you'll then know its clean install.

Each to their own but id prefer a complete clean install to installing over something already there

Wrong. It downloads the new macOS. It doesn't use the factory partition unless you're not connected to wireless.

Secondly, it's not based off of what you recommend or want to do. It's about me telling you how to fix your battery issue.

Do what you want but a simple reinstall tripled my battery life.

 

[JohnnyGo]

Same here, no change

Sorry to hear that.

Did you use Migration assistant at any point ? Have you tried clearing the cache folders ?

 

[Nar1117]

There definitely is not a timer that powers down the GPU. That's not how GPUs work. There's logic to dictate which GPU is utilized based on the needs of the OS (which speaks to the drivers which speaks to the hardware).

That makes sense, and it makes it more of a problem than I originally thought. If the OS doesn't truly need the dedicated GPU card, then why is the GPU card drawing so much power for so long, without a pattern?

 

[NoWayBehind]

I might have found a solution and one possible culprit for some of the problems with battery life you guys are experiencing.

Spotlight was somehow really buggy for me, even if this was my first Mac and there was no previous data. Spotlight in the Activity Monitor seems to only show average battery consumption, if you switch between the activity monitor tabs (for example to CPU and back), otherwise it will just show current usage, which is usually as low as 0,3.

However, if you switch tabs in the Activity Monitor current usage is still low, BUT the average consumption suddenly showed between 10 and 15. This indicates current Spotlight energy usage is probably displayed faulty in the Activity Monitor Window.

I tried different things, and what helped was disabling bootcamp (to a lesser extend) in Spotlight indexing and also, much more so, deleting Safari history, which probably synced from my last iPad or iPhone.
Average Spotlight usage after activity monitor switching now shows below 1, which needless to say is SIGNIFICANTLY lower than before. After a day of test I can confirm my battery life has become much better.

I am not sure about disabling Bootcamp in Spotlight indexing helped, but you should really try to delete Safari history if you have been a long time Mac or iOS user. Please let me know if this fixes issues for you.