Battery life for 13" and 15" Macbook Pro

[HonestChicken]

I get like 4 hours by just watching youtube and browsing web with google chrome and emails.

15" touchbar, 2.7Ghz i7, 16GB, Radeon Pro 455 with 512GB SSB

 

[mahcus36]

n00b question, but what does "Average Energy Impact" in Activity Monitor measure in? like, whats the units? is it watts?

 

[malikkamran]

I get 6 hours on my 2012 15 MacBook Pro retina on latest 6 beta

 

[technoholic]

It's a beta-of course it's going to have issues, some with power consumption. If you want good battery life, I'd stick with either a gold-master beta or the final release.

You mean the final release version that shipped with these macs that also has terrible battery life, hence all this conversation?

 

[marcel500]

Just had a 2 hour call with apple support, they took all my data and will analyse it now.

I strongly advise to call them as well that they realise that this is a much wider problem. Its not enough to continuously post results in this forum they need to get their hands on this.

 

[nmeed]

The more I use this machine and occasionally check the battery, the more convinced I am that there's a software-related power management issue. Otherwise, we wouldn't we seeing wildly variable battery life even on our own units.

I just used my 13" TB for 75 minutes straight, non-stop with screen at 50% brightness. Browsing various websites, using iMessage and Notes. Nothing heavy, but very constant usage. Battery dropped 11% in that time.

That's like +13 hours if it stays true...that's pretty damn amazing. Which macOS are you using and is your keyboard light on? Any special settings or something that you've done?

 

[mikeo007]

That's like +13 hours if it stays true...that's pretty damn amazing. Which macOS are you using and is your keyboard light on? Any special settings or something that you've done?

Stock OS, haven't done any reinstall or any of the other tricks in this thread. Keyboard backlight at 1 tick, screen at 50% brightness. I still don't totally trust that battery drain curve though, it stayed at 100% for a long time. When the battery started to tick below 100%, it drained pretty consistently at a rate of 5-7 minutes per 1%. So more like 8-11 hours, but still decent this time.

 

[jk76]

n00b question, but what does "Average Energy Impact" in Activity Monitor measure in? like, whats the units? is it watts?

I think it tries to correspond with precentage of CPU core/hyperthread occupancy. Basically, if you have an application keeping one hyperthread of the CPU completely busy, it puts average energy impact at 100. This is not an entirely accurate picture of power usage. In general, it would be very hard to attribute power usage to applications in general, but usually if it uses lots of CPU time (or wakes CPU often), it's a hog, and thus this is a reasonable approximation.

 

[mfarben]

I'm now 100% sure that it's software related. After rolling back to 10.12.1 I have superior battery life.

58% left, 5:00 remaining, which is much better than ever before, so rejoice ppl -> I'm pretty sure it's fixable.

One thing I noticed is that the screen really eats up battery. at 50% brightness it's pretty energy saving, at 75 above it's eating it up.

 

[jk76]

That's like +13 hours if it stays true...that's pretty damn amazing. Which macOS are you using and is your keyboard light on? Any special settings or something that you've done?

I've spent quite a while watching power usage of 15" MBP, and I don't think it has ever gone under 6.8 watts (well, at least with display on). This puts maximum time on battery around 11 hours. And that's not a realistic scenario, to be fair; even on an intercontinental flight, display brightness at minimum, mostly reading PDFs, I've reached tad under 10 hours in practice. When you really want to stretch battery life, that's possible, but not on actual daily, productive work.

 

[Roller]

I'm now 100% sure that it's software related. After rolling back to 10.12.1 I have superior battery life.

58% left, 5:00 remaining, which is much better than ever before, so rejoice ppl -> I'm pretty sure it's fixable.

One thing I noticed is that the screen really eats up battery. at 50% brightness it's pretty energy saving, at 75 above it's eating it up.

I just completed my first test on my 13" TB i7 3.3 GHz 16 GB. After getting it, I ran the battery down to zero then charged it overnight. To test it, I played five YouTube videos continuously with screen brightness three levels down from max and keyboard light down five. Power draw was about 9-10 watts whenever I checked. The battery gave out at 5 1/2 hours.

I agree that it's partly related to software, but the battery is what it is. I'm going to wait and see how much Apple can do with an OS or firmware update. I don't want to go through the trouble of installing all my apps and moving data until I'm comfortable that the battery life will be acceptable. I'd love to get 10 hours in regular use (Word, Mail, Evernote, Excel, Safari) and would be fine with 8-9, but anything much less than that won't do.

 

[drvelocity]

I just completed my first test on my 13" TB i7 3.3 GHz 16 GB. After getting it, I ran the battery down to zero then charged it overnight. To test it, I played five YouTube videos continuously with screen brightness three levels down from max and keyboard light down five. Power draw was about 9-10 watts whenever I checked. The battery gave out at 5 1/2 hours.

I agree that it's partly related to software, but the battery is what it is. I'm going to wait and see how much Apple can do with an OS or firmware update. I don't want to go through the trouble of installing all my apps and moving data until I'm comfortable that the battery life will be acceptable. I'd love to get 10 hours in regular use (Word, Mail, Evernote, Excel, Safari) and would be fine with 8-9, but anything much less than that won't do.

9-10 watts with five Youtube videos playing sounds pretty damn fantastic to me.

I have a 15" TB i7 460, and with absolutely nothing running, wifi/bluetooth off, screen brightness at one tic, keyboard light off, I get 5-6 watts of power draw. With your test (actually brightness was lower than you at 5 tics from the top) I got 25 watts of power draw. So you're in good shape I'd say.

 

[happyhippo1337]

15 / 256 / 450 - Started with 100% and did some Affinity Photo and Lightroom stuff with Spotify running in the background. Got to 50% within an hour and 20 minutes. CPU load was only high for half the duration.

Pretty. F*******. Bad.

 

[Sohappy]

15 / 256 / 450 - Started with 100% and did some Affinity Photo and Lightroom stuff with Spotify running in the background. Got to 50% within an hour and 20 minutes. CPU load was only high for half the duration.

Pretty. F*******. Bad.

Did you try to do the same with your precedent macbook if you have one. How long does the battery last ?

 

[happyhippo1337]

Nope, had an even worse XPS 15 9550 before that I am very glad to have gotten rid off.

 

[09872738]

Strange things going on:
I just tried to reproduce my results from yesterday; that is, internet research on some computer science stuff, a pdf open in preview; this time with iTunes playing some music in the background.
Now, two hours in I still got approximately 60 % on the battery, while the system is reporting 4:30 to go.
In other words, a higher system load (even though iTunes should not stress the CPU too much) resulting in a higher battery life. Makes no sense whatsoever to me.

Im puzzled as to what's going on here.

 

[technoholic]

I've been pretty vocal about how bad battery life is on my 13", then yesterday I took it too a coffee shop for a few hours for a change of scenery fully charged, and got less than 10% drain each hour! Brought it home and used it a few hours later and then got my usual almost instant draining battery. If anything, in the coffee shop, the screen brightness was higher than usual! I don't get it, I guess I have to work in the coffee shop if I want it to last longer!

 

[09872738]

Indeed, battery drain seems totally arbitrary. WFT? (Sorry for obscenity).

Funny coincidence, in my case it was exactly the other way round: in a coffee shop, battery drained from 100 % to 15 % in less than 3 hours.
Today, at home, after 3 hours I still got 40 %.

Is it possible that there is some issue with wifi???

 

[b_scott]

I've been pretty vocal about how bad battery life is on my 13", then yesterday I took it too a coffee shop for a few hours for a change of scenery fully charged, and got less than 10% drain each hour! Brought it home and used it a few hours later and then got my usual almost instant draining battery. If anything, in the coffee shop, the screen brightness was higher than usual! I don't get it, I guess I have to work in the coffee shop if I want it to last longer!

maybe your wifi at home sucks or is fighting with other signals, so your wifi card has to work harder.

 

[09872738]

But no matter how clogged the ether is, wifi should not eat up that much power

 

[technoholic]

maybe your wifi at home sucks or is fighting with other signals, so your wifi card has to work harder.

Unlikely, I have multiple ubiquiti APs around the house, all channel scanned to ensure no conflicts and there are barely any other wifi connections nearby anyway. In the coffee shop I was using a tether connection to my iPhone. And I counted at least 10 other available connections in addition to my phone.

 

[09872738]

Only plausible thing might be a wifi driver going astray. Highly speculative though

 

[technoholic]

Only plausible thing might be a wifi driver going astray. Highly speculative though

Yeah it could well be

 

[09872738]

At least it seems worthwhile to keep an eye on that

 

[Corrode]

Just had a 2 hour call with apple support, they took all my data and will analyse it now.

I strongly advise to call them as well that they realise that this is a much wider problem. Its not enough to continuously post results in this forum they need to get their hands on this.

I count on people like you to call so I don't have to spend two hours on the phone with Apple. Thanks.
[doublepost=1481491687][/doublepost]

Indeed, battery drain seems totally arbitrary. WFT? (Sorry for obscenity).

Funny coincidence, in my case it was exactly the other way round: in a coffee shop, battery drained from 100 % to 15 % in less than 3 hours.
Today, at home, after 3 hours I still got 40 %.

Is it possible that there is some issue with wifi???

Maybe you were sitting by a window in the coffee shop and your screen automatically adjusted to a higher brightness.