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Battery life for 13" and 15" Macbook Pro
- Thread starter fokmik
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It' s Battery Health 2 [Pro version with power history is for 10Euro, app is in AppStore]
My faith in apple is mixed when it comes to the desktop / laptop product lines. I have had mixed service with them. I have had some rather bad experiences with there support in the past year or so. The 180 flip is the iPhone / iPad. I can get an iPad or iPhone fixed with almost zero effort. I swear they are trying to bend over backwards to make sure the process hurts so little. This is what it used to feel like owning a Mac. I was the center of there world. My issues were there issues. I was the most important customer line they had. This is gone. This vibe is dead. They still are way way way better than any other peer, however they are off there previous own internal high numbers.
I want to believe I honestly do. I just don't get the warm and fuzzy any more.
I want to say I am sorry for WE, I will most likely move away from this pricey model I have and wait out the fray. I just do not know how long it is going to take apple to find and kill the bug. I am not of the camp that they knew the issue and released it any way. I do not think apple would ever ever do that. I think something happened from the prerelease versions to the released version and they are going to have to find the issue and sort it. This feels like the antenna issue of the iPhone 4. The phone was not truly 100% at fault ATT network being so crummy you needed every single bar to even hold a call / data transfer. I just hope there is not some 2017 antenna diversity fix that all of us who have these 2016 units at stuck with. I mean they fixed the issue with a bumper for the iPhone 4 people and quietly made a eng change to make sure it could never happen again.
It is the same as in Windows laptop. Depends on your usage. In case of light browsing - easy pages without videos and lot of flash - you will get 10h. In case of heavy browsing - 6-7hours. If you will run something with high CPU demand [ in my case Osirix [Dicom viewer] - you can get only 3hours.
But the very same situation is in case of Surface too. They advertise 16hours of usage with performance base, but I got only 11hours of light usage.
If you really need more, just buy external battery pack with USB-C port - you can have 30 000mAh extra.
2016 13" MacBook Pro w/ 16GB Ram and 512 SSD.
In my tests, Safari and Firefox tested.. I used CoconutBattery to see the WATTS being pulled.
(4 to 6 hours) NO FLASH, NO VIDEO, just text websites only, gmail in a browser, LOW SCREEN BRIGHTNESS. No other applications open.
(1 hour to 45 Mins, NOT A JOKE!!) Websites with video vimeo, netflix, and amazon prime. Multiple windows open.
When I started to test the video intensive websites is when I threw in the towel. The battery life is just going to get worse over the life of these laptops, and Apple is becoming more secretive about their battery replacement process on new machines. I assume it will be $200 to $400 to replace the battery down the road, but that is just a guess. Tim Cooke could abandon battery replacement all together for all we know, and just give use a $400 coupon for a iPad Pro.
Imagine when the battery is at 80% capacity or less, and I will get 30 Mins of battery doing intensive video via a web browser. Thats not cool for a $1900 machine.
This post is highly important. We are comparing claims to reality. Microsoft lies just as much if not more than apple does about battery life if your experience is universal.
The thing is about 8 or so hours of web surfing and email is more than enough. Apple just had to make the claim of 10 cause well they are dumb.
The only issue I see are all software related where the CPU does not spool down fast enough to conserve energy. I am sure a SMC firmware update will help with that and I am sure it will come.
The other issues are all stupid OS X issues like messages hogging the DGPU and you have zero clue about it unless your actively monitoring it.
Safari having a huge memory leak that eats up massive amounts of ram and disk if you push it hard.
That is not the hardware teams fault. That is the OS team being lazy or understaffed.
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That is not typical life that I am seeing with similar use case. That is the issue we have here your machine is not up to par and mine is closer to the the level we were promised.
I have no idea why. That is the issue. I would return that machine for a new machine at the min.
Battery replacement is already listed as a 199 charge. That is not going to go away any time soon.
The SSD extraction is free as of right now but that remains to be seen.
I am averaging about 7 hours of mixed web usage including video and text.
I am also able to get well over 10 hours of iTunes playback for video on a loop.
So there is something not right and apple needs desperately to find the issue
Decisions, decisions, decisions!
Intel just announced availability of newer and more efficient Kaby Lake chips for MacBook Pro. Now it looks like Apple might make a summer or fall refresh of the MacBook Pro with these chips and any other improvements available sooner especially with the issues that 2016 refresh has had. Check it out: http://appleinsider.com/articles/17...lake-chips-suited-for-apples-macbook-pro-imac
Some of us still have until 1/8/17 (Sun) to decide whether to return the 2016 MBP and wait for the 2017 MBP which may arrive sooner than expected. That decision just got a little harder.
Intel just announced availability of newer and more efficient Kaby Lake chips for MacBook Pro. Now it looks like Apple might make a summer or fall refresh of the MacBook Pro with these chips and any other improvements available sooner especially with the issues that 2016 refresh has had. Check it out: http://appleinsider.com/articles/17...lake-chips-suited-for-apples-macbook-pro-imac
Some of us still have until 1/8/17 (Sun) to decide whether to return the 2016 MBP and wait for the 2017 MBP which may arrive sooner than expected. That decision just got a little harder.
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Eh I dont think so. Its common knowledge that Apple refreshes the chips every year. If you return the laptop, that means you would be waiting MONTHS for the new chips.
For my situation, I'm very tempted. I still have my 2014 MBP with Apple Care good until August 2017. The only thing I will really miss would be the Touch ID. But if I wait, I might even get more for my money and USB-C peripherals would be more plentiful. I gotta think long and hard.
I would suspect that the new machine will not drop till the same time it did last year. I think they have a back log of iMac and Mac Pro announcements to fill up the first half of the year. They also have an iPad to drop. That brings us to WWDC we get new OS. Then sept iPhone drop / watch. Then October release of the MacBook Pro so this model will have a 11 ~ month shelf life. This will be a simple drop in chip upgrade and any revisions that are needed to support that.For my situation, I'm very tempted. I still have my 2014 MBP with Apple Care good until August 2017. The only thing I will really miss would be the Touch ID. But if I wait, I might even get more for my money and USB-C peripherals would be more plentiful. I gotta think long and hard.
The latter half of your thought is very true though your money might go farther on USB-C.
The issue is I think the Kabby chip is still to weak to push 7 stream video for dual 5k displays so I think the machine will still have the same price point and a DGPU.
I'm getting all day battery life on the 15 inch 2016 MBP with discreet graphics. I noticed that Google photo sync was hogging my battery. Shut that off and I'm getting all day battery. I've owned a dozen Macs and this by far the best Apple computer I've ever owned. The old MBP is a much inferior machine in almost every way.
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I had the same laptop you did. I rarely got 5 hours out of it doing basic html5 video and chat. I am besting that by about 2 hours safely.
I think the rub comes that the 2015 way over delivered in battery life. The machine got over 10 hours of this same use.
So people come to expect that and apple did not update there PR in reference to this so the change in expectation was not communicated.
you work in tech you know exactly what I am talking about.
Apple made a promise which is normally conservative and this time it was upper bounds. The upper bounds are technically legit but they are harder to head then the middle or lower slice of typical users use cases.
So in short over promised and do not meat the promise. That is a huge tech no no under promise over deliver. There is no other way to make people happy I have found in tech. I have to lie to you so you do not expect the universe and make you sweet potato fries.
Nobody minds if Microsoft does it. They exaggerate battery life insanely. Nowhere even close. But everyone gives them a free pass.
Anyhow, I think the new processors do much more throttling so it is much harder to estimate. Also, if you have a bad app these processors are much more vulnerable to burning up juice just because their idling juice is so low. I think Google's crappy code definitely doesn't help reach promised battery life, but they're not the only culprit.
Well I found 2 nasty little OS X bugs (yes OS X I refuse to subscribe to the apple official vocab) Safari can be induced to eat all ram in sight and page massive amounts if you do like a automator click macro of refreshing pages.
The second bug that is 100% invisible Is when messages grabs the DGPU and refuses to let it go. The thermals of the new DGPU do not betray that it is sucking down the juice until you got hey what gives and you have lost 15 percent. Messages should not be able to call the DGPU and if it does it needs to resign it. That is a huge glaring bug. I mean that is iOS dev 101 bug. Resign your responders esp the DGPU.
So those are just to surface bugs. The frequency coalescing does not seem to be optimized for the new low power ideal. The chip ramps up and ramps down just not fast enough. The race to sleep does not feel optimized. Then again I have no diag on that function.
The other two bugs you can reproduce with such ease it makes me wonder why apple missed them in QA
I have been using my 2016 13" Pro with mixed usage and have not found the battery life to be bad at all ... I get MORE than the advertised 10 hours ... I have Outlook constantly running in the background, surf the web, watch youtube videos, have creative cloud running the the background ... other "work" processes including webex/chat you name it and no issues. Right now I'm at 84% and its showing 8:26 left on battery ... maybe I just got a good unit, but I was nervous at first, but once I let computer settle in and get fully loaded and synced, including 90k+ iCloud photo library (optimized) ... everything has been perfect ever since ... this is also roughly between 40-50% brightness ...
I truly think it is the DGPU just sucks down the power and if you have the CPU running high as well your going to suck down the gas tank like a Bugatti. The power cell will just go poof gone. That power turned into to some serious cycles though.
I just got off of the phone with Apple tech support, I still have a few days to return the Laptop so I wanted to get an update on their internal battery research. They said the battery problem is top priority, and they think its the background processing sucking too much juice. I dunno, i am still going to return it, and wait and see what pans out.
The 2017 MBP with Kaby Lake should be more efficient. It will still require a DGPU but Apple should have better worked out the switching problems. In addition, since it would be the second version of their latest redesign then it will probably be more stable. And most likely, they won't even have a presentation. The 2017 MBP will be quietly released as an announcement. I do like the new 2016 redesign but since I can wait until my Apple Care support lapses then I'll probably do so. Then I'll get the 2017 model with another 3 year AC agreement.
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yeah I can not fault that choice.
I was put in a spot where my 2012 was just done. The thing was a refurb lemon. I had to have more stuff replaced on that I should have. Then it just started acting up again with no AC so I was up the creek I sold it off and started over I thought with a new machine that would be a bit more stable vs the old.
Is there a list of suggestions thats summarized? Im receiving my macbook tomorrow. Want to do all the steps before i transfer stuff over
After almost 9 weeks of waiting I finally received my 15" / 2.9 GHz / 460 / 16 GB / 2 TB from my local reseller. The first thing I did was to run som battery test comparing to my old 2014 / 13" / 3.0 GHz / 16 GB / 1 TB.
In the attached diagram you see the estimated battery times I got as a function of screen brightness in clicks. In summary 12.4 hours @ 50% for the new 15" and about 3 hours better than the 2014 13".
How I measured:
In the attached diagram you see the estimated battery times I got as a function of screen brightness in clicks. In summary 12.4 hours @ 50% for the new 15" and about 3 hours better than the 2014 13".
How I measured:
- Brightness adaptation disabled
- No background services running (sync, time machine ...)
- Sound at 50%
- Playing Lord of the rings: The return of the king (SD) - first 10 minutes
- Measuring raw current consumed from the battery using pmset -g rawlog
- Computing an average current consumption based on 10 samples (pmset gives one sample per minute)
- Dividing the DESIGN capacity of the battery (15# MPB: 6669 mAh) with average current consumption to get an estimation of time on battery
- Battery MAXIMUM CHARGE is actually 4% better than design capacity (6934 mAh), giving 20 - 30 min more on a new battery.
- There is more fluctuation of current consumption during the 10 min clip for the 15", CPU/GPU throttles back more, peaks more, compared to my old 2014 MBP; this leads to a bit more variation in measurements at low brightness
- The battery had two charge cycles on it out of the box, someone in China running battery test on the new MBP
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Is it safe to assume by now that Apple does not intend to do and/ or say anything about the battery "situation"? I've waited this long (even though I desperately need one ASAP, more like 3 months ago) just to get a confirmation from Apple that what's causing this mess is just a software issue and not a hardware one. Hell, they haven't even acknowledged the issue yet. The closest was Phill's tweet concerning Consumer Report's findings. At that point, I had hoped that soon enough they'd say something - but it's been a while since that tweet, and still nothing.
I know that odds are it's a software issue (and then I'd simply get it and wait for the update), but I need a confirmation on that, because once I get the MBP I will not be able to return it (long story).
This is really messed up.
I know that odds are it's a software issue (and then I'd simply get it and wait for the update), but I need a confirmation on that, because once I get the MBP I will not be able to return it (long story).
This is really messed up.