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Battery life for 13" and 15" Macbook Pro
- Thread starter fokmik
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confirmed. 15tb 455 here. 8-12 hours achievable.
wattage always sub 10 for light usage with occassional spikes depending on the websites im surfing (chrome) --> This is key to know if you're facing a batt life issue.
happy with the update.
I have a macbook pro 13 (early 2015) At 95% it tells me 2:30 hrs remaining?
What can be causing it?
What can be causing it?
I took off chrome and it gave me 6hrs at 67%. Cant believe Chrome was that bad.
Just thought I would weigh in here. Picked up my 13" tbMBP about 3 weeks ago. Like many, I was a bit alarmed with the battery life out of the box, as I was initially getting around 3-4 hours, but after about a week that bumped up to 5-6 hours which was not great, but tolerable. I'm sure there is something behind initial indexing and setup that chews extra battery until complete, but no idea for sure what the impact is.
Where it got interesting for me was when I actually started using it for work. Now I am getting 10+ hours. I spend a lot of time in word, powerpoint, and excel through-out the day and usually connected to a wifi network. Why the big bump? I believe my regular work like activity is far less intensive through-out the day than playing with a new computer out-of-the box. There are more idle moments. Taking notes during a meeting and working in Excel may not be continuous, even though I may have those apps open and be looking at them through-out the day. Just yesterday, I spent a full day, 8am-5pm in a conference room doing that type of activity and even projecting some powerpoint slides. By the end of the day, I still had 37% battery remaining! I can certainly live with that.
I realize everyones work habits are different and which apps they use have a big impact. But I thought it was worth pointing out my observations.
One other thing, last week I borrowed someone's USB-C hub adapter that had VGA adapter and other ports and wow, battery went down fast! After about an hour of presenting without being plugged in, the laptop died. I picked up a simple belkin USB-C to VGA adapter (nothing fancy) and battery drain was much, much slower while presenting. Just something to consider. Those multi-port hubs are cool, but they might drain your battery a lot faster.
Where it got interesting for me was when I actually started using it for work. Now I am getting 10+ hours. I spend a lot of time in word, powerpoint, and excel through-out the day and usually connected to a wifi network. Why the big bump? I believe my regular work like activity is far less intensive through-out the day than playing with a new computer out-of-the box. There are more idle moments. Taking notes during a meeting and working in Excel may not be continuous, even though I may have those apps open and be looking at them through-out the day. Just yesterday, I spent a full day, 8am-5pm in a conference room doing that type of activity and even projecting some powerpoint slides. By the end of the day, I still had 37% battery remaining! I can certainly live with that.
I realize everyones work habits are different and which apps they use have a big impact. But I thought it was worth pointing out my observations.
One other thing, last week I borrowed someone's USB-C hub adapter that had VGA adapter and other ports and wow, battery went down fast! After about an hour of presenting without being plugged in, the laptop died. I picked up a simple belkin USB-C to VGA adapter (nothing fancy) and battery drain was much, much slower while presenting. Just something to consider. Those multi-port hubs are cool, but they might drain your battery a lot faster.
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Yep, like others I'm seeing improvement in battery life with 10.12.3. Yesterday I took my 13" TB to the office and used it all day (from 10-5), and still had about 25% remaining. And that was using Chrome with a video conferencing app, which prior to the 10.12.3 update really drained the battery significantly. This morning I've been doing light web browsing for almost an hour and I'm still at 94%.
First, let me state that I was very satisfied with battery life of my 15'' MBP right out of the box and up to (and including ) 10.12.3. It's nice that people who seemed to have battery life issues are seeing improvements with the OS updates. Some people though are suggesting that the improvements are due to GPU throttling (see here for example). My question is: Are you experiencing performance degradation of any sort with 10.12.3 ??
The dGPU doesn't affect battery life for the kinds of ordinary use involved with battery life tests. Probably, if there have been changes to dGPU use, it's about graphics glitches. Interesting thread you link to, though.
I don't think the battery savings are from GPU throttling. When I was on 10.12.2, I used gfxcardstatus to set my mac to 'integrated only' and kept a dedicated wattage meter for my Radeon in the menubar to make sure it wasn't firing when it wasn't supposed to. So I knew the GPU wasn't the source of my bad battery life.
The gains I've seen on 10.12.3 seem to be from CPU wattages that don't spike as easily, and stay slightly lower than before. Again, just a general impression - but I've used every build so far and have kept a close eye on wattages.
The gains I've seen on 10.12.3 seem to be from CPU wattages that don't spike as easily, and stay slightly lower than before. Again, just a general impression - but I've used every build so far and have kept a close eye on wattages.
Hadn't really used my 15" in mobility recently and finally got to use it more.
10.12.3 hasn't fixed my battery draining while sleeping so I'll look into the "hard" fix.
Other than that, battery life is "ok" now, it's really about understanding what causes high power draw.
Watching the same movie in VLC uses 11 watts compared to 6 in Quicktime.
And some weird things like watching full screen Youtube uses about 2/3 watts less than when not in full screen for whatever reason.
Also sadly most the websites I go to have crazy power draw, scrolling Twitter uses more watts than watching Netflix or Youtube.
Overall, I can get 7 hours of solid use in great conditions and around 9 if I pay a bit more attention to what I do and dim the screen to 50% (which I find very low brightness unless in total dark).
Just sad that they didn't come with Kaby Lake to begin with... could have probably reach that 9-10 hours with 75%+ brightness
10.12.3 hasn't fixed my battery draining while sleeping so I'll look into the "hard" fix.
Other than that, battery life is "ok" now, it's really about understanding what causes high power draw.
Watching the same movie in VLC uses 11 watts compared to 6 in Quicktime.
And some weird things like watching full screen Youtube uses about 2/3 watts less than when not in full screen for whatever reason.
Also sadly most the websites I go to have crazy power draw, scrolling Twitter uses more watts than watching Netflix or Youtube.
Overall, I can get 7 hours of solid use in great conditions and around 9 if I pay a bit more attention to what I do and dim the screen to 50% (which I find very low brightness unless in total dark).
Just sad that they didn't come with Kaby Lake to begin with... could have probably reach that 9-10 hours with 75%+ brightness
Have you tried out the suggestion in this thread?
https://forums.macrumors.com/thread...drain-while-sleeping-here-is-the-fix.2026702/
Thanks for the feedback Jack.
You mentioned two points that are key for battery consumption:
- Wifi access: when writing notes or using Excel you are actually using less wifi / throughput (if any) which is not the case for heavier web use or bunch of downloads / streaming
- external devices plugged in will impact battery drain, some more than others as you experienced first hand
Today doing heavy browsing I will not be able to reach 8h on a single charge. Also to blame was the fact that while sleeping battery drain is still an issue even on 10.12.3
¨
Thanks ! That is the "hard fix" I was talking about that I will try tonight.
I was hoping that 10.12.3 would fix it, but apparently not
People who need to have serious battery life outside of ability to plug it in, and who can afford to buy a mac laptop in the first place should realize that even the best only has about a 9500 watt battery. For about $130-170 you can buy an external battery that will fit the laptop like it was external power and has between 26000-65000, and is about the size of a portable HDD. If battery power was that important to me, I would have back-up. You can look in Activity Monitor and easily see how much energy different applications are using. Expecting to run a whole bunch of high power applications and then expecting the battery to do the work is crazy. Now all bets are off when Lithium-Oxygen batteries come out. These will have the energy capacity of gasoline.
I better start saving up now for MacBook Pros with lithium-oxygen batteries or Apple's take on it. Sounds like this feature will cause Apple to markup the price of an Apple MacBook Pro far more than the Touch Bar did.
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interesting folk are loosing power on sleep - I put mine to sleep last night at midnight after using it on Mains all evening. power was disconnected, and opened it up just there 9 and a half hours later and it is still at 100%...
been lucky as never had any of the bad battery problems...
been lucky as never had any of the bad battery problems...
Me too !. FWIW, I have unplugged mine (15''/2.7/512/455), fully charged, 4 days ago. I used it for about 3 hours every afternoon for the past 3 days (used for web front-end development, i.e. a dozen safari tabs, chrome for testing, Webstorm IDE and a terminal running an incremental webpack build). After a solid 9 hours battery is at 35% and Activity monitor tells me I could go for another 3 hours. Very satisfied !
So, reporting battery life!
Currently I'm just listening music from iTunes, display not so bright, and four light tabs opened in Opera.
I definitively dropped out Chrome, given the bad reviews.
Battery Health was showing 16.50 hours remaining, but in a couple of seconds went down to 16.30 and then 16.20.
Still good, I supposed
(now 16.10/15.50)
Anyway, Battery Health is expecting 6.50 hours of Internet Browsing, with battery at 98% (6372 mAh)
A little bit far from the 10 hours promoted by Apple.
I'll try to report the Mac on battery with some Adobe apps, mainly InDesign, Photoshop and Illustrator.
Currently I'm just listening music from iTunes, display not so bright, and four light tabs opened in Opera.
I definitively dropped out Chrome, given the bad reviews.
Battery Health was showing 16.50 hours remaining, but in a couple of seconds went down to 16.30 and then 16.20.
Still good, I supposed
(now 16.10/15.50)
Anyway, Battery Health is expecting 6.50 hours of Internet Browsing, with battery at 98% (6372 mAh)
A little bit far from the 10 hours promoted by Apple.
I'll try to report the Mac on battery with some Adobe apps, mainly InDesign, Photoshop and Illustrator.
Hi guys,
I need your help and advice.
Minimal usage, 5-6 hours of battery:
Got a brand new MacBook Pro TB 12", 1TB SSD, 16GB RAM. I am on 10.12.3 and I get about 5-6 hours of battery life on <75% brightness, keyboard not lit, bluetooth off, no devices attached, only safari open with max. 5 tabs, light browsing, a bit of text editing, and using mail. No app using significant energy. No cloud service, no music streaming, no video, no audio playback, background apps: 1pass, coconut battery, battery health, adobe core sync helper. I already tried PRAM and SMC reset. Transferred files manually from my old mac.
Does a return make sense and is it reasonable?
Just got the MacBook a few days ago, so I am considering to return it. Do you guys think I am overreacting here? I think with the specs and usage outlined I should be closer to the outlined 10 hours of battery life, however I am only seeing maybe 50-60% of what is advised by apple. The machine has cost nearly 3000 EUR, so I thought I should be a bit picky here and return it. However, what would be the outcome? Will I get a replacement and should I have any hope that a replacement will offer a better battery life? Or is this generation just screwed up?
What would you do? Thanks for your help.
I need your help and advice.
Minimal usage, 5-6 hours of battery:
Got a brand new MacBook Pro TB 12", 1TB SSD, 16GB RAM. I am on 10.12.3 and I get about 5-6 hours of battery life on <75% brightness, keyboard not lit, bluetooth off, no devices attached, only safari open with max. 5 tabs, light browsing, a bit of text editing, and using mail. No app using significant energy. No cloud service, no music streaming, no video, no audio playback, background apps: 1pass, coconut battery, battery health, adobe core sync helper. I already tried PRAM and SMC reset. Transferred files manually from my old mac.
Does a return make sense and is it reasonable?
Just got the MacBook a few days ago, so I am considering to return it. Do you guys think I am overreacting here? I think with the specs and usage outlined I should be closer to the outlined 10 hours of battery life, however I am only seeing maybe 50-60% of what is advised by apple. The machine has cost nearly 3000 EUR, so I thought I should be a bit picky here and return it. However, what would be the outcome? Will I get a replacement and should I have any hope that a replacement will offer a better battery life? Or is this generation just screwed up?
What would you do? Thanks for your help.
Do you have the 15" or the 13"? The battery issues are more common with the 13" with touch bar.
What energy impact shows in your Activity Monitor for Safari, Mail and whatever else? Something must be using the energy.
Give it more time before you decide to return it. Some people have reported that battery life improves over time (maybe because of software updates, maybe because the machine becomes more efficient with the software it has, who knows?).
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nTB MBP on 10.12.3. Yesterday, I got around 10 hours and had 40% left. This was with light browsing, OneNote, powerpoints, and word documents.
can anyone please report their battery life after the sierra 10.12.3 update? I am wondering whether to get a 2016 macbook pro. Thank you.