I've got a Macbook Pro 2020 running Catalina 10.15.7. My battery life seems horrible these days though it says its normal. I'm at 21% today after 2.5 hours of web browsing, which is typical for me lately. What's going on? I do keep the screen on brightest display so I can see it best, but other than that I'm not sure what could contribute to this. I've attached some screenshots that might be helpful.
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Help a non-techie out -- ye olde battery problem
- Thread starter heycal
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What does "coconut battery" show?
coconutBattery 3.9 - by coconut-flavour.com
With coconutBattery you are always aware of your current battery health. It shows you live information about the battery in your Mac and iOS devices (iPhone, iPad)
www.coconut-flavour.com
There's part of your answer. You can expect about a 40% hit to battery life from that alone for your model vs using 150 nits. You can check the Activity Monitor Energy tab to see what else is using power.
What specifically would I be looking for in here? A bunch of things are listed, Safari first on the list.
Not necessarily. Capacity just goes down as the cycles go by.
Go to the "energy" tab in Activity Monitor and check that out. Sort by Energy Impact. You can also look at the CPU tab and sort by CPU Tiime to see what's been using a lot of cycles.
I'd suggest running CoconutBattery and setting it up to show power usage in your menu bar. In its preferences you can set what shows up in the menu bar. Watt usage is super useful (the code for that in the display is %w -- this will make sense if you install it and look in the display preference).
My last Intel MacBook Air would consistently pull around 10 watts, and if it spiked up to 15 or more, the estimated time remaining would plummet and I'd know to turn the screen brightness down or quit whatever app was hogging power. (I replaced it with an M1 Air and now it pulls well under 5 watts most of the time, and I really don't think about battery life anywhere near as much).
Here's what I see under those two tabs. I couldn't figure out how to sort CPU by time.
I guess I could try this coconut thing, but if all it tells me is what is using how much energy, it doesn't solve the problem, huh? It just diagnoses it, and its a shame if a newish Macbook Pro can't last three hours with normal use.
I guess I could try this coconut thing, but if all it tells me is what is using how much energy, it doesn't solve the problem, huh? It just diagnoses it, and its a shame if a newish Macbook Pro can't last three hours with normal use.
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Your Activity Monitor screen isn't showing the numbers. You may need check View > Columns > Energy Impact and/or scroll to the right and put your pointer up by the light vertical bar on the same line as App Name, over to the right, and drag it over leftward to put the other columns where you can see them with the names. It should give a number for each to give you an idea how much an app is using compared to others.