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Brammy

macrumors 68000
Original poster
Sep 17, 2008
1,718
690
I have a 2014 11" MacBook Air, and a 2011 15" MacBook Pro with a dGPU. Both are getting horrible battery life with Sierra. I was running all the betas and did an upgrade to the retail version as a sanity check. I am currently on the 10.2 Developer beta to see if that helps at all (It didn't).

I don't have any statistics on my 211 MacBook Pro, other than after about 2 hours I was down to 45% last week. On the MacBook Air, however I do have some numbers.
  • Last Friday I played a game and it drained completely in an hour. I then charged it to full thinking it needed a calibration.
  • Later that night, I did some casual web surfing and it died exactly 3 hours later
  • Today I'm re-downloading El Cap over wifi and I've lost 12% battery in 30 minutes.
A few questions:
  1. Is anyone else noticing bad battery life?
  2. Did anything fix it? Does a clean install work?
It's not often I need to run my Mac on just battery, but I'm thinking of downgrading one of the Macs to El Cap to see if my battery life goes back to normal.
 

carloborja

macrumors newbie
Oct 3, 2016
2
2
Cagayan de Oro, Philippines
I am experiencing less battery life too.

I have a MacBook Air Early 2014. It used to run like 9-10 hours on El Capitan.

Right now, with the same things I'm doing it's only at around 7-8 hours on macOS Sierra.

Haven't done anything yet though. It's not that significant of a difference I guess but I can notice it.
 
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Brammy

macrumors 68000
Original poster
Sep 17, 2008
1,718
690
I am experiencing less battery life too.

I have a MacBook Air Early 2014. It used to run like 9-10 hours on El Capitan.

Right now, with the same things I'm doing it's only at around 7-8 hours on macOS Sierra.

Haven't done anything yet though. It's not that significant of a difference I guess but I can notice it.

Clean install? Are you on the 10.12.1 beta? Were you on any of the betas?
 

Brammy

macrumors 68000
Original poster
Sep 17, 2008
1,718
690
So, I backed my 11" 2014 Air back to El Capitan last night and let it do its new install stuff over night.

Today at work I ran the same tests as yesterday. Because I'm an idiot, I erased yesterdays tests from my white board, but the difference was notable. Previously, "mostly idle" the battery died in about 4 hours. I started the tests around 10 and by 2:30 it was mostly dead.

Today at 8:45 I started it and when I left at 4:20 it still had 24% battery left.
 
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