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Really Poor Battery Life with Sierra

B

Brammy

macrumors 68000
Original poster
Sep 17, 2008
1,718
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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.
 
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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carloborja said:
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.
Click to expand...

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