Air Battery Life - OS X Yosemite

loby said:

First I have a MacBook Air i7 8gigs RAM 512gig SSD drive 2013 model,

Has anyone noticed a difference in battery life with OS X Yosemite?

I upgraded and noticed a little more draining than with Mavericks.

Anyone else notice this?

Thanks!

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I upgraded to Yosemite on the Air in my sig. I haven't gotten the opportunity to test the actual battery life myself yet, but my estimated battery life on a full charge has actually gone up by a couple hours. I'm not sure if that's all that accurate though.

I see the same battery life in my 2012 MBA.

Memory usage is a different story. I'm using so much more running less.

kage207 said:

I see the same battery life in my 2012 MBA.

Memory usage is a different story. I'm using so much more running less.

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Memory usage is presented in a way that's difficult to understand in Activity Monitor. As long as the graph is showing green, you're fine.

motrek said:

Memory usage is presented in a way that's difficult to understand in Activity Monitor. As long as the graph is showing green, you're fine.

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I understand memory very well actually. I'm actually swapping when I used to not under the same load of work. I usually am running 7-12 tabs in Safari, Coda (or Xcode), iTunes (or Netflix), Mail, Messages, Calendar, Reminders.

On top of this I run DropBox, Unclutter, Mint QuickView, Color Maker, and Google Drive. These are are all in the Menu Bar, I understand that these don't take up too much but 50MB each uncompressed still adds up. When they get compressed they maybe drop down to 30MB.

I do begin to swap and the other day after 10 minutes of work, I had swapped about 150MB.

I'm a Computer Science dude. I understand how it all works but I think iTunes and Netflix take much more memory as I used to do all this on Mavericks with about 1GB to spare (as long as I didn't use simulator in Xcode).

kage207 said:

I understand memory very well actually. I'm actually swapping when I used to not under the same load of work. I usually am running 7-12 tabs in Safari, Coda (or Xcode), iTunes (or Netflix), Mail, Messages, Calendar, Reminders.
...

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When you say you're swapping, do you mean that some memory is written out to disk (i.e., "Swap Used" is showing non-zero in Activity Monitor) or that your machine is thrashing the swap and thus performance is affected?

I've noticed that starting with Mavericks, the OS is fairly aggressive about swapping out inactive pages to free up physical memory in case its needed. For example, right now I'm not running much stuff and I'm showing very low values for "memory used" and "app memory" and "memory pressure" but I still have 600+ MB swapped out, presumably because the OS thinks I'm not likely to need whatever's in that memory.

motrek said:

When you say you're swapping, do you mean that some memory is written out to disk (i.e., "Swap Used" is showing non-zero in Activity Monitor) or that your machine is thrashing the swap and thus performance is affected?

I've noticed that starting with Mavericks, the OS is fairly aggressive about swapping out inactive pages to free up physical memory in case its needed. For example, right now I'm not running much stuff and I'm showing very low values for "memory used" and "app memory" and "memory pressure" but I still have 600+ MB swapped out, presumably because the OS thinks I'm not likely to need whatever's in that memory.

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Yes, my "Swap Used" is nonzero. I had this fairly low on Mavericks usually if ever as I always had 1GB of free memory when I work (the apps above). The "Swap Used" was roughly about 15MB if it did.

Now, I have about 16MB free and my "Swapped Used" is about 150MB when I start working in a very short period of time.

Also note, my battery life hasn't been affected. I'm not too worried about this as I've always had great performance with it.

Also, I hope the OP sees usage varies depending what you do. I don't do all the things I listed on my battery but when I'm plugged in. I'm a bit more reasonable when on battery.

kage207 said:

Yes, my "Swap Used" is nonzero. I had this fairly low on Mavericks usually if ever as I always had 1GB of free memory when I work (the apps above). The "Swap Used" was roughly about 15MB if it did.

Now, I have about 16MB free and my "Swapped Used" is about 150MB when I start working in a very short period of time.
...

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Wouldn't worry about this at all unless performance is affected. As long as that "memory pressure" graph is green, you have free memory, or at least memory that Apple has deemed easily allocatable.

If inactive pages are written to disk, i.e., swapped out, it shouldn't really make any difference to performance at all. Probably improves performance actually.

loby said:

First I have a MacBook Air i7 8gigs RAM 512gig SSD drive 2013 model,

Has anyone noticed a difference in battery life with OS X Yosemite?

I upgraded and noticed a little more draining than with Mavericks.

Anyone else notice this?

Thanks!

Click to expand...

I upgraded 2014 Air i5 8g RAM and battery life seems as good as before. In saying that battery testing always is so subjective to me that I only judge by what "seems" to be a decent battery life for me. And the new Air seems to have incredible battery life as has been stated countless time by others.

motrek said:

Wouldn't worry about this at all unless performance is affected. As long as that "memory pressure" graph is green, you have free memory, or at least memory that Apple has deemed easily allocatable.

If inactive pages are written to disk, i.e., swapped out, it shouldn't really make any difference to performance at all. Probably improves performance actually.

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Ya, I just get nervous as it was after 10 minutes plus of usage for 150MB to be swapped. The only reason to be a bit nervous is the limited read / writes SSDs have that I don't want to burn through. I understand the technology behind it and there are plenty but I constantly work on my computer 12-16hrs a day really.

kage207 said:

Ya, I just get nervous as it was after 10 minutes plus of usage for 150MB to be swapped. The only reason to be a bit nervous is the limited read / writes SSDs have that I don't want to burn through. I understand the technology behind it and there are plenty but I constantly work on my computer 12-16hrs a day really.

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If you go to the Disk tab of Activity Monitor you can see how much data has been written to your SSD (well, any disk) since your computer was last rebooted. Then you can run 'uptime' in the terminal to see how long that was.

If you divide, you can figure out how much data is written to your SSD per day.

Personally I just checked and I seem to write about ~6 GB/day.

If you figure that you can write to your SSD cells only 100k times (pessimistic number) then for a 128GB drive, you can write 12.8 million gigabytes to it before it dies, assuming perfect wear leveling and no write amplification.

So for me, I need to worry about my SSD wearing out in about 5800 years.

So I'm not that concerned if I swap out 150MB here or there.

motrek said:

If you go to the Disk tab of Activity Monitor you can see how much data has been written to your SSD (well, any disk) since your computer was last rebooted. Then you can run 'uptime' in the terminal to see how long that was.

If you divide, you can figure out how much data is written to your SSD per day.

Personally I just checked and I seem to write about ~6 GB/day.

If you figure that you can write to your SSD cells only 100k times (pessimistic number) then for a 128GB drive, you can write 12.8 million gigabytes to it before it dies, assuming perfect wear leveling and no write amplification.

So for me, I need to worry about my SSD wearing out in about 5800 years.

So I'm not that concerned if I swap out 150MB here or there.

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Ah, good call.

Actually, I think my battery life has gone down. Im at 80% right now and it says I have an estimated 2 hours left. I only have 2 tabs in safari and iTunes in the background.

Does this sound normal to anyone? I just rebooted to see if there was anything in the background running and its still the same estimate.

Its a Mid-2012 entry level 11-inch air.

Leotno said:

Actually, I think my battery life has gone down. Im at 80% right now and it says I have an estimated 2 hours left. I only have 2 tabs in safari and iTunes in the background.

Does this sound normal to anyone? I just rebooted to see if there was anything in the background running and its still the same estimate.

Its a Mid-2012 entry level 11-inch air.

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Looking at the programs you have open is a fairly worthless way of telling how much your computer is doing. You have to go to Activity Monitor and see what's using up Energy, i.e., click on the Energy tab.

If it doesn't look like any program is using a lot of CPU power or "Energy" then maybe you have something plugged into the USB port(s) that's sucking power?

Ah, I see. I've attempted to include a screenshot, hopefully it works.
I pulled it off the charger less than an hour ago from 100% and I'm already at 76% with minimal use.

Leotno said:

Ah, I see. I've attempted to include a screenshot, hopefully it works.
I pulled it off the charger less than an hour ago from 100% and I'm already at 76% with minimal use.

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Uff, that's pretty crap. And you haven't been using the laptop to charge/power anything like an external drive or your phone?

I'd be reluctant to blame the operating system though BTW. Aside from making sure the computer goes into low-power modes at the right times, the operating system really has very little to do with how much power the computer uses. (Well, that, and Apple's indexing software sure does take a bunch of CPU/power if it needs to reindex something...)

motrek said:

Uff, that's pretty crap. And you haven't been using the laptop to charge/power anything like an external drive or your phone?

I'd be reluctant to blame the operating system though BTW. Aside from making sure the computer goes into low-power modes at the right times, the operating system really has very little to do with how much power the computer uses. (Well, that, and Apple's indexing software sure does take a bunch of CPU/power if it needs to reindex something...)

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Okay, so I'm just not being sensitive about this. Phew. I figured my battery life was draining a little too quick.
Nope, no usb or any devices plugged in.

I've had OSX Yosemite installed since the public beta and even then the battery lasted about 5-6 hours on a charge. I'll continue to leave it be for the next few days and see if anything improves. If not, ill reinstall the OS and go from there.

Leotno said:

Okay, so I'm just not being sensitive about this. Phew. I figured my battery life was draining a little too quick.
Nope, no usb or any devices plugged in.

I've had OSX Yosemite installed since the public beta and even then the battery lasted about 5-6 hours on a charge. I'll continue to leave it be for the next few days and see if anything improves. If not, ill reinstall the OS and go from there.

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Next question: is it cold where you're using the laptop, or is the laptop cold for some reason? Chemical reactions happen slower if it's colder, so the battery will seem to be running down faster when it actually isn't.

Other than that, no idea what might be going on.

Maybe download the Intel Power Gadget, which will show you if your CPU is using a lot of power (even though it doesn't seem like it should be based on Activity Monitor).

Also probably worth downloading "Battery Health" which will show you how your current max charge capacity compares to the factory original state.

motrek said:

Next question: is it cold where you're using the laptop, or is the laptop cold for some reason? Chemical reactions happen slower if it's colder, so the battery will seem to be running down faster when it actually isn't.

Other than that, no idea what might be going on.

Maybe download the Intel Power Gadget, which will show you if your CPU is using a lot of power (even though it doesn't seem like it should be based on Activity Monitor).

Also probably worth downloading "Battery Health" which will show you how your current max charge capacity compares to the factory original state.

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Nope, everything is room temp and the computer is under normal operating temps.

System Report states that battery is at 181 cycle counts and is in normal condition. I don't know how reliable iStat Pro is, but it rates the battery at 90% health.

Leotno said:

Nope, everything is room temp and the computer is under normal operating temps.

System Report states that battery is at 181 cycle counts and is in normal condition. I don't know how reliable iStat Pro is, but it rates the battery at 90% health.

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Everything should work fine... like you, the only thing I can think of is a clean install. Maybe upgrading from a beta, there is a higher chance of system file corruption, than upgrading from a prime time release.

Mine is pretty terrible also. Upgraded to Yosemite (no clean install) and I'm getting 3-4 to 4 hrs.

487 load cycles, 89% capacity, so it should still last more than 4 hrs. I tried to run with lots of tabs open in FF and Safari, then I only ran with 3 tabs in Safari and same thing. No flash. Did SMC and PRAM reset. Did a disk repair. etc...

No improvement. Would hate to install everything from scratch and I wonder if that would even help.

Any other thoughts?

blue2007 said:

Mine is pretty terrible also. Upgraded to Yosemite (no clean install) and I'm getting 3-4 to 4 hrs.

487 load cycles, 89% capacity, so it should still last more than 4 hrs. I tried to run with lots of tabs open in FF and Safari, then I only ran with 3 tabs in Safari and same thing. No flash. Did SMC and PRAM reset. Did a disk repair. etc...

No improvement. Would hate to install everything from scratch and I wonder if that would even help.

Any other thoughts?

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If it was a software incompatibility / upgrade corruption issue, on your end, a clean install would help.

Or the problem could be that Apple needs to issue Yosemite updates to fix various battery-draining bugs.

In any case, a Yosemite bug fixe from Apple could solve both of these upgrade problems. I'm waiting a few months before updating any computers to Yosemite, or for that matter for updating any sort of device to a new OS in general. Apple needs to issue a couple bug fix releases in order to make the upgrade process smooth and hopefully trouble free.

Your battery looks to be in excellent condition. Today I saw a 2012 macbook with 154 cycles and 77% capacity.

mangomind said:

If it was a software incompatibility / upgrade corruption issue, on your end, a clean install would help.

Or the problem could be that Apple needs to issue Yosemite updates to fix various battery-draining bugs.

In any case, a Yosemite bug fixe from Apple could solve both of these upgrade problems. I'm waiting a few months before updating any computers to Yosemite, or for that matter for updating any sort of device to a new OS in general. Apple needs to issue a couple bug fix releases in order to make the upgrade process smooth and hopefully trouble free.

Your battery looks to be in excellent condition. Today I saw a 2012 macbook with 154 cycles and 77% capacity.

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Yes, I have a July 2013 MBA, so the battery does seem to be okay. I would jus hate to reinstall all to find out it didn't help. I wish more people would report on a fresh install.

blue2007 said:

Mine is pretty terrible also. Upgraded to Yosemite (no clean install) and I'm getting 3-4 to 4 hrs.

487 load cycles, 89% capacity, so it should still last more than 4 hrs. I tried to run with lots of tabs open in FF and Safari, then I only ran with 3 tabs in Safari and same thing. No flash. Did SMC and PRAM reset. Did a disk repair. etc...

No improvement. Would hate to install everything from scratch and I wonder if that would even help.

Any other thoughts?

Click to expand...

The power must be going somewhere. Run an app called Battery Health. It will give you an estimate of "mAh Usage (realtime)" that people can compare with their current laptops to see if its in-line with expectations.

Also run Intel Power Gadget and see what your CPU is using.

Also -- are you guys actually seeing these sub-par battery times or are you reporting the estimate that's displayed in the battery menu in the corner? Because who knows if that estimate is any good.

I've got the same MBA config as the initial poster, but haven't really noticed any difference in battery life. Caveat, I don't really pay attention to it as it the laptop works well for me and my use cases, plus spends the majority of its life on the charger.