Ma2k5
macrumors 68030
Is Microsoft office that poorly optimised in MacOS? That concerns me quite a bit as a lot of my work flow requires Microsoft Products (you may say why I don't just get a Windows machine but lets ignore that for now 🙂).
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13' touch bar: 6 hours battery life...
- Thread starter cibonak
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Is Microsoft office that poorly optimised in MacOS? That concerns me quite a bit as a lot of my work flow requires Microsoft Products (you may say why I don't just get a Windows machine but lets ignore that for now 🙂).
Can we stop with this ********?
Chrome uses too much battery, word uses too much battery, using VMs uses too much battery... Then what purpose does this ****** laptop have if not running programs?
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What you're saying is that this is a 4000+ $ machine that should only be used with Safari to surf facebook? God forbid people actually need to work on it...
Ma2k5
macrumors 68030
This is what my train of thought is becoming, as I am not in the world of design/photography, but more of back-end development, data-bases, lots of Word/Excel/Visio usage in the businesses/enterprises/financial institutions that I work. If I am going to have to suffer productivity for some niceness of the MacBooks, is it really worth it?
skids929
macrumors 6502a
Manufacturers will tell you they are ready at birth but it's bullsh*t. Just look at user experiences everywhere, here for example. People report gains as they cycle the batteries a few times.
NT1440
macrumors P6
How long have you been using it? After indexing and a discharge or two Macs tend to really hit their stride in battery life.
elf69
macrumors 68020
I have old 2009 macbook, after upgrading to sierra battery was crap for a day while it index everything, now it great and longer than El Cap.
give it a cycle or two or a really good long charge.
every battery device I bought the shop has told me to give first charge twice what box says.
Then they said first 2-3 cycles will not be at best but after that it will be good until the batteries reach end of life.
give it a cycle or two or a really good long charge.
every battery device I bought the shop has told me to give first charge twice what box says.
Then they said first 2-3 cycles will not be at best but after that it will be good until the batteries reach end of life.
mattopotamus
macrumors Pentium
This mimic's what some reviewers are seeing. A lot of the reviews getting good battery life were simply running test in a loop and not actually using the Macs. The problem with doing that is the TB is not activated if you are not using the MacBook. The few reviews who are actually doing a battery test the right way are getting 7-8ish.
I have a no TB version and a TB version being delivered today. I am excited to try them side by side doing the exact same task to get a good real world battery comparison. As is stands now, I get right at 11 on the 13" no TB.
It makes sense that the battery is not going to be the same as the no TB version. You are talking about a 10% smaller battery, more power hungry CPU, and a TB to power. The battery size alone would account for an hour less than the 10 hour quote since they rate both machines getting 10 hours.
I have a no TB version and a TB version being delivered today. I am excited to try them side by side doing the exact same task to get a good real world battery comparison. As is stands now, I get right at 11 on the 13" no TB.
It makes sense that the battery is not going to be the same as the no TB version. You are talking about a 10% smaller battery, more power hungry CPU, and a TB to power. The battery size alone would account for an hour less than the 10 hour quote since they rate both machines getting 10 hours.
zhenya
macrumors 604
Or, we are just putting developer's feet to the fire to fix inefficient code.
Pretty much.
Apple quotes "up to 10 hours of web web", which is "wirelessly browsing 25 popular websites with display brightness set to 12 clicks from bottom or 75%"
So yes, basically, they expect you to only run Safari if you want to get that battery life.
If you're going to use your Mac for work, fine, nobody'd telling you not to (and the Mac is more than capable of doing it) ... you're just not going to get 10 hours of battery life. IMO, that's nothing new (or specific to the 13' touch bar model).
cmaier
Suspended
Probably because nilay was remotely logged into the machine and using it to search for studded wrist jewelry the whole time.
http://gawker.com/adult-website-editor-throws-twitter-tantrum-over-his-br-1697459743
What I've seen over and over again is that the size of the battery matters alot. It is the dominant factor once you start using your computer for anything more than surfing and word processing. In other words, the larger your battery, the longer you can video edit, crunch some numbers, etc unplugged.
Apple's software optimizations, etc, are only good for light use. This is the same with the iPhone. On every benchmark I've seen, once you game on it, the battery life is worse than on Android phones. Why? Because it's got a battery that's almost half the capacity.
So I assumed that once Apple cut the battery by 1/3 on the new macbook pros, the old model would have better battery life. CPU efficiency and screen improvements just don't make leaps in a year or two that negate a 33% decrease in battery capacity. That's a huge cut. Maybe it's close to 10 hours if you're really careful and use word and only safari. But for most people "who just use it" they will not see 10 hours and they will notice a decrease compared to the old model. The model with the touchbar I'm not surprised at all that it's got even worse battery life as it has a touchbar to power now while using a smaller battery.
Apple's magic is not that powerful. They tried but there's no amount of engineering that can overcome such a huge hole to start with.
These are very much in-between laptops and absolutely not worth the price. Just my opinion.
Apple's software optimizations, etc, are only good for light use. This is the same with the iPhone. On every benchmark I've seen, once you game on it, the battery life is worse than on Android phones. Why? Because it's got a battery that's almost half the capacity.
So I assumed that once Apple cut the battery by 1/3 on the new macbook pros, the old model would have better battery life. CPU efficiency and screen improvements just don't make leaps in a year or two that negate a 33% decrease in battery capacity. That's a huge cut. Maybe it's close to 10 hours if you're really careful and use word and only safari. But for most people "who just use it" they will not see 10 hours and they will notice a decrease compared to the old model. The model with the touchbar I'm not surprised at all that it's got even worse battery life as it has a touchbar to power now while using a smaller battery.
Apple's magic is not that powerful. They tried but there's no amount of engineering that can overcome such a huge hole to start with.
These are very much in-between laptops and absolutely not worth the price. Just my opinion.
I was saying it from a personal experience?
Ever since I switched to Pages, I have no problem with battery life. 😛
After using both whats your opinion of the overall performance? Did you did the touch bar version to be noticeably faster?
I've had my non-touch bar for a couple of weeks. At first life was lower related to Spotlight indexing. It's also been through a couple of battery drains and full charge cycles. Right now, I'm getting 10+ hours. I'm at a conference, taking notes, etc. today, using Outlook, VPN and Skype for business (text only, no video). It's been powered on since about 8a, it's 2:40p now. Use has been about 3 hours worth so far. Battery showing 90% and 8:19 remaining. Screen at about 75-80% brightness, backlights off. Sure, the TB version may be a bit less, but it shouldn't be drastic though.
TheBacklash
Suspended
My mother "needs" word on her mac, as does my niece. Both have 13" mbp, both hate how crappy word runs.
I run pages, runs fine. Export stuff in word format that looks exactly like their "true" word stuff. They can't tell the difference, but they can't use pages cause it's not "accepted" for use in their fields.
It's not apple... or the cost, it's MS being worthless in how they program their mac apps.
mattopotamus
macrumors Pentium
I don't notice a single difference in performance. Granted I use it for surfing the web, watching videos, office suite, and connecting to Remote Desktop. Speed wise for those task, identical. Maybe a power user would see a difference; however benchmarks show them very close so maybe not. I am at work (had it delivered there) so I plan to really spent time with it tonight. The touchbar is pretty cool, but I honestly don't think I will use it that much unless I am forcing myself to do so. Everything it does I can do just as fast without it. For example, safari. Most of my favorites are pinned. that is easier to use than looking down at the keyboard and finding the icon.
No, but if you were running a text editor that, for no reason, randomly tried to solve pi equations in the background, we would all tell you that running that program would unnecessarily drain battery life. I think this is what Word must be doing when I try to edit a document, or perhaps it's mapping the f***ing universe. I dunno. In any case, if you're fixed on using MS Word in a Mac OS laptop, you're probably plugging in plenty.
Also, yes Chrome is a hog as well. My Macbook runs at about 35°C with Safari, meanwhile it runs at 55°C+ with Chrome.
It is all because of bad coding / not efficient coding.
soulreaver99
macrumors 68040
yillbs
macrumors 6502
I'm on my 5th charging cycle and my estimated time in the battery drop down bar is starting to become more accurate, and battery life overall is starting to improve pretty heavily. I feel they need to give us an option to disable the touch bar personally, but based on the way things are going, it's only going to be around 7 hours. I'll be using it the entire time until it dies tonight at work, but I'm predicting at least 7 hours. I'm going to be coding, and compiling various bits of XCODE , php, etc. I'm hoping after it's had a chance to break in so to speak, it'll be much better results.
I'm not TO upset though, because honestly, I have external battery packs that I'd carry even if it got a solid 10 hours, so it's moot imo.
I'm not TO upset though, because honestly, I have external battery packs that I'd carry even if it got a solid 10 hours, so it's moot imo.
TheBacklash
Suspended
Wouldn't know if that's true or not, wouldn't trust my iTunes library on a windows machine... 😉
As others pointed out, the first few days of a new machine.. don't pay attention to the battery usage. My iPhone 7+ didn't even last through the first day, now I can stream all day at work and still have 25-30% when I go to bed.
I am sitting at around 4-5 hours of battery life. Indexing is done, i'm not running Word (or any office product)...and nothing is using "significant power usage". I'm not really sure what to think about it. I love everything so far about the laptop but that's a tough one.
zhenya
macrumors 604
What do you consider 'significant power usage?' (ie. what are the values you are looking at? Single digits, two digits? Three?)
Maybe install Coconut Battery which will let you see how much power, in Watts, are being used in realtime.