16" MacBook Pro Battery Draining Faster Than Charger Can Replenish.

[Xenden]

I've been using the new 16" MacBook Pro and it is pretty good. When I've been playing World of Warcraft however, the battery drains faster than the charger can replace.

I'm using the USB-C power brick and cord provided. I've never had a laptop, Mac or Windows, burn through power like this.

Any ideas?

 

[junkw]

what happens, it reaches 0 then dies even if plugged in or it reaches 0 then it continues on USB-C power only ?

 

[Xenden]

what happens, it reaches 0 then dies even if plugged in?

You know, I haven't let it get that far. I played for basically an hour a little bit ago and drained the battery from 100% ->77%.

Once I turn off WoW, the battery started to charge up again. The whole time the charge cable was in though.

 

[Ifti]

Once it drains to 0% it will probably switch off the unit for a moment while the charger tops up the battery enough to switch back on, after which you would need to quit the game and allow it to charge somewhat.

 

[junkw]

Once it drains to 0% it will probably switch off the unit for a moment while the charger tops up the battery enough to switch back on, after which you would need to quit the game and allow it to charge somewhat.

are all (non-Apple) laptops behaving like that? and gaming laptops?

 

[iemcj]

are all (non-Apple) laptops behaving like that? and gaming laptops?

I have several friends with gaming laptops and I've never heard of the power cable not being able to provide enough power to break even, let alone have the battery *drain* while being plugged into AC power. That's not normal.

 

[Ifti]

I have several friends with gaming laptops and I've never heard of the power cable not being able to provide enough power to break even, let alone have the battery *drain* while being plugged into AC power. That's not normal.

Agreed. I would expect it to at least break even, although I do not game on my systems so I have no experience in the matter I'm afraid.

 

[mightyjabba]

This is extremely surprising. I could understand it if you were using a different adapter than the supplied one, but I find it hard to believe you're using more than the standard adapter can supply.

 

[Xenden]

This is extremely surprising. I could understand it if you were using a different adapter than the supplied one, but I find it hard to believe you're using more than the standard adapter can supply.

i know that the game is using the discreet card, but it shouldn’t be using that much extra power.

I have several friends with gaming laptops and I've never heard of the power cable not being able to provide enough power to break even, let alone have the battery *drain* while being plugged into AC power. That's not normal.

I agree it’s not normal. I was using a 2015 MacBook Pro and it always charged the battery when playing games.

I know the 16” is new, but I was wondering if anyone else was running into this issue

 

[chrono1081]

This is really weird. I tax the absolute crap out of my system (far more than WoW could do) and never have it not charge while plugged in.

Something is faulty here, either the machine or the power brick. Hopefully the latter.

 

[1196403]

Wow will not only drain your battery, it will drain your soul.

 

[satchow]

Sounds like you have a faulty power brick or usb-c cable. I tend to believe that they're providing less than 100W versus your computer drawing more than 100W.

 

[akash.nu]

My suggestion is to take it to the Apple store.

 

[seangrimes590]

Agreed with most of the posts, there's a problem somewhere. I've had mine run simulations for 12-18 hours that keep the CPU + GPU at or near 100% load and I come back to a computer that's still fully charged in the morning.

 

[jerryk]

I've been using the new 16" MacBook Pro and it is pretty good. When I've been playing World of Warcraft however, the battery drains faster than the charger can replace.

I'm using the USB-C power brick and cord provided. I've never had a laptop, Mac or Windows, burn through power like this.

Any ideas?

Double check your power supply and ensure it says "96 watts". Also check in the System Report (About this Mac | System Report) and see what it reports the charger as being. Scroll down in System Report to Power and then "AC Charger Information". It should show 96W USB-C and made by Apple.

Also make sure you are using the cable that came with the unit. Any USB-C cable certified for more than 60 watts will be a little thicker and will tell a power supply they can support more up to 100w. The one that comes with the 16" MBP is thicker and stiffer and does not wrap well around the charger.

FWIW, I just went through and replaced all of my USB-C cables with the 100W certified units so I did not end up wondering why my charging was limited.

Oh, and ensure the unit has been running for a day or two and finished initial indexing. I always leave my unit plugged and the display open for the first day or two to speed this process.

 

[leman]

I've been using the new 16" MacBook Pro and it is pretty good. When I've been playing World of Warcraft however, the battery drains faster than the charger can replace.

Check what will happen when the battery is at lower charge levels. There is a good change that this is just the battery controller at play trying to balance power delivery and prevent battery ageing. I have seen similar patterns before — the MBP would use the battery when its close to 100% but then switch to 100% charger then the battery hits 50% or so.

When you push both the CPU and the GPU very hard, it is possible that the cumulative power draw of the laptop exceeds 97W (especially if you add high screen brightness etc. to the mix). But it should not really happen when playing WoW — that game should not be that demanding.

I have several friends with gaming laptops and I've never heard of the power cable not being able to provide enough power to break even, let alone have the battery *drain* while being plugged into AC power. That's not normal.

It happens occasionally, especially on laptops that try to be more mobile. Dell XPS 15" and various Razor Blade models for example have been reporter, under rare scenarios, to exceed the power consumption of their power adapter.

 

[jerryk]

I have several friends with gaming laptops and I've never heard of the power cable not being able to provide enough power to break even, let alone have the battery *drain* while being plugged into AC power. That's not normal.

Remember many gaming laptops have much higher powered chargers. For example, a razor blade 15" gaming laptop has a 230 W power brick. It is designed to power the system playing triple A titles at high resolution, AND charge up the battery.

The MacBook Pro makes no claim to be a gaming laptop. It has a 96W power supply and is designed for portability and general use.

 

[poorcody]

Have you tried installing something like iStatMenu or Coconut Battery to have it report the real-time power draw and charging? iStatMenu in particular will give a break down of power usage by component, so you can see how power is being used. Might give you a clue if something in particular is not working properly.

 

[fs454]

Are you running WoW in windows or macos? My Late 2016 15" drains about 5% per hour(maxed out at the time, 2.9ghz i7, 16GB, Pro 460 4GB GPU)with the display at max brightness running Battlefield 1 via Boot Camp. You've got something along the lines of a 45w CPU and a 45-50w GPU. Add in the RAM, SSD, display and backlight and it's likely that all of these things under max constant load will tip the scales at just over your charger's 96 watts and dip into the battery to keep the power coming. On the flip side though no matter the load on macOS I have been unable to get the same machine to drain. Just Windows. Overnight 8K transcodes don't drain it - although I do not own any games for macos for an apples to apples comparison.

It's somewhat normal that if you're hammering the CPU/GPU fully for extended periods of time for the battery to be needed to supplement the incoming 96 watts of USBC PD. It's the way these notebooks are designed, as 99.9% of use cases aren't full-throttle loads for 5+ hours straight. However if you're seeing 25+% per hour, something is wrong and you should hit up Apple.

 

[haginile]

Similar experience here. As soon as I run intensive scripts with all 8 cores fired up, not only does battery refuse to charge, it goes down...

 

[am2am]

I've played Raise of Tomb Raider on high settings yesterday - during two hours (apple charger connected+steam controller) battery went down from 85% to 81%. I don't consider it a problem - it was constant heavy load.

btw - while apple charger is rated 96W, real max you get is around 94W (you can verify in system info while charger is connected). I have istat menus installed - have seen total system power exceeding 94W easily when CPU & dGU are used.
If you add charging optimisation algorithms - battery power drawing while connected to charger is possible.

 

[Xenden]

I figured out the problem.

I was using the apple USB-C Digital AV Multiport Adapter and had the power cable daisy chained through the adapter. When I plugged the power cord straight into the computer, there was no problem.

In my defense, the apple product page does say you should be able to do this:

Use the standard USB port to connect devices such as your flash drive or camera or a USB cable for syncing and charging your iOS devices. You can also connect a charging cable to the USB-C port to charge your Mac or iPad Pro.

​

I guess I'll call it user error, with a small asterisk next to the word error.

Thanks to everyone who provided feedback or commentary.

 

[iMacDragon]

The AV adapter probably only allows 60W passthrough, many many passthrough systems are limited to this as the jump from 60w to 100w needs extra implementation.

 

[b0fh666]

I've been using the new 16" MacBook Pro and it is pretty good. When I've been playing World of Warcraft however, the battery drains faster than the charger can replace.

I'm using the USB-C power brick and cord provided. I've never had a laptop, Mac or Windows, burn through power like this.

Any ideas?

totally unrelated question - how bad / good is playing wow in the touch bar?

and fyi my old macbook does the same on a 60w adapter. need more juice to keep up.

 

[am2am]

The AV adapter probably only allows 60W passthrough, many many passthrough systems are limited to this as the jump from 60w to 100w needs extra implementation.

I've measured it with istats menu - this is apple dongle and you loose approx 2W on it - it will feed more than 90W (at least the latest version with 4k 60Hz output).