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16" MacBook Pro owners - How's your battery life?

ozziegn

ozziegn

macrumors 65816
Original poster
Aug 16, 2007
1,323
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Central FL Area
I bought my 16" MBP today, fully charged the battery and I'm kind of disappointed in the battery life. So here's what I've been doing. I'm 51 years old so I like my brightness set to max. I've been browsing the web while watching some YouTube videos and that's about it. I started with 100% battery life, two hours later I have 50% battery left. So the simple math tells me I'm looking at roughly four hours worth of web browsing and YouTube watching on a laptop that's advertised with an eleven hour battery. Obviously their eleven hours claim isn't with the screen brightness set to 100% but still. I wouldn't think maxing the brightness would reduce the battery by so much.

Can anyone else with a 16" MBP chime in?
 
All things consider is this. Eleven hours according to Apple with who knows what brightness level they used. Let's say it was set to 50% which can't be too uncommon. So, split eleven hours by half and double the brightness level to 100%. That's 5.5 hours of battery life. My initial findings aren't going to agree with that.
 
ozziegn said:
All things consider is this. Eleven hours according to Apple with who knows what brightness level they used. Let's say it was set to 50% which can't be too uncommon. So, split eleven hours by half and double the brightness level to 100%. That's 5.5 hours of battery life. My initial findings aren't going to agree with that.
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I also wouldn't assume that screen brightness leads to a linear increase in energy required to produce the "max" brightness setting. What I am saying is, you can't simply do some quick math and half 11 hrs and then double the brightness to 100 to get 5.5 like you suggested.

But yes, as others have stated, screen brightness has always been the biggest battery drain in any laptop really, unless you have an OLED one, but I have no experience with those.
 
poorcody said:
The footnote on their tech spec page says battery tests are at 75% brightness.

First day is never reliable with all the background setup stuff going on.
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Exactly this - first few days, there's a lot of background stuff happening. Spotlight indexing, whatever software you installed, OS updating, etc. Let it settle in and do your measurements in a few days.

Also get coconutbattery app to see charge cycles, capacity, etc. See attached pic (which is for my 2014 mbp, not the 16" one - that one arrives Nov 27th :) )
 

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That battery will change after few days, and a proper full charge...let 1 time for 4-5 hours to charge
And again, Apple adv 11 hours with light using like web browsing at 75% brightness
 
Bump on this thread. I have a "maxxed out" 16", but with a 4TB ssd.

Right now I am 56 minutes into being unplugged, with 25% or an estimated 30min battery left. while I have many apps open, I was only using chrome to video chat. no FCP or Photoshop work being done.

I have chatted with apple multiple times about this very poor battery life, and they don't seem to think it's a problem.

so, is anyone else experiencing such poor performance?
 

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idkew said:
Bump on this thread. I have a "maxxed out" 16", but with a 4TB ssd.

Right now I am 56 minutes into being unplugged, with 25% or an estimated 30min battery left. while I have many apps open, I was only using chrome to video chat. no FCP or Photoshop work being done.

I have chatted with apple multiple times about this very poor battery life, and they don't seem to think it's a problem.

so, is anyone else experiencing such poor performance?
Click to expand...

You also have plenty of apps there that are using the dedicated graphics - that hits the battery hard on my 16".
 
Exactly, only time I see my battery life go less then 2 hours is when hitting the GPU. I have the 5500m so using this while it's engaged will burn through power. Overall the battery life is very good with my dev workflows with an external 4K display connected (again using the GPU.)

MacRS4 said:
You also have plenty of apps there that are using the dedicated graphics - that hits the battery hard on my 16".
Click to expand...
 
ozziegn said:
I bought my 16" MBP today, fully charged the battery and I'm kind of disappointed in the battery life. So here's what I've been doing. I'm 51 years old so I like my brightness set to max. I've been browsing the web while watching some YouTube videos and that's about it. I started with 100% battery life, two hours later I have 50% battery left. So the simple math tells me I'm looking at roughly four hours worth of web browsing and YouTube watching on a laptop that's advertised with an eleven hour battery. Obviously their eleven hours claim isn't with the screen brightness set to 100% but still. I wouldn't think maxing the brightness would reduce the battery by so much.

Can anyone else with a 16" MBP chime in?
Click to expand...
Frankly it sucks. I just got 4 hours on my normal workload. That is no better than my souped up linux laptop (with actually more power than the MBP 16 inch) on the same workload. I don't know what is up with Apple but this is totally against my expectations. At this level of performance I have no reason to continue to buy Apple.
 
The gpu if it activates is a massive power power draw. I've set mine to completely disabled whilst on battery and battery life immiedietly jumped a good fraction, even though I wasn't doing things that should generally be triggering the gpu.
 
It has gotten better day by day. I feel that my i9 variant has a tiny bit better battery life than my i7, but I need to do more testing :D Overall I get battery life between 6,5h to 9,5h with auto brightness enabled.
Full brightness will destroy your battery life!
 
shariksa007 said:
It has gotten better day by day. I feel that my i9 variant has a tiny bit better battery life than my i7, but I need to do more testing :D Overall I get battery life between 6,5h to 9,5h with auto brightness enabled.
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It's possible that the i9 has been better binned for a slightly lower voltage and thus consumption.
 
I have the i9 but I'm using it in clamshell mode most of the time so I don't have a good indication of battery life.
I'm now at 50% after about 2.5 hours, brightness is high as it is sunny and I've used Xcode for a while. I only have 4 cycles, but I bought the laptop 10 days ago.
I know they say 11 hours, but even with my old 15 I've never been able to have more than 6-7 hours of battery life. Maybe with reduced brightness and a light work (no compiling, just internet browsing and reading) I'd be able to run for 8-9 hours. Not that I really care, I don't need to work on coffee shops or on the plane with this laptop, I work at home or office, so I can plug it in when necessary.
 
ozziegn said:
I bought my 16" MBP today, fully charged the battery and I'm kind of disappointed in the battery life.
Click to expand...

Hello ozziegn

I can totally understand you how disappointed that feels, after you spent thousands of dollars for a machine which Apple promises will carry you through around 11 hours. My first thought was that the apple ad is not true.

I was struggling to find a solution for my fast battery drain for about 4 weeks.
Started with 2h 14min (from 100% to 6%) and ended up with 11h 44min (from 100% to 5%).

After reading through several forums, having phone calls with Apple experts and doing live testing (without using tons of 3rd party apps) I could finally solve my fast battery drain. Here is how I managed it:

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/battery-life-on-macbook-pro-16.2212813/post-28364649
 
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