2016 MacBook Pro Battery Life

[toddsimon]

I upgraded a 2013 MB Air to a 2016 MB pro last year and haven't really been satisfied with the battery life. Is the battery life significantly worse on the pro? Is there anything I can do to improve the battery life? I mostly use it for basic email/web surfing and light photoshop.

 

[ZapNZs]

Yes, it is a reasonably significant decline depending on usage. Which model do you have? What runtimes are you currently getting? What have you done thus far to mitigate energy usage.

 

[PBG4 Dude]

If you have the 15” MBP, you could be triggering dGPU when using PS. Get the free (donationware) program gfxcardstatus from http://gfx.io and it will display “r” in the menu at whenever the dGPU is active. You can also use this program to force your MBP to stay either on integrated or dGPU depending on your needs.

I do this to keep Xcode’s simulator and the Kindle program from activating my dGPU when I’m on battery.

 

[recoil80]

If you have the 15” MBP, you could be triggering dGPU when using PS. Get the free (donationware) program gfxcardstatus from http://gfx.io and it will display “r” in the menu at whenever the dGPU is active. You can also use this program to force your MBP to stay either on integrated or dGPU depending on your needs.

I do this to keep Xcode’s simulator and the Kindle program from activating my dGPU when I’m on battery.

I didn't know the utility, seems great! Thanks for sharing it with us.
I use the simulator a lot, and I suspect it drains battery a lot, how much can you save by disabling the GPU on the simulator?
I'm pretty happy with 2016 MBP battery life and I don't need to work for a full day without charging, but the more I can save battery the better, of course

 

[leman]

QUOTE="toddsimon, post: 25561605, member: 876900"]I upgraded a 2013 MB Air to a 2016 MB pro last year and haven't really been satisfied with the battery life. Is the battery life significantly worse on the pro? Is there anything I can do to improve the battery life? I mostly use it for basic email/web surfing and light photoshop.[/QUOTE]

The 13" MP has a significantly more powerful CPU/GPU as well as other power-hungrier components, but the battery size is not any larger (in fact, its slightly smaller) compared to the 13" MBA. So yes, its expected that you will see lower battery life on the pro. This was always the case btw and not exclusive to the 2016/2017 Pro redesign. The 13" MBA is the ultimate battery life champion among Apple's laptops. You can try to get most of your battery by not setting the screen to max brightness and making sure that your apps are properly using resource management (Chrome and PS are known offenders here).

If you have the 15” MBP, you could be triggering dGPU when using PS

Just wanted to point out that this is not exclusive to 15" model. Even with 13", certain apps will force the GPU to go to a higher power state, depleting the battery quicker. This definitive solution of this issue lies with the app developers — they need to make sure that their apps only reserve power-intensive resources when actually needed. The OS doesn't really have any means to determine this.