2018 MBP 15 Battery life

[lukeyyyyy]

Hey!

Loving the new MBP so far. Upgraded from a 2013 late MBP 13 but i'm a little surprised at the battery life.

For my work load my 2013 MBP would last around 3h 30 before the battery needed charging this was a 4 year old machine with close to 400 cycles, my 2018 MBP last's around 5 hours.

I've attached my usage. If this is fine then so be it. I've had the MBP for just over a week and have 9 cycles.

 

[Thysanoptera]

What do you run in terminal? Because obviously this consumed the vast majority of your battery. From the energy monitor only it is difficult to tell whats going on because it show only relative percentage, not the absolute values. Get iStatMenus and look at total 'packgage' wattage when running this particular software, and just calculate if the battery discharge rate makes sense taking into account its rated capacity. It could be ok, or not.

 

[lukeyyyyy]

a frontend web application written in angular which is refreshing the browser on code change, yeah good call i'll look into that.

 

[poorcody]

One thing I've found to help figure out what drains the battery, is an app like "Coconut Battery" that sits in the menu bar, and updates the wattage being used in near real-time. Then you can experiment with different settings/app. Usually there is something that is a particular "hog".

Switching from Chrome to Safari might help if that's an option.

How long have you had the machine? It looks like Spotlight is still doing a fair amount of work. If the machine is still very new, you might leave it on overnight to let Spotlight finish indexing everything. Also if brightness is above 50%, that can have a big impact too...

 

[lukeyyyyy]

I had Coconut Battery on my last machine, i'll do some investigative work. I'd like to use safari over chrome but the console on chrome I find to be superior.

Machine is just over a week old with 9 cycles so far, and my brightness is usually set pretty high. 75-90%

 

[New_Mac_Smell]

I had Coconut Battery on my last machine, i'll do some investigative work. I'd like to use safari over chrome but the console on chrome I find to be superior.

Machine is just over a week old with 9 cycles so far, and my brightness is usually set pretty high. 75-90%

It's just a fact of life really, you won't see the 10 hours battery life unless you're giving it the perfect scenario. However, you'll still see a pretty reasonably battery life. You can set the brightness lower etc., but the real truth is just leave it plugged in if you can - use it on battery if you need to, that's what it's for; to be portable.

Chrome is pretty terrible on the energy usage, but it does have a much better developer console. If you must use it, just understand that it is going to consume your battery life. There's not really a lot you can do about it.

However, personally I am never more than a few feet from a socket so mine is plugged in the vast majority of the time. I'm running stuff that makes the battery last 2-3 hours at times, I would never expect to get 10 hours out of it when the CPU is using a large amount of energy. Although when I'm not working, I just shut things down and use Safari, I then get the 10 hours or so battery which is great.

Basically, until they magic up some high density battery technology that won't explode at the slightest dirty look, then you're stuck with the current status quo.

 

[sergeyz]

It lasts 1 hour more than the previous MacBook model. According to statistics it is about 6.5 hours now.

 

[maflynn]

a frontend web application written in angular which is refreshing the browser on code change, yeah good call i'll look into that.

That might be eating up the battery.

I'm seeing phenomenal battery life on my 15" and I know its an apples to oranges comparison, I only point this out that the Apple's estimates are pretty close to what I'm getting