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Battery Conservation rMBP

J

Jacobwilson99

macrumors member
Original poster
Jun 3, 2012
64
0
I got my retina the other day and had a whopping 3:15 battery life. :[

I let it die and then recharged it, even though it's not a nickel cadmium batt., i know this doesn't affect it. Still for around 3:30.

I turned off auto-brightness, and the battery life shot up to 4:45.

Apple estimates a 7 hour battery life.

Is there anything else I can do in System Pref. or in running apps or anything else to increase the battery life a little more?

I run the screen at about 50% brightness. I could go lower, but 50% is comfortable.
 
Jacobwilson99 said:
I got my retina the other day and had a whopping 3:15 battery life. :[

I let it die and then recharged it, even though it's not a nickel cadmium batt., i know this doesn't affect it. Still for around 3:30.

I turned off auto-brightness, and the battery life shot up to 4:45.

Apple estimates a 7 hour battery life.

Is there anything else I can do in System Pref. or in running apps or anything else to increase the battery life a little more?

I run the screen at about 50% brightness. I could go lower, but 50% is comfortable.
Click to expand...
You should read the fine print on the apple website, 7 hours battery life is attainable under very specific usage patterns. (wi-fi, no time machine, no bluetooth, 1/3 brightness, a pages document open, and safari browsing websites with no Flash on them, refreshing the page every 30 seconds).

Battery life depends almost entirely upon what you're doing with the computer, if you're gaming, using CPU intensive applications or browsing heavily flash-based websites you'll decrease your battery life like there's no tomorrow.
 
Jacobwilson99 said:
I got my retina the other day and had a whopping 3:15 battery life. :[

I let it die and then recharged it, even though it's not a nickel cadmium batt., i know this doesn't affect it. Still for around 3:30.

I turned off auto-brightness, and the battery life shot up to 4:45.

Apple estimates a 7 hour battery life.

Is there anything else I can do in System Pref. or in running apps or anything else to increase the battery life a little more?

I run the screen at about 50% brightness. I could go lower, but 50% is comfortable.
Click to expand...

There's many posts about this. The time remaining is an estimate, based off of the current activity of your computer. It varies greatly depending on what apps you're using, which graphics card is in use, etc. etc. Apple's 7-hour estimate is based on pretty light usage, which isn't what most people are doing. You can force integrated graphics only while you're on battery power, dim your screen more, things like that, and it might help some. Was the 4:45 estimate with your system completely idle, or did you have programs and stuff running?
 
537635 said:
Upgrade Mountain Lion to 10.8.1.
Click to expand...

was the first thing I did when I got it.

sweetbrat said:
There's many posts about this. The time remaining is an estimate, based off of the current activity of your computer. It varies greatly depending on what apps you're using, which graphics card is in use, etc. etc. Apple's 7-hour estimate is based on pretty light usage, which isn't what most people are doing. You can force integrated graphics only while you're on battery power, dim your screen more, things like that, and it might help some. Was the 4:45 estimate with your system completely idle, or did you have programs and stuff running?
Click to expand...

Just Chrome with 1 or 2 pages open. Maybe a YouTube video playing in the background.
 
I bought a MBp not an rMBP and had the same problem, i called them up they did some things over the phone and told me things were fine so I said i want to return it and get a new one since it's in the first month so I did and it turns out my first one did had a problem, my new one had approximately 2-3 hours more battery time.
 
So, my battery percentage just shot up. I'm at 59% and it went up to 5:29.

I'll give it a few days and see how it goes.

Thanks everyone
 
Light surfing with screen at 65% brightness I get around 8hrs out of mine on 10.8.1. At 100% charge it usually shows around 11.5hrs but I've never had more than 9hrs.
 
Mouse can help as well, I see about a 45-60 minute boost if not using the track pad (which consumes a decent amount of power).
 
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