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gocanucksgo

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Original poster
Sep 25, 2015
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How is everyones Battery Life on El Capitan compared to Yosemite?

Has anyone noticed anything?
 
can't compare to Yosemite, since I upgraded from Maverick, but on my 4 years old MBP Im still above 6 hrs of web browsing. Amazing since I have 508 charge cycles on it. Still at 94% of original capacity.
 
Noooooo!!! It's noticeably worse!!!!! I was getting like 8 hours on Yosemite on average and now I'm getting just under 6. I'm pretty sure I'm going back to Yosemite and staying there.
 
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Noooooo!!! It's noticeably worse!!!!! I was getting like 8 hours on Yosemite on average and now I'm getting just under 6. I'm pretty sure I'm going back to Yosemite and staying there.
can you go back?
 
Much worse than that on Yosemite.
My Macbook Pro Retina (13", early 2015) has been from 8~9 hours on Yosemite to around 5 hours on El Capitan despite after a few charge cycles.
 
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Until 10.11 equals 10.10.5 on battery runtime, I have zero interest in the "upgrade" as it will only serve to negatively impact my usage...

Apple needs to stop this 12 month OS X cycle, as it`s obviously beyond their capability, the way we are going OS X will be continuously a Beta...

Q-6
 
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Used to be around 7-8 hours on normal web browsing/iTunes on Yosemite. It's doing around 6 hours in El Capitan

Exactly; is pointless to move to 10.11 given the purpose of a Notebook is to be capable of running off the mains supply for extended periods of time. I rather feel this is one of Apple`s games as once Skylake Mac`s are available magically the "lost" time on battery will be "found" and all will be "awesome" again.

Seriously Apple needs to step up their "game" it`s ludicrous that the latest release of OS X is less power efficient than the previous iteration. I was planning on replacing my 15" rMBP on the release of Skylake, however the more I read about El Crapitan the less I care for it, nor do I want to be locked into it...

Q-6
 
Exactly; is pointless to move to 10.11 given the purpose of a Notebook is to be capable of running off the mains supply for extended periods of time. I rather feel this is one of Apple`s games as once Skylake Mac`s are available magically the "lost" time on battery will be "found" and all will be "awesome" again.

Seriously Apple needs to step up their "game" it`s ludicrous that the latest release of OS X is less power efficient than the previous iteration. I was planning on replacing my 15" rMBP on the release of Skylake, however the more I read about El Crapitan the less I care for it, nor do I want to be locked into it...

Q-6
I'll give it a try for one or two weeks to see how the battery does. My macbook is actually blazing fast now. That's why I'm still liking El Capitan as for now. My macbook is mostly on power cord, so battery backup doesn't matter that much to me. But it's good to have the feeling of knowing that you've got long battery backup :D
 
I'll give it a try for one or two weeks to see how the battery does. My macbook is actually blazing fast now. That's why I'm still liking El Capitan as for now. My macbook is mostly on power cord, so battery backup doesn't matter that much to me. But it's good to have the feeling of knowing that you've got long battery backup :D

Just a dumb move by Apple, performance at the cost of runtime is pointless to those of us who need to be off the mains supply for extended periods, 30 minutes I could accept, however people are quoting several hours depreciation. "Blazingly" fast is pointless if the battery is dead, one of the most definitive features of a portable Mac was the long runtime on the battery.

As I have stated for some time, Apple should stop this 12 month OS X refresh cycle, as they simply can't deliver on the release date, I can only hope that Apple will fix it in the short term. Right now I am of a mind to purchase the current 15" rMBP, at least this way should 10.11 be a cluster I can avoid it and stay on 10.10.5. The whole point of El Capitan was to improve OS X, reducing the runtime on battery is a massive retrograde step IMO...

Q-6
 
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Is this, by any chance, due to Spotlight reindexing the internal disk? I see it usually takes a lot of processing power (therefore, energy).

Paolo
 
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dev laptops though, so usage varies a lot ..

but it seems the older macbook pro 13" with hdd goes through battery a lot faster now.
And the newer one with ssd is about the same.

I really prefer capitan over yosemite on both.
 
i'm getting about 7~8hrs of battery life on my 13" MBA, during my 8hr shift it lasts me the whole time at work w/o using the charger.

nothing extreme...internet, microsoft office while streaming music. i have the screen brightness-1, backlit keybd-0, computer/display sleep-3 min when i'm away.

my workspace is well lit, which explains the display/keyboard settings. battery life is pretty much the same when it was running Yosemite...
 
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How is everyones Battery Life on El Capitan compared to Yosemite?

Has anyone noticed anything?

Worse than on Yosemite. Re-installed Mavericks I don't care much about the aesthetics of Yosemite/El Capitan specially since I use my Macbook Pro 2013 for djing. Mavericks gives me everything I need and more so far, this way I avoid some wear and tear of the battery.
I noticed a big drop on battery life since Yosemite was released, I have been a El Capitan public beta tester for months and I can say that no battery improvements have been made.
 
Why is this happening?
MacBook Pro Retina 13'' 2014
 

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There must be a bug or smething because it's noticeably worse than Yosemite.
I did a clean install on my late 2014 Macbook Pro Retina 2 Days Ago and was surprised to notice much shorter battery life.
 
This is a joke....Battery is worse here for me too after trying out El Captain..
 
Why is this happening?
MacBook Pro Retina 13'' 2014

My own 2014 13" rMBP can reach as much as 10 hours, on battery on 10.10.5 Right now with multiple Apps open, approximately 100 tabs in Safari open, downloading a 12Gb file, display at 50% the battery runtime is close to 8 hours on 10.10.5
Screen Shot 2015-10-04 at 09.59.42.png

Until 10.11 meets the same level of performance it can stay on Apple`s servers...

n.b. Screen Capture above is 10.10.5 Yosemite

Q-6
 
The battery life on my mid-2014 rMBP 15" with dGPU was dramatically less than it was on Yosemite while using the GM candidate by several hours. I then formatted the drive, reset the SMC and PRAM, and then did a clean install. After roughly a day (I'm assuming this spotlight finished indexing during this time) my battery life actually seems to be slightly better than it was with Yosemite by ~30 minutes- 1 hour. Operating temperature seems to have decreased slightly as well -- I'm at roughly 35C while doing some casual web browsing with Safari 9. All in all, I seem to get 6+ hours for most tasks, so I'm very pleased.
 
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Why is this happening?
MacBook Pro Retina 13'' 2014
Exact same issue here. On my 2014 11" MBA, I used to easily get 10+ hours of battery life on Yosemite, but now I get maybe 7 hours with a clean install of El Capitan. I've noticed that Safari is shown as ALWAYS using up significant energy, even is it only has a single tab open. Its energy impact jumps all over the place under Activity Monitor. I noticed little snitch showing a lot of oddly excessive activity from Safari. Is this just an issue with Safari, or is this some kind of internal mess-up with El Capitan? Do I need to downgrade? :/

Screen Shot 2015-10-02 at 11.15.16 AM.png Screen Shot 2015-10-03 at 10.21.42 PM.png
 
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Exact same issue here. On my 2014 11" MBA, I used to easily get 10+ hours of battery life on Yosemite, but now I get maybe 7 hours with a clean install of El Capitan. I've noticed that Safari is shown as ALWAYS using up significant energy, even is it only has a single tab open. Its energy impact jumps all over the place under Activity Monitor. I noticed little snitch showing a lot of oddly excessive activity from Safari. Is this just an issue with Safari, or is this some kind of internal mess-up with El Capitan? Do I need to downgrade? :/

View attachment 589449 View attachment 589450

10.11 "phones home" more than 10.10 which explains the additional activity. I don't think it`s related to Safari as I have 9.0 on my 10.10.5 systems and I don't perceive any loss in time on battery. When did you update the OS? as it can take "some" to settle down, if it`s more than a day or two it`s obviously related to 10.11.0

Q-6
 
10.11 "phones home" more than 10.10 which explains the additional activity. I don't think it`s related to Safari as I have 9.0 on my 10.10.5 systems and I don't perceive any loss in time on battery. When did you update the OS? as it can take "some" to settle down, if it`s more than a day or two it`s obviously related to 10.11.0

Q-6
It was a few days ago.
 
afe4a9f075777c1137b61046cf86a232.jpg


Now going back to Yosemite. The 1-2 hours of battery life I lost is not worth split screen multitasking (the only feature I was excited about).

If I don't hear that battery life improves with updates over the next couple of months then I'll just have to keep Yosemite as long as I can. 2-4 more years hopefully before I get another laptop.
 
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It was a few days ago.

Then what you are observing is likely to be what the battery life will be. The only other thing that springs to mind is that as it`s a new OS it that the software side of the battery needs time to calibrate against the usage, equally if this is the case one would expect to see the predicted runtime gradually increasing until it plateau's.

Q-6
 
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