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Battery life on Yosemite for MBA 2013
- Thread starter cedwhatev
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You need a few days before you can judge battery life. After a major update your Mac will reindex everything. Internal system maintenance is performed and then you want to run your Mac and recharge it. It takes time before your battery life returns to what it will be.
Which version of OS X you have isn't going to make as much impact on battery life as what apps you have running and what settings you use. You may experience reduced battery life initially due to setup, indexing, etc. You may also find some apps are less efficient until they've been upgraded to be fully compatible with the new OS. Once those things are done, you shouldn't see any measurable difference in battery life from one OS X version to another.
There are many factors that impact your battery life. See the BATTERY LIFE FROM A CHARGE section of the following link for details, including tips on how to maximize your battery life.
There are many factors that impact your battery life. See the BATTERY LIFE FROM A CHARGE section of the following link for details, including tips on how to maximize your battery life.
The link below should answer most, if not all, of your battery/charging questions. If you haven't already done so, I highly recommend you take the time to read it.
You need to launch Activity Monitor and look at what is consuming system resources and power.
ALL: Please update observations on your battery life of OS 10.9 vs. 10.10 in a few days, after you are back in equilibrium-- indexing complete, etc.
I updated on Sunday (or was it Saturday? 
)
Today, I can say that I have had a much better battery life than I had just last week =D That is, of course, if the battery calculating thing is actually correct. If not, then, well, crap. But I have a mid 2010 MacBook white. At 34%, I still have 2 hours, 13 minutes left. I have the screen dimmed to two. And have been using the laptop the whole day, with quite a few tabs open in Safari. Have also used Pages, Keynote and Preview.
Before, my MacBook would have about 6 hours of battery life.
Also, there is no service battery thingy. *knock on wood*
)Today, I can say that I have had a much better battery life than I had just last week =D That is, of course, if the battery calculating thing is actually correct. If not, then, well, crap. But I have a mid 2010 MacBook white. At 34%, I still have 2 hours, 13 minutes left. I have the screen dimmed to two. And have been using the laptop the whole day, with quite a few tabs open in Safari. Have also used Pages, Keynote and Preview.
Before, my MacBook would have about 6 hours of battery life.
Also, there is no service battery thingy. *knock on wood*
I also have the same problem. I have upgraded last week to OS X Yosemite, and the battery life has drastically dropped to 4-5 hours on Normal use (No gaming etc.)
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Any more updates?
Just curious, do others have updates on actual battery run time after a couple of weeks of using Yosemite?
Just curious, do others have updates on actual battery run time after a couple of weeks of using Yosemite?
Hey guys.. yeah, another battery thread. I'm probably going to upgrade to Yosemite regardless, but I'm just curious if anyone with an 11" MBA 2013/2014 is noticing any difference in battery life so far with the upgrade.
mine has been crazy good , around 12-14 hours standard, 8 using it moderately.
So, it seems the last two poster are saying that once indexing is complete and everything is back to equilibrium, the battery life on Yosemite is at least as good as Mavericks.
Do others have a similar or different observations?
mine is 8-9 hours. I could definitely squeeze 10 with lighter usage and lower screen brightness. If I'm using it in the dark with brightness low I get over 9 hours.
This is the 11' model.
This is the 11' model.
As stated before, there won't be a significant difference in battery life, based solely on upgrading to a different OS version. The OS version has minimal impact on battery life, which is affected primarily by workload and settings. This has held true for at least the past 6-7 OS versions, including Yosemite.
With all due respect, we know that battery life is supposed to be stable (or increase as it did with Mavericks), but with a new OS there can be bugs and problems with battery life as has been seen with new iOS versions. Earlier posters in this thread claimed to be seeing a decrease in battery life after they first installed Yosemite (possibly due to indexing, but maybe not). It does not seem unreasonable to ask if battery life is any different (in either direction) after it has been in use for a period of time.
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I have a 2013 11" MBA 4GB RAM 256GB SSD and having upgraded to Yosemite, I've noticed significantly worse battery life compared to Mavericks when Transparency is turned on, dropping down to about 5 hours on idle. However, after turning transparency off, battery life returns to the ~10 hrs seen in Mavericks.
Try Chrome?
BTW -- data point -- I've updated my Mini and MBA to Yosemite. Both have 4GB RAM. They both run about as fast as they did with Mavericks and I'm getting exactly the same battery life with the MBA as before.
Chrome is even worse energy wise, I won't let that on my laptop anymore
I suppose the scientific way to do this is to open the same web sites in each browser and see how much CPU time each one uses.
I have not done this but I can report that Chrome doesn't necessarily use much power. I currently have probably 15-20 tabs open and my machine is 97-98% idle.
Chrome also has its Task Manager window which you can use to see which web pages are taking CPU time and then decide what to do about it.
thats actually not true....
one of the biggest features when i upgraded to mavericks, was battery life increase. they found a way for safari and mail to use almost 2/3rds the power it was using previously....
i watched my previous MBP go from 3 hours to almost 4 hours of active battery life when i upgraded