Battery life with 2018 Macbook Pro i9

[SDColorado]

I havent but iStatMenu shows Design capacity at 7336 mAh, the Current Capacity keeps changing between 6800 and 7200. Mfg date is June 9, 2018

Hmm. I returned mine so I can’t compare notes or recall the max design capacity.

Yours isn’t as low as I thought it would be if battery had a partial failure. The fluctuation in current capacity makes me wonder if it isn’t the logic board, rather than the battery. But I don’t have any pretensions of being a tech.

Hopefully Apple will get it figured out and back to you soon. Last I had heard they didn’t have spare parts for those yet, so they may just swap the unit.

 

[chrfr]

So I have a brand new MBP 15" with i9, 32GB ram and 2 TB SSD. I am barely getting an hour of battery life.

There's most likely something running in the background that's using a lot of CPU time. Try opening Activity Monitor, under the view menu select "All Processes" and look at the CPU tab. Click the "%CPU" heading in the main window and it'll sort the processes that are using the most CPU to the top. Take note of what those are, and around what the percentage is.

 

[AppleHaterLover]

Check the Energy tab in Activity Monitor.

 

[Parikh12345]

Energy tab just shows safari abnormal. Everything else is minimal
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There's most likely something running in the background that's using a lot of CPU time. Try opening Activity Monitor, under the view menu select "All Processes" and look at the CPU tab. Click the "%CPU" heading in the main window and it'll sort the processes that are using the most CPU to the top. Take note of what those are, and around what the percentage is.

already tried that. Nothing is using anything crazy

 

[Anonymous Freak]

Okay, have you actually tested running the computer until the battery is empty and the computer shuts down?

If it's using that much energy, that you are actually getting only one to two hours battery life, something is *VERY* wrong. Either hardware with the battery/charging subsystem, or software with the OS/apps.

If you open Activity Monitor, leave it on the "CPU" tab, go to "View" and select "All Processes" then click on the "% CPU" header so it sorts highest-on-top, report the top few items, both the Process Name and the % CPU value. Do this when the battery meter claims nearly full yet very short life.

Also, I would recommend installing gfxCardStatus, which tells you if your computer is running on the CPU integrated graphics chip or the higher-power discrete graphics chip (and lets you manually control it.)

 

[leman]

Your machine is either broken or for some reason, some software is abusing resources. Watch the CPU utilisation/energy impact as already suggested above. Safari is usually a very efficient browser, if it sucks a lot of energy check whether you are using any third-party plugins or the sites you are visiting are doing more work then expected (for instance, I've noticed the MacRumors news page occasionally causing near 100% CPU utilisation).

 

[Ma2k5]

Your machine is either broken or for some reason, some software is abusing resources. Watch the CPU utilisation/energy impact as already suggested above. Safari is usually a very efficient browser, if it sucks a lot of energy check whether you are using any third-party plugins or the sites you are visiting are doing more work then expected (for instance, I've noticed the MacRumors news page occasionally causing near 100% CPU utilisation).

Yep, without a breakdown report of the battery discharge, we won't know. I suspect it is some rogue application, but it could just as easily be faulty.

Is your mail client possibly downloading tonnes of data from various email providers(and repeatedly failing or something?)? Seems strange that would have high usage.

 

[SDColorado]

If a rogue application was putting enough of a load on the computer to cause the battery to drain in just 1 hour, wouldn't the fans be going full speed and non-stop? That seems like the kind of battery life you would get if running Prime95 or FurMark on battery? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

 

[dannys1]

If it helps people diagnose. My i9 with 32gb of ram and Firefox, Safari (with about 40 tabs) and a bunch of background apps open, at near full brightness, discharges at 17w in Coconut Battery.

Closing Firefox and the other apps took it to 14.5w. Closing Safari took it to 12w (I now had nothing but menu bar items open), lowering the brightness to about 15% took it to 6w.

So my usual multi-tasking usage is probably drawing on average about 15w (assuming I don't always sit where I need monitor in full brightness) which should weight about 3 and half hours. Which is about what I get. Same with the 2017 and 2016. If I just used one app and a couple of tabs in Safari i'd probably get what Apple gets, but my usage drains the battery. I can easily get it to the point of needing to charge in a couple of hours without doing anything CPU heavy.