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Battery on the new 2018 MBP

johnalan

johnalan

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Jul 15, 2009
890
1,079
Dublin, Ireland
Hello,

Are you guys seeing good battery results on the new machine?

My machine seems to drop fast. I have 79% battery left and Activity Monitor is suggesting that I have approx 4.5hrs left.

(Just been browsing the web, no intensive stuff, on 70% brightness or so).

This seems way lower than the Ars Technica testing...


Any similar experience out there?
 
2 day old 2018 13" i5 here. 2 Hours continuous light usage with 11.5hrs / 82% remaining (so 13.5hrs total estimated). With a much heavier workload (plus first TM and various out-of-the-box processes running) I burned through the battery in 10.5hrs but it may have been slightly short of a full charge. The system battery life prediction was spot-on.
[doublepost=1532595008][/doublepost]Saying that as my workload has increased through the morning the total estimate is now 11hrs, so looking like a repeat of yesterday.
 
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RobbieTT said:
2 day old 2018 13" i5 here. 2 Hours continuous light usage with 11.5hrs / 82% remaining (so 13.5hrs total estimated). With a much heavier workload (plus first TM and various out-of-the-box processes running) I burned through the battery in 10.5hrs but it may have been slightly short of a full charge. The system battery life prediction was spot-on.
[doublepost=1532595008][/doublepost]Saying that as my workload has increased through the morning the total estimate is now 11hrs, so looking like a repeat of yesterday.
Click to expand...
Whats a good way to auto test the battery?
 
Just install BatteryTruth - it will collect your usage statistics and tell the truth :) As for 15" MBP 2018 it's about 5 hours (according to first results)
 
I'm happy with my battery life, though I've not used it off the mains too much. I was seeing fantastic results yesterday, I was in the 70% range with about 3 1/2 hours of usage on the battery and the display turned up near max (the location was bright I needed to see the screen)
 
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maflynn said:
I'm happy with my battery life, though I've not used it off the mains too much. I was seeing fantastic results yesterday, I was in the 70% range with about 3 1/2 hours of usage on the battery and the display turned up near max (the location was bright I needed to see the screen)
Click to expand...


Wow that is good, currently with Coconut Battery its saying the health of my battery is 100%, with a cycle count of 4.

Also the full charge capacity matches the design capacity.

Still, it's only saying 5 hours until empty with 57% battery remaining.

I currently have a VPN running and youtube in a window playing a 1080p video in safari HTML5.

Doesn't seem too good.
 
maflynn said:
Tbh, I ignore cycle count, I've seen too many people here at MR, get too wrapped up on their cycle count. I'm not saying you are, but rather people here seemed more obsessed with it, where as I'm all for just enjoying the machine
Click to expand...
Ya I agree - don't care for cycle count either, just seeing the machine only be able to pull in 6 or so hours on battery.

Any ideas on what might be an easy way to test consistently?
 
On the 13" model seeing improved battery life as expected since they kept the Low Power Ram on that model. Similar to the nTB model now.
 
I have the 15" i7 2.2Ghz + 32GB of RAM. I had thought that my battery life issues was due to running in Parallels last time I was off battery. But last night I was just browsing the web in Safari and I was shocked to see it down at 68% in an hour and a half. That is pretty unacceptable. I had just assumed I'd get spectacular web browsing times (my last MacBook Pro did).

I've been away from macOS as a daily driver for a long time now. I use powercfg (Windows' built in command line tool, which is pretty thorough) when I'm on Win10. Activity monitor is always complaining that Safari is using a lot of energy. Should I, gasp, be using Chrome? I've always assumed that Chrome is the worst browser for battery life so I stuck with Safari unless I am doing development.

Thanks!
 
Does anyone know what the method Ars used was?

They got like 16 hours! - anyone know a script that would replicate their test?
 
Safari seems to be over eager to jump to dGPU for some reason, macrumors seems to constantly trigger it for example and I can't see why.
 
johnalan said:
Does anyone know what the method Ars used was?

They got like 16 hours! - anyone know a script that would replicate their test?
Click to expand...

I don't think there is any reason to try replicate a test - they are all arbitrary. Your test/usage is going to have a discharge of maybe 8wh,10wh,15wh,20wh etc all of which will give you a different battery life in the end.

Don't go in the rabbit hole of changing your workflow to maximise battery life - always base your workflow around your productivity.

The performance monitors are quite good at identifying how much power each app is using if you are very curious.
 
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If the machine is really new it is likely spending a lot of time indexing files from applications you installed and the OS. This make take a day or two depending upon how often you close the lid and put the computer to sleep since it only runs when the computer is not asleep.

You should run Activity Monitor and see what is running when A) you think it is idle and B) when you are doing "normal" work.
 
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Does anyone know if an MBP 2018 which is a week old and thus far has only been used plugged in should be using battery cycles? It has 1 cycle when I bought it, and now 3 but I haven't used it off battery yet at all. My 2017 model was used for 2 or 3 months the same way and never used any cycles.
 
If you've been running a lot of benchmarks etc that will likely use some battery too, the psu is only 87w but the gpu+cpu alone can at peak draw over 100w for short periods before screen etc is even factored in, this extra is taken from battery.
 
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iMacDragon said:
If you've been running a lot of benchmarks etc that will likely use some battery too, the psu is only 87w but the gpu+cpu alone can at peak draw over 100w before screen etc is even factored in, this extra is taken from battery.
[doublepost=1532715681][/doublepost]If you've been running a lot of benchmarks etc that will likely use some battery too, the psu is only 87w but the gpu+cpu alone can at peak draw over 100w for short periods before screen etc is even factored in, this extra is taken from battery.
Click to expand...

Interesting, thanks! I haven't seen such high draw from iStats but it is possible. I assume the Quad Core i7s in the MBP 2017 15in were lighter on the power consumption in that case.
 
Admittedly I'm somewhat estimating on the 100w, but as gpu is nominally 35w and cpu certainly can peak at 60-70w it will need to use battery a little to supply enough power during worst peak usage.
 
In iStats Menu, it is showing me Battery Current as being 0.50W, so I assume that is the battery being used in addition to the mains power. Seems to be showing that sort of number even when idle, so I'm probably wrong ;)
 
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That may be trickle charge current to battery, I think it should be reporting a negative value if drawing.
 
I don't think so; if I pull the power lead, it goes up to 45W or so (all positive values), so I think it is using the battery even at idle. I guess I didn't notice on my 2017 model because it didn't let the CPU draw whatever it wanted above 45W when turbo boosting, so it wasn't likely to use the battery too. Definitely, the same programs I am using on this 2018 model is using the battery too, and it wasn't with my 2017.
 
I'm getting really great battery life. I'm coming from a 2015 model, which still got good battery life. The 2018 model has been nothing short of outstanding.
 
krich said:
I don't think so; if I pull the power lead, it goes up to 45W or so (all positive values), so I think it is using the battery even at idle. I guess I didn't notice on my 2017 model because it didn't let the CPU draw whatever it wanted above 45W when turbo boosting, so it wasn't likely to use the battery too. Definitely, the same programs I am using on this 2018 model is using the battery too, and it wasn't with my 2017.
Click to expand...

At idle it certainly shouldn't be, in order to support the cpu/gpu anyway, only when heavily loaded.
 
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