Disappointed with the rMBP battery performance

What was the brightness set to? How much CPU did you use (iPhoto and iMovie can be CPU intensive if you meant you used them, but you probably meant, that you just downloaded them)? Can this help?

 

What i think was wrong is you downloaded 2.5 gigs of data, that with in itself is enough to drain the battery. Plus any kind of feeds or notifications will drain it also. The battery is on par with the cMBP series, i think.

 

Okay, maybe have a look at Activity Monitor to see, what process is hogging up the CPU during your next battery powered session.

That is normal, sometimes new MB/P/As have three to seven cycles on them, nothing to worry about. Again, have a look at the link in post #2.

 

I wouldn't be too concerned unless it keeps happening. Besides downloading all that stuff it was also indexing for spotlight in the back ground. So give it some time and you'll be fine.

 

I get 9-12 hours on my mac retina. Dim settings, simple web surfing.

 

indexing probably had a lot to do with it.

 

You are running ML. Tech Radar reported on a serious issue with ML draining the battery at an extremely fast rate.

http://www.techradar.com/us/news/co...os-x-mountain-lion-battery-complaints-1091307

 

okay

okay, this just sounds out there. really?

 

At least that's what it says.
Minimum brightness
2.3/256/8
All Apps closed except safari. Also note that I disabled all things I never use such as bluetooth.
The biggest thing I do is load emails, otherwise, I use it solely for reading news via yahoo. I tend to read bigger articles and take my time, thus, not much loading is required. This test was prior to ML though.

I'll run a test with constant HD playback, but other reviews did get a good 4-5 hours of pure HD viewing. That is flipping amazing considering it is constant moving pictures VS plain text.

 

How awesome that we actually live in an age where 5 hour battery life on a powerhouse laptop with a display that nearly rivals imax is a disapointment! I remember getting 30 mins battery life on a laptop 1/10 as powerful as my iPhone!

 

Using flash player or even flash based ads in the web can contribute to battery draining. Also how intense is iMovie and iPhoto usage? Those can use some good amount of resource which will drain your computer faster. Personally I've never got more than 5 hours of battery time in all of my portable macs.

 

check which gfx card you are using, also flash can/will kick on the 650m which will drain the battery faster than just the HD4000.

 

4-5 hours, that's seems pretty good.

 

I wouldn't be surprised - my rMBP @ 2.6GHz is happily reading 9+ hours of battery life just browsing and running on a low brightness. The battery in this machine, in my experience, has been massively underrated. Light use will likely last more than 7 hours.

I could have just somehow managed to get a slightly better battery than most, though. From what I've read they tend to vary somewhat.

 

My battery is awesome unless I have my thunderbolt external drive plugged in. I get 7-8 hours with web, Adobe CS6, Final Cut and then music and streaming.

 

Sounds normal. You can try another computer and compare but I doubt it will be any better. Worth a try if you're disappointed with the rmbp