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Good Battery Life on MacBook Pro Touchbar

hululu

hululu

macrumors member
Original poster
Sep 17, 2016
74
19
I was wondering if people out there had decent battery life on their Macbook Pro Touchbar?


Seems like a lot of us are having around 6 hours with light usage on them... (50-75% brightness)


If anyone could share their experience that would be awesome
 
13" TB (base model), I run the app battery logger and it tracks actual usage time as well as sleep time. I've had some battery drain during sleep overnight (3-7% on average) that I'm confident is a software issue and can be addressed. In actual usage, I've been getting about a 10% drain per hour using Safari, Spark mail, a few Youtube videos (or video in news articles), iMessage, etc. Light usage. That correlates to a 10hr battery life. I'd say, I've been really getting about 7-8 when in normal use. It will drop to 6-7 if I throw in Photos, etc. (not video editing though).

This is MUCH better than I got on the 15" I returned which was 3-5 hours with the same usage. So far I'm much happier. It did take me doing a complete HD wipe using disk util and then a 100% clean install of 10.12.2 from a USB disk to get this though. Out of the box, I got 4-7 hours on the 13".

There ARE apps that I KNOW are battery killers and not optimized for 10.12.x yet. These include what I use for my workday/corporate as well: Office 2016's Outlook and Skype for Business (any conference kills it really fast, I've reported this to MS and they are "addressing it" with betas which are getting better) and MS remote desktop. Apple wise, of course editing in FCPX or iMovie will and that should be expected. Adobe LR6 is also a killer, even just browsing, no editing.
 
13"/3.1ghz/16gb/256gb
brightness: 8 clicks
keyboard led (almost full brightness, two left)
been on battery: 3h35min
left (estimated): 64% (6hours)
current consumption: 4.9W/374mAh (realtime)
- it's fluctuating from 4/10W / 300-1000mAh depending on what I'm doing (light usage) - mostly around 5W/450mAh.

I played earlier abit when I was on the battery.

open: finder/safari/mail/itunes/whatsapp/skype/activity monitor/battery health app/connected to the nas, wifi 5Ghz.
 
kwandrews said:
13" TB (base model), I run the app battery logger and it tracks actual usage time as well as sleep time. I've had some battery drain during sleep overnight (3-7% on average) that I'm confident is a software issue and can be addressed. In actual usage, I've been getting about a 10% drain per hour using Safari, Spark mail, a few Youtube videos (or video in news articles), iMessage, etc. Light usage. That correlates to a 10hr battery life. I'd say, I've been really getting about 7-8 when in normal use. It will drop to 6-7 if I throw in Photos, etc. (not video editing though).

This is MUCH better than I got on the 15" I returned which was 3-5 hours with the same usage. So far I'm much happier. It did take me doing a complete HD wipe using disk util and then a 100% clean install of 10.12.2 from a USB disk to get this though. Out of the box, I got 4-7 hours on the 13"
Click to expand...

same for me, although i'm at 6-7 hours usage with light usage. I'm not impressed with that to be honest.

Are you happy with the battery though, no regrets?
 
My 15" 2.6GHz/16GB/Radeon Pro 450 gets a solid 6-7 hours with the screen set around 75%. The usage to get this includes some web surfing, some excel work and email. For reference, the 13" tMBP I had previously lasted about the same amount of time on battery with the same usage.

I know a lot of people are complaining about battery life. But since when have manufacturers been accurate on their time estimates? Have you tried one of those "10 hour battery life" windows machines? They get closer to 4-5 hours with any typical use. You can't expect to do any picture/video editing (or any CPU taxing work) on battery and truly think you'll get anywhere near 10 hours on these machines.

Now, if I was consistently getting like 3 hours with my usage, as some claim they are, then that would be a very different story.
 
hululu said:
same for me, although i'm at 6-7 hours usage with light usage. I'm not impressed with that to be honest.

Are you happy with the battery though, no regrets?
Click to expand...

I had a non-TB as well, I did "need" more power for some 4k video editing, so it made sense to jump to TB. Taking that out of the equation though, just as a machine with "routine" tasks, I do prefer the TB quite a bit. I've found it VERY handy. I love using it in Spark mail, I can get through 100's easily and quickly with it. Touch has grown on me so much, that unless that battery was "useless", I'll keep it. I can't see having a Mac without one now. My bluetooth Apple keyboard and Magic Trackpad are gathering dust because it doesn't have a TB! I used to use laptops with an external monitor in clamshell mode, now I use it open for the TB!

These are my settings when on battery. Brightness 9-12 (clicks, no auto-adjust), backlights (manual control only), I do opt for a darker wallpaper.
 
kwandrews said:
... Taking that out of the equation though, just as a machine with "routine" tasks, I do prefer the TB quite a bit. I've found it VERY handy. I love using it in Spark mail, I can get through 100's easily and quickly with it. Touch has grown on me so much, that unless that battery was "useless", I'll keep it. I can't see having a Mac without one now. ...
Click to expand...

Funny, I've also found the touch bar to be most useful with Spark email as well. Every time I use it with that app I keep thinking "man, this is awesome". Once Excel starts utilizing the touch bar to quickly save the file and hopefully for cell formatting, the touch bar will be an absolute game changer for me.
 
sn0warmy said:
Funny, I've also found the touch bar to be most useful with Spark email as well. Every time I use it with that app I keep thinking "man, this is awesome". Once Excel starts utilizing the touch bar to quickly save the file and hopefully for cell formatting, the touch bar will be an absolute game changer for me.
Click to expand...
I use it with my corporate email (Outlook 2016) to sort through it initially in Spark to get rid of all of the junk email, bulk, etc. I can do it in about 20% of the time it takes in outlook and I get about 300-400 emails per day. Then I still have to stick with Outlook for my primary work mail for other features required and the calendar, shared views, etc. BUT Spark has been great to start the day with AND I use it for my personal email as well and love it. This is what SOLD ME ON THE TOUCHBAR. Now, when I go to Outlook and it's not there, I gets me a bit frustrated. LOL!!
 
I get pretty much the same life as with my other MacBooks, except for the Air, which is the best.

20161229_080609_resized.jpg



R.
 
CaptRB said:
I get pretty much the same life as with my other MacBooks, except for the Air, which is the best.

View attachment 680663


R.
Click to expand...

thats nice to see! but im getting the same estimates, real time usage though, with like battery logger will tell you exactly how many hours you ve actually been using the mac!
 
I've got 5 hours usage on my 15 inch mac with touchbar. Now, I am wondering if this is a software issue, which can be fixed. Otherwise, I am going to return the laptop. Can someone please advise? Thanks
 
hululu said:
I was wondering if people out there had decent battery life on their Macbook Pro Touchbar?


Seems like a lot of us are having around 6 hours with light usage on them... (50-75% brightness)


If anyone could share their experience that would be awesome
Click to expand...
Mine lasts 10 hours with regular use like internet, email, etc. Gaming will cut it down to about 2 hours on boot camp.
 
Tomnguyen504 said:
I've got 5 hours usage on my 15 inch mac with touchbar. Now, I am wondering if this is a software issue, which can be fixed. Otherwise, I am going to return the laptop. Can someone please advise? Thanks
Click to expand...

Battery life can and will very likely be improved by software updates. I suspect the biggest drain on battery for the 15" is the automatic GPU switching implementation. I've read that it can be wonky and not working properly, allowing both the iGPU and dGPU to be draining the battery simultaneously after the 10.12.2 update.

If Apple released an update allowing us to toggle on the Radeon GPU manually, only when needed, while otherwise keeping the Intel 530 GPU on full time, I suspect we'd see closer to 10 hour battery life on these machines.

In fact, on my next battery cycle I'm going to test doing the opposite, which is to disable automatic graphics switching and just keep the Radeon GPU on full time. I'm curious to see if it isn't so much the dedicated GPU that drains the battery as it is the automatic switching firmware behind it. If I can get the same or better battery life with the auto graphics switching turned off, I'll just run the better GPU full time.
 
adh328 said:
Mine lasts 10 hours with regular use like internet, email, etc. Gaming will cut it down to about 2 hours on boot camp.
Click to expand...

10 hours on a 13 touchbar?

What are you doing? settings etc
[doublepost=1483030877][/doublepost]
Tomnguyen504 said:
I've got 5 hours usage on my 15 inch mac with touchbar. Now, I am wondering if this is a software issue, which can be fixed. Otherwise, I am going to return the laptop. Can someone please advise? Thanks
Click to expand...

im sure software improvements will come, how much of an improvement though is the question
 
On my 15" base model, I get around 9-10 hours with light use (web browsing, e-mail, etc) and brightness set at 60%.
 
I get about 6-7 hours of battery life on my 13 inch TB with light usage and it drops to 4-5 if I start watching a couple youtube videos.

I get about 7-8 on my older late 2013 inch Macbook pro with light usage and 5-6 hours with youtube videos.

So slightly worse battery life unfortunately, but it's not all that noticeable since its only an hour difference. It's just for a new computer you would expect better battery life instead of worse.
 
And again, I own a rMBP and I get 4-5 hours if I watch videos with proper screen brightness. I ran the 13" tMBP watching Titanic (over 3 hours via Netflix) and it was at 60% when I started. After the movie it was down to something like 15%. I did it twice with different brightness settings.
But the screen brightness was higher than the rMBP, so any way you cut it, this is reasonable battery life.

R
 
To be honest. I have the 15inch 2.7 Radeon 460 and I think the battery life has been great so far. At the moment I'm using Eclipse, Safari (multiple tabs), 2 other desktops in full screen writing assignments and have been for the past 3 hours. Battery life is at 75 percent. which says over 8 hours and seems to be going down accurately. Best laptop I've had to date. Keyboard is class.
 
sn0warmy said:
My 15" 2.6GHz/16GB/Radeon Pro 450 gets a solid 6-7 hours with the screen set around 75%. The usage to get this includes some web surfing, some excel work and email. For reference, the 13" tMBP I had previously lasted about the same amount of time on battery with the same usage.

I know a lot of people are complaining about battery life. But since when have manufacturers been accurate on their time estimates? Have you tried one of those "10 hour battery life" windows machines? They get closer to 4-5 hours with any typical use. You can't expect to do any picture/video editing (or any CPU taxing work) on battery and truly think you'll get anywhere near 10 hours on these machines.

Now, if I was consistently getting like 3 hours with my usage, as some claim they are, then that would be a very different story.
Click to expand...


Until recently Apple was the exception to the rule. Their products consistently exceeded the stated battery life, and sometimes by large margins. And this was part of the reason people selected Apple products. So many people, including me, are disappointed for see that Apple is now overly estimating the performance we will see in real usage, just like a discount Windows PC maker.
 
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