Good Battery Life on MacBook Pro Touchbar

[CaptRB]

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.

This is patently untrue. My 2015 rMBP will only get close to 9 or 10 hours if I do simple tasks with it, just like the 2016 model.

Run Final Cut Pro on either and battery life drops FAST on both machines.



R
[doublepost=1483042945][/doublepost]

Why do you have two reading one under ninety and one over ?

Machine was off and charging to show difference in battery health meter based on changes in temperature.



R.

 

[d14b0ll0s]

Around 7 hours of regular use during the first rundown – WiFi browsing / downloading some small PDFs (Safari), Mail, Messages, Word, Excel, PDFs, RSS reader (called Reeder); half of the time music on (iTunes), briefly with bluetooth ear buds which drew more energy.
Brightness at around 50-60%.

I would've preferred the non-TB version if not for the paucity of ports.

 

[CaptRB]

BTW....aboard our boat last season we could watch 2 movies on Netflix with the 2015 rMBP before the battery would drop down to below 10%. That's with the screen pumped up pretty bright, which still wasn't bright enough for my tastes.

The new 13" does better and goes brighter. It passed the Titanic test!


R.

 

[biosci]

I suspect the biggest drain on battery for the 15" is the automatic GPU switching implementation.

But what about the 13" Where today I got only 5:13

 

[rklinkhammer]

So, today is the first day that I took my 15" tMBP out and about. I followed Apple's guidelines and spent the first couple of days letting the system sync all my files from iCloud, indexing, backup, etc. I noticed quite a bit of activity happening in the background. So far, with light usage and iTunes, I have been unplugged since about 7:00am this morning, writing this at 16:30, and the battery has about 66% available.

But, my experience has been entirely positive, especially coming from a 2008 MBP. I was worried given all that I have read about these machines, especially on these forums. Notwithstanding those who have experienced real hardware problems, I am beginning to suspect that some of the battery issues may be related to basic setup, initialization, and syncing that goes on for a couple of days. In addition, if you migrated from a previous MAC, you could be now storing your entire Documents directory in iCloud.

I am so looking forward to getting my LG 5K....

As for the USB-C ports, I love them. Its so much better having ports that I will actually use rather than too many ports I would never use and too few of the ones that I want.

 

[Karnicopia]

I was getting a pretty consistent 9 hours on a 13" touch bar and about 10 on a 15" with browsing. I set the display to about 75%, the keyboard to about 50% and turned off auto adjust. If I listen to headphones that's pretty consistent, if I listen to speakers a fairly significant drop (because I'm powering speakers). If I start to do anything significant like process photos or something I drop to about the 6.5 - 7 hour life. I'm sure if I really pushed it I'd drop faster but I'm fine with the battery life. If I were to for some reason plug into a external monitor and external devices without plugging my laptop in that is going to kill my battery because at that point I'm not testing battery life for my laptop I'm testing my laptops ability to power whatever other devices are connected or while the GPU is running non stop. One other thing is it did take a good 3 days for my photos agent and Email to stop doing whatever setup it had to do. Spotlight indexing happened pretty fast but these took a while because I have large data that has to be synched wirelessly instead of a SSD.

I do think there is some kind of software issue though because some people were reporting solid 20 watts of usage on browsing, fixed something in software like a clean install or SMC reset and ended up around the normal 7-10 watts. So there's definitely something going on with software. Even the Consumer Reports tests seem like software to me. How could the same laptop have wildly different results cycling through the same 10 webpages? Then they say it was consistently good battery life with Chrome but inconsistent with Safari. If the battery was too small it should always be too small and for it to be consistent with one piece of software (Chrome) and not another (Safari) heavily indicates software optimization issues to me. I wouldn't suggest anyone wait past their return period or anything but I'm personally pretty optimistic that this sounds like a software issue.

 

[acj25]

What app is that? I want it!

It's coconutBattery!

 

[rklinkhammer]

I was getting a pretty consistent 9 hours on a 13" touch bar and about 10 on a 15" with browsing. I set the display to about 75%, the keyboard to about 50% and turned off auto adjust. If I listen to headphones that's pretty consistent, if I listen to speakers a fairly significant drop (because I'm powering speakers). If I start to do anything significant like process photos or something I drop to about the 6.5 - 7 hour life. I'm sure if I really pushed it I'd drop faster but I'm fine with the battery life. If I were to for some reason plug into a external monitor and external devices without plugging my laptop in that is going to kill my battery because at that point I'm not testing battery life for my laptop I'm testing my laptops ability to power whatever other devices are connected or while the GPU is running non stop. One other thing is it did take a good 3 days for my photos agent and Email to stop doing whatever setup it had to do. Spotlight indexing happened pretty fast but these took a while because I have large data that has to be synched wirelessly instead of a SSD.

I do think there is some kind of software issue though because some people were reporting solid 20 watts of usage on browsing, fixed something in software like a clean install or SMC reset and ended up around the normal 7-10 watts. So there's definitely something going on with software. Even the Consumer Reports tests seem like software to me. How could the same laptop have wildly different results cycling through the same 10 webpages? Then they say it was consistently good battery life with Chrome but inconsistent with Safari. If the battery was too small it should always be too small and for it to be consistent with one piece of software (Chrome) and not another (Safari) heavily indicates software optimization issues to me. I wouldn't suggest anyone wait past their return period or anything but I'm personally pretty optimistic that this sounds like a software issue.

Well, one thing that I did today was add an ad blocker (ublock-safari). One of the side effects of the the ad blocker was that I noticed that the bookmarks (that blank webpage tab with all of your sites) was essentially the same as accessing all of those sites. So, I deleted all of the standard bookmarks (news, shopping, etc) and only had my real favorites. If I have to go to a site, then it will just type it in. I did noticed that even with ad blocking, cnn.com alone was sucking in excess of 3 watts. During the day, I kept track of the wattage, and it hovered around 4.5 and 7.5. I thought that was pretty reasonable.

Also use duck duck go....

Best laptop I ever owned. Also the most expensive.

 

[Karnicopia]

Well, one thing that I did today was add an ad blocker (ublock-safari). One of the side effects of the the ad blocker was that I noticed that the bookmarks (that blank webpage tab with all of your sites) was essentially the same as accessing all of those sites. So, I deleted all of the standard bookmarks (news, shopping, etc) and only had my real favorites. If I have to go to a site, then it will just type it in. I did noticed that even with ad blocking, cnn.com alone was sucking in excess of 3 watts. During the day, I kept track of the wattage, and it hovered around 4.5 and 7.5. I thought that was pretty reasonable.

Also use duck duck go....

Best laptop I ever owned. Also the most expensive.

That is pretty interesting, when I first set up the computer it did pull in all of my old favorites and I did clean a lot of that up mainly because it really cluttered up the touchbar so I just focused on the ones I really used often. So that could have definitely helped. If you are getting 4-7 watts that seems pretty good to me that's what I usually saw on the 13" and about 7-10 watts on the 15" for light browsing. I would see pretty big spikes but over time those seemed like pretty good ranges.

 

[N0ughtsAndCr0sses]

10 hours on a 13 touchbar?

What are you doing? settings etc
[doublepost=1483030877][/doublepost]

im sure software improvements will come, how much of an improvement though is the question

Same here on a similar machine. 10 hrs of safari and some email exchanges. Music was playing incessantly all this time. Brightness at 50%.

 

[fred911]

new i7 16gb getting only 4-6 hours with the same usage as 12 hours on mba.
battery life is disappointing. i asked apple about the difference in battery life between tb and non-tb. the answer was: same battery life of 10 hours.
after all research i believe that the non-touchbar version will last 10 hours.
why are they overstating the battery life of the tb version?

 

[turbineseaplane]

why are they overstating the battery life of the tb version?

Simple - If they were honest you'd have bought the less expensive nonTB.

The TB concept, execution - all of it - is a half backed flop of a solution looking for a problem.

God I hope they abandon ship on that sooner rather than later.

 

[fred911]

Simple - If they were honest you'd have bought the less expensive nonTB.

i have also bought the nonTB version. it is coming within one week. the TB version will go back.
apple has a good return policy. apple is a great company living from one product which is not the macbook. my experience with apple was always positive. they excel in customer service.

having said that i do not understand why this excellent company misrepresents the facts of battery life of both macbooks. this does not make customers happy.

 

[turbineseaplane]

having said that i do not understand why this excellent company misrepresents the facts of battery life

They simply don't want the perceived "better" model being advertised to have worse performance in such a key metric as battery life.