High End 15" Retina Battery Life

If you turn off the backlit keyboard and disable bluetooth as well as keep the screen brightness under 50% You should easily exceed 9-9.5 hours with basic web browsing. If you are watching videos from the web that use flash or silverlight expect only around 5-6 hours tops. I too use GFX card status. If not for this program I might have went with the 13 inch version. And FYI with these settings I usually exceed 10 hours on a charge with normal web browsing. Best of luck!

 

Base model Haswell rMBP 15 with Iris Pro. I get ridiculous battery life on my Haswell compared to my 2012 rMBP. At 50% screen brightness, 1 bar of sound normally and then up to half volume when playing videos, 50% keyboard lights, bluetooth off, and wifi ac connection to time capsule it shows a crazy 15:21 of battery life.

 

The "time remaining" indication is an ever-changing estimate, based on the current workload of your system. It will fluctuate up and down from minute to minute as your power demands change. It is not perfectly accurate, but only an estimate. The only true measure of battery life is to fully charge your battery, then measure the time while you run on battery under your normal workload until your Mac shuts down/sleeps from the battery being drained. There are many factors that impact your battery life. See the BATTERY LIFE FROM A CHARGE section of the following link for details, including tips on how to maximize your battery life.

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The link below should answer most, if not all, of your battery/charging questions. If you haven't already done so, I highly recommend you take the time to read it.

Apple Notebook Battery FAQ​

 

The part where you say you may have picked the 13'' kinda confuses me

I have the 2012/ 15" model and also use GFX status, but only to monster the GPU
I can confirm you do not need GFX status to help with battery life since the dGPU ONLY activates for extremely intensive tasks (the only app I have that activates it in OSX is Starcraft 2, even watching flash video does not do that, nor does iPhoto etc.)

So yeah no need to worry about it much

Edit: admittedly it used to be a slight issue at release, but the software updates have been very good for battery life (I get 5+hrs when watching YouTube)

 

The reason I say that is without GFX card status my battery drains very fast as I use Netflix a lot. It always switches to the 750M card and even when watching some videos or even flash player on some websites as yahoo even turn on my 750M card. Using it as is without GFX I was getting about 6 hours or less in mixed use. The 13 inch has a great battery 10hours plus and around 8 in mixed usage. But for me to be able to force it to use the Iris Pro 5200 for things like Netflix and get a lot closer to the 13 inches battery life in a top spec 15 is amazing to me. I can keep it calm while on battery but when I choose to plug it in I can release the beast. LOL But to be honest for what I use it for I see no difference in the Iris Pro 5200 or the 750M card. But anyways like I said if it were not for the improved battery life for me at least then I would have went with the 13 inch for the superior battery life.

 

For just web browsing, working on essays via Pages and iTunes piped through my EarPods, no wifi (I always use Ethernet), and having the GPU forced into Iris only via GFXcardstatus, I get almost 10 hours.

Bluetooth and keyboard lights are also off. Brightness is around 8-10 out of the 16 possible levels.

 

Iris Pro only model, keyboard light off, bluetooth off, screen brightness 75%, wifi ac w Time Cap, I'm getting around 9.5 hrs pretty consistently.

Love this thing!

 

I find it takes a few chafe cycles to break in. My problems is I push this bad boy to the max with a bunch of VMs.