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How can I improve the battery life on my MBPr 13"?

Hieveryone

Hieveryone

macrumors 603
Original poster
Apr 11, 2014
5,632
2,347
USA
I have a 2.6GHz Haswell i5, 8GB RAM, 256 SSD 13" from late 2013.

My battery life has become pretty bad, far less than 9 hours. The only things I've done is:

1. changed my resolution to 1680 x 1050

2. turned on FileVault 2.

3. Brightness half

4. keyboard back light mostly off but sometimes half lit

5. bluetooth on.

If I watch videos on YouTube, THE BATTERY LIFE IS IS PITIFUL! :mad:
 
If battery is your main concern, then sell this and buy a MBA.

There's no point in changing your workflow just to increase battery life if that is your concern.
 
iAppl3Fan said:
If battery is your main concern, then sell this and buy a MBA.
There's no point in changing your workflow just to increase battery life if that is your concern.
Click to expand...
If you watch youtube videos, the battery life on the mba will be equally pathetic.

Macbooks are still not there when it comes to battery life, use an iPad or stick with a desktop.
 
Hieveryone said:
I have a 2.6GHz Haswell i5, 8GB RAM, 256 SSD 13" from late 2013.

My battery life has become pretty bad, far less than 9 hours. The only things I've done is:

1. changed my resolution to 1680 x 1050

2. turned on FileVault 2.

3. Brightness half

4. keyboard back light mostly off but sometimes half lit

5. bluetooth on.

If I watch videos on YouTube, THE BATTERY LIFE IS IS PITIFUL! :mad:
Click to expand...

Using scaled resolution may use more battery.

If you're using Chrome, there's your answer. Chrome is a huge resource hog.
 
Flash and Silverlight really hurts the battery life.

Use HTML5.

When I'm watching Netflix (it uses Silverlight, thought it supports HTML5 but I can't seem to enable it), I get 2-3 hours on a full charge vs 10 hours I usually get when I'm not doing anything demanding.

Using scaled resolution doesn't really impact battery life that much, maybe 10 mins, 30 mins at worst.
 
Thanks guys, I did turn off Flash! And I've already noticed that my computer runs cooler when watching videos.

I will let you know if battery life has improved.

And I'm sorry to say it but I really like Chrome. It's fast. So for now I will stick with it :)
 
Hieveryone said:
Thanks guys, I did turn off Flash! And I've already noticed that my computer runs cooler when watching videos.

I will let you know if battery life has improved.

And I'm sorry to say it but I really like Chrome. It's fast. So for now I will stick with it :)
Click to expand...

It's fast? It lags so horribly :/

Safari, on the other hand, renders web pages smoothly. And Chrome doesn't have the super fast NitroJS engine in Safari (the engine is also proprietary to Safari).
 
yjchua95 said:
It's fast? It lags so horribly :/

Safari, on the other hand, renders web pages smoothly. And Chrome doesn't have the super fast NitroJS engine in Safari (the engine is also proprietary to Safari).
Click to expand...

Really? I did a side by side when I had my buddies computer in that video you saw and Chrome loaded faster for me. Maybe it's b/c the servers are closer to me or something? I dont know.

In fact, it also beat Mozilla in a side by side! I was using Mozilla Firefox for a while because I believe in their open source open internet philosophy but switched recently to chrome.
 
Flash will *destroy* your battery life.

If you are watching youtube videos with flash enabled then that's where all your battery life is going. Equally, Chrome is a bit of a resource hog on the MBP - it's fast and so on, but it doesn't care about hitting your CPU and it does so frequently. Safari is much more gentle and sips power (likely because Apple made sure it did to get max battery life out of their machines).

The biggest thing you can do to improve battery life is to install Clicktoflash (or just force youtube to use the HTML5 player only) and switch to Safari as your browser.

The other thing you can do is open activity monitor when you have your normal suite of apps open and at idle and go to the energy tab to see if there's a rogue process or app that has a high energy impact. The scale is arbitrary, but it can give you an idea of what is hitting up the resources hard. You can also do a quick version of this by clicking on your battery in the menu bar at any time. Mavericks will give you a short list of apps that are using significant energy at that time (give it a few seconds to refresh this list).
 
joe-h2o said:
Flash will *destroy* your battery life.

If you are watching youtube videos with flash enabled then that's where all your battery life is going. Equally, Chrome is a bit of a resource hog on the MBP - it's fast and so on, but it doesn't care about hitting your CPU and it does so frequently. Safari is much more gentle and sips power (likely because Apple made sure it did to get max battery life out of their machines).

The biggest thing you can do to improve battery life is to install Clicktoflash (or just force youtube to use the HTML5 player only) and switch to Safari as your browser.

The other thing you can do is open activity monitor when you have your normal suite of apps open and at idle and go to the energy tab to see if there's a rogue process or app that has a high energy impact. The scale is arbitrary, but it can give you an idea of what is hitting up the resources hard. You can also do a quick version of this by clicking on your battery in the menu bar at any time. Mavericks will give you a short list of apps that are using significant energy at that time (give it a few seconds to refresh this list).
Click to expand...


Thanks. I turned off flash in Chrome and it's running way cooler. I will hopefully get a chance to test my battery today and update y'all on whether or not it's better.

I'm assuming it will be from all your posts. So just to clarify I'm using HTML5 not flash anymore. Even if it says "you need flash rah rah" I don't care. I just watch another video lol :)
 
The battery life is better without flash. Safari is also better than Chrome for battery life. So yeah guys I think that was the main problem. Thanks :)
 
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