Used safari, actually took up MORE energy than chrome. Flash Player (Safari internet plug-in) is an energy hog.
Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Late 2013 rMBP 5 hour battery life?
- Thread starter Ruphio
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
Used safari, actually took up MORE energy than chrome. Flash Player (Safari internet plug-in) is an energy hog.
Flash is sandboxed in the new Safari. Flash objects won't play until you click on it. I agree that Chrome is the likely culprit. On my 2010 MBA, after I upgraded to Mavericks, I got about 30 min extra. Then I stopped using Chrome and started using Safari, and got another half hour (about 4 hours total).
How do you know it took more energy? How did you measure it? Make sure none of the Chrome services are running when Chrome isn't open.
I watched a flash video on both chrome and safari and compared the energy being used in activity monitor invidivually.
Well Flash itself is a problem. If you're using that a lot, you're definitely not going to get your spec'd battery life. Either in Safari or Chrome. But I'll tell you for sure, on my MBA, using Chrome resulted in the fan firing up a lot. When I switched to the new Safari, it never once came on.
Try Safari for a full charge cycle and see if it gets you past 5 hours.
Why don't you just reveal the Energy tab in the middle to see what's using the battery? Now, on Mavericks, you can see the top power hog also in battery menu.
For me, it's almost always Safari.
The poster asked me to see the CPU tab.
----------
At 50% brightness, keyboard light off, wifi on + bluetooth off, and thunderbird + safari open, the estimate says 7:04. This is without me watching anything and just browsing the net. Seems like it's getting a tad bit better!
Do you have the 2.6Ghz or the 2.3Ghz 15 inch? And also on a side note, I don't think Chrome would deduct 2-3 hours of battery life over Safari. Flash isn't helping your battery life, but it isn't hurting it by that much.
Got the feeling that 2.3 is the way to go to maximize battery life...
----------
Could you use gfxCardStatus and disable the discrete GPU and see if it makes any difference?
30 min later and at 8:24 (from 9:14)with moderate safari and iMessage usage. Also forgot to mention mail has been running. (On 2.3 Ghz)
Left it charging after shutting down last night, booted up and opened thunderbird, little snitch, and safari, and the battery estimate is at 9:03.
Brightness at ~50%, wifi on, bluetooth off, smcFancontrol loaded, integrated graphics shown being used by gfxcardstatus.
Hope this helps!
Brightness at ~50%, wifi on, bluetooth off, smcFancontrol loaded, integrated graphics shown being used by gfxcardstatus.
Hope this helps!
That's more like it. I know my battery estimates were sometimes off when I first got a new Mac or installed a new OS.
My bad, it's the 2.3ghz (the high end stock one you can get from the local Apple store for $2600).
I've got the 13" Haswell with the 2.6ghz as well, so I think that mixed me up.
Either way, the 15" gets nearly the battery life of the 13" one. I can't imagine 300ghz would make it last half as long. That's super weird.
Still not even in sight of the ballpark of double the power and the CPU doesn't use all the extra power when just browsing the web.
By that measure, wouldn't "300MHz per core" have similarly drastic effects when comparing the 2.3GHz CPU to the 2.0GHZ one? And yet--GPU factors aside--that doesn't seem to be the case... at least not according to early battery life comparisons.
Still too early to jump to conclusions if you ask me.