MacBook Pro battery life

[Art3mis]

I know I'm probably biting the bullet on this one, and it's been asked a HUNDRED times before, but I've tried all of the usual stuff and my macbook battery is still pretty average compared to what I thought it should be.

I've heard that keeping the macbook plugged in can make the battery worse, so I try to keep it unplugged for as much time as possible, but I'm a writer so it can prove difficult at times when I need to write for long periods of times.

I've got my brightness turned down to the minimum, keyboard backlight is off completely, bluetooth is off, I've quit as many apps as possible (I have the ones I'm using running). Is there anything else I should think of doing? If I turn Time Machine off will it still remember my backups from previous times?

I know that having Wifi off completely would probably help in the long run but I have to use the internet a lot so it would be frustrating having to turn it off and on whenever I use it.

 

[dusk007]

Keeping it plugged in does not hurt the battery. It only charges if the charge level drops low enough. Constantly running it on battery just racks up the cycle count faster than need be. Occasionally discharging the battery a little is good but once a week is enough. The only think Li-batteries don't like is being discharged fully but even that should be prevented by the battery logic shutting the notebook off in time.

Do you have a 13" or a 15"? The 13" should be much better in battery life. The application you use also makes a big difference. Apple's pages is very nice on power draw. The broken crappy Microsoft Word for Mac is terrible. Most of the power savings come in when the cpu can go to sleep. If there is any load if a very tiny but constant one battery life is severly worse. Word with some of its processes isn't great.
Turning off grammer and orthography correction helps probably. Only run it on after you have written a couple pages.
Just write in Pages and copy the text over to Word or whatever more consuming app you use later for formatting.

Turning Wifi Off does very little. Install adblock and flashblock in the browser you use helps a lot. Also closing tabs that you do not need. Some pages with bad code on them can be quite big resource hogs even if they just sit there doing nothing. Disabling Java Script would help but usually it break too many sites today.

Timemachine only gets active at sceduled times, it shouldn't affect battery life in between.

 

[scbond]

Tell us what model MacBook you have and what sort of battery life you're getting.

 

[snaky69]

I've heard that keeping the macbook plugged in can make the battery worse, so I try to keep it unplugged for as much time as possible, but I'm a writer so it can prove difficult at times when I need to write for long periods of times.

Whoever told you that should not be allowed near a computer or is stuck in the batteries from 10 years ago. Keeping the computer plugged as much as you need it to be plugged in is perfectly fine for the battery and does nothing for worsening it. You're putting needless cycles on your battery right now and are actually damaging it more than you would if you kept it plugged in.

Reduce your brightness, turn off bluetooth and wi-fi if you're not using them, and actually quit apps, don't just close windows.

Apart from that, there isn't much you can do. Battery life claims are just that, claims. In the case of Apple, the claims are done on preproduction models, with wi-fi on and bluetooth off, brightness at 50%, safari refreshing a text-only webpage every 30 seconds, with a Pages document open. That's what they call their "Wireless productivity test", and this is what they base their battery life claims on.

 

[Art3mis]

Tell us what model MacBook you have and what sort of battery life you're getting.

13 inch, mid 2012... I only bought it a few months ago really

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Keeping it plugged in does not hurt the battery. It only charges if the charge level drops low enough. Constantly running it on battery just racks up the cycle count faster than need be. Occasionally discharging the battery a little is good but once a week is enough. The only think Li-batteries don't like is being discharged fully but even that should be prevented by the battery logic shutting the notebook off in time.

Do you have a 13" or a 15"? The 13" should be much better in battery life. The application you use also makes a big difference. Apple's pages is very nice on power draw. The broken crappy Microsoft Word for Mac is terrible. Most of the power savings come in when the cpu can go to sleep. If there is any load if a very tiny but constant one battery life is severly worse. Word with some of its processes isn't great.
Turning off grammer and orthography correction helps probably. Only run it on after you have written a couple pages.
Just write in Pages and copy the text over to Word or whatever more consuming app you use later for formatting.

Turning Wifi Off does very little. Install adblock and flashblock in the browser you use helps a lot. Also closing tabs that you do not need. Some pages with bad code on them can be quite big resource hogs even if they just sit there doing nothing. Disabling Java Script would help but usually it break too many sites today.

Timemachine only gets active at sceduled times, it shouldn't affect battery life in between.

13inch 2012 model as mentioned. I dunno why but I read that keeping it plugged in ruins the battery. I was a little paranoid at the idea since this is only a few months old so wanted to find out for sure what the best way of running the Macbook is.

Is it okay to usually keep your macbook asleep at night or should I be turning it off fully? I usually just close it and let it sit to one side til I use it again - not sure if this is okay.

I currently use Pages and haven't got Word so that's fine
Adblock and flashblock? Where can I get these from? Are they plugins?
Should I be using Safari instead of Firefox?

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Whoever told you that should not be allowed near a computer or is stuck in the batteries from 10 years ago. Keeping the computer plugged as much as you need it to be plugged in is perfectly fine for the battery and does nothing for worsening it. You're putting needless cycles on your battery right now and are actually damaging it more than you would if you kept it plugged in.

Reduce your brightness, turn off bluetooth and wi-fi if you're not using them, and actually quit apps, don't just close windows.

Apart from that, there isn't much you can do. Battery life claims are just that, claims. In the case of Apple, the claims are done on preproduction models, with wi-fi on and bluetooth off, brightness at 50%, safari refreshing a text-only webpage every 30 seconds, with a Pages document open. That's what they call their "Wireless productivity test", and this is what they base their battery life claims on.

I was a little anxious because I heard that the battery only has so many lifecycles. I guess the best idea is to keep it plugged in unless I'm somewhere where I don't have use of the power?

My brightness is down almost all the way, I don't particularly need it very high anyway due to a bright room. Bluetooth is already off, but seeing as I need wifi for work a lot of the time that stays on mostly.

At the moment my cycle count is at 44 and my full charge capacity is 5707. Not that I know what this means. Battery health is normal, so I'm guessing it's okay for now.

Sorry it took so long to get back on here - Christmas has been pretty hectic. Thanks for the replies though!

 

[dirtnnasty]

use your macbook whenever you want and however you want...

u can charge und drain your battery as much as you want... important is to not only use it plugged in... let your battery work...

apple says, after 1000 cycles you should have 80% of your capacity... 80% is much!!!

So don't bother you too much and have fun with your machine...

 

[snaky69]

13 inch, mid 2012... I only bought it a few months ago really

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13inch 2012 model as mentioned. I dunno why but I read that keeping it plugged in ruins the battery. I was a little paranoid at the idea since this is only a few months old so wanted to find out for sure what the best way of running the Macbook is.

Is it okay to usually keep your macbook asleep at night or should I be turning it off fully? I usually just close it and let it sit to one side til I use it again - not sure if this is okay.

I currently use Pages and haven't got Word so that's fine
Adblock and flashblock? Where can I get these from? Are they plugins?
Should I be using Safari instead of Firefox?

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I was a little anxious because I heard that the battery only has so many lifecycles. I guess the best idea is to keep it plugged in unless I'm somewhere where I don't have use of the power?

My brightness is down almost all the way, I don't particularly need it very high anyway due to a bright room. Bluetooth is already off, but seeing as I need wifi for work a lot of the time that stays on mostly.

At the moment my cycle count is at 44 and my full charge capacity is 5707. Not that I know what this means. Battery health is normal, so I'm guessing it's okay for now.

Sorry it took so long to get back on here - Christmas has been pretty hectic. Thanks for the replies though!

Li-Po batteries have a finite life, think of it as a car warranty: x number of miles or x time, whichever comes first.

Li-Po batteries will usually work just fine for roughly 1000 battery cycles (1 cycle is 100%-0%-100%, discharging to 90% then back up to 100% ten times counts as a cycle). Or, they usually work well for 3-5 years then crap out, whichever comes first.

Just use your computer however you see fit, the battery will die whatever you do to try to make it live longer, it's a reversible chemical reaction, and all such reactions lose their effectiveness with time. That's just how things are.

 

[Cloudsurfer]

Depends on what you mean by poor battery life. My 3 year old MacBook (going on 4 years) can still make 5-6 hours of internet browsing. If you were expecting it to be closer to the advertised battery life (10 hours in my case), it's a huge disappointment. But in practice, 6 hours is all I need really.

My wife also complains her battery is drained so quick (she has the same model as me) but when I switch laptops with her for a day I get about as much battery life as I would on my own laptop. So again, it depends on your expectations and needs.

As a comparison, my wife's sisters' HP notebook (also a 2010 model) lasts only 30 minutes on a full charge. Go figure.

 

[dusk007]

I never shut down. I only let it sleep and restart when needed. There are a lot of myths about battery most of them false. Just use it when you need on battery and when you sit on the desk plug it in.

AdBlock and Flashblock are plugins or addons. They exist for any browser be it safari, Chrome or FF. Opera doesn't need it because it has most of the functionality built in but then again the new version might not.

Safari is the best on battery life. Just like on Windows, IE usually wins. But the difference isn't that big. I would use the browser that you like best. I prefer Chrome. I cannot stand Safari. Usability is crap imo.
The real energy hogs are badly coded pages (JS stuff), adds and flash. You can fix the latter two and that matters more than the browser choice.

 

[Cloudsurfer]

The only gripe I have about battery life is that since Lion, my MacBook drains a lot quicker with the lid closed than it did in Snow Leopard. In SL my Mac could sleep for many days, while since Lion it will sometimes not even make it a full day.

I have a hunch that Apple has done this on purpose to differentiate it from the flash based Macs that can stay 'on' for a month.