New MacBook Pro Problems

[macintosh1097]

Hi all,

I got a new 15 inch MacBook Pro for Christmas and I'm having some problems with it. First is my battery. I believe that it's defective. I've only been surfing the internet for the past 30 minutes. When I started my battery was at 100% and now, thirty minutes later it's at 85%. That's 15% in 30 minutes. 15 goes into 100 about 6 2/3 times. 30 times 6 2/3 equals 200. Divide by 60 and that equates to only about 3 and 2/3 hours of battery life. Apple advertises 7. I'm not doing any high performance tasks, I only have safari and mail open. Do you think my battery is defective?

My second problem is with my Belkin Thunderbolt to HDMI cable. When I plugged it into my Sharp tv the tv began to flicker. I messed with the resolution and couldn't find a solution. I unplugged it and switched my tv back to the cable input and it still continued to blink. I had to unplug the tv for about 20 minutes for it to work properly again. I tried it on my Hisense tv and it worked but it looked horrible. No matter which resolution and other settings I tried, the picture was horrible and didn't take up the entire screen. Does anybody have any solutions to this?

Thanks!

 

[justperry]

About the battery, you can't calculate it like that, I would recommend you to just run it down, also the system is brand new and the system still needs to calibrate the battery, just run it down 2 times or so and see what it does.
Also, Update your software with Software Update, there might be firmware updates regarding your HDMI problems.

 

[xriderx11]

Hi all,

I got a new 15 inch MacBook Pro for Christmas and I'm having some problems with it. First is my battery. I believe that it's defective. I've only been surfing the internet for the past 30 minutes. When I started my battery was at 100% and now, thirty minutes later it's at 85%. That's 15% in 30 minutes. 15 goes into 100 about 6 2/3 times. 30 times 6 2/3 equals 200. Divide by 60 and that equates to only about 3 and 2/3 hours of battery life. Apple advertises 7. I'm not doing any high performance tasks, I only have safari and mail open. Do you think my battery is defective?

My second problem is with my Belkin Thunderbolt to HDMI cable. When I plugged it into my Sharp tv the tv began to flicker. I messed with the resolution and couldn't find a solution. I unplugged it and switched my tv back to the cable input and it still continued to blink. I had to unplug the tv for about 20 minutes for it to work properly again. I tried it on my Hisense tv and it worked but it looked horrible. No matter which resolution and other settings I tried, the picture was horrible and didn't take up the entire screen. Does anybody have any solutions to this?

Thanks!

What year is your macbook pro? Did you get the new one or a refurbished 2011 year?


I have a late 2011 2.4ghz I7 15" (The more expensive version of the 15") and the battery would drain when im playing games or using anything with high CPU (even skype!) and the laptop is plugged in!

Also sometimes when charging, the light will go green on the plug meanwhile the battery is at 60% (Not full) and i will have to turn the laptop off and pray that it will charge sometimes.

This didnt happen with my 2010 15" i5 2.53ghz version :/

I still have the charger from my 2010 version FYI and it happens with both meanwhile it shouldnt matter because they both have the same voltage.


___


Also does it happen always? Mine rarely happens and i recorded it and might show it to the apple store ... I will wait till I sell mine so it looks like i barely used my macbook pro

 

[NewishMacGuy]

Your battery life will fluctuate greatly depending on what you were doing on the internet and which browser you were using. It comes down to whether or not your browsing (or browser) engaged the dGPU (which chews up battery life).

If you were watching Flash videos, then that battery usage sounds about right. Flash switches on the dGPU and generally just gobbles power (thus Apple's decision a couple of years back to remove Flash from their OS builds to promote HTML5).

I've noticed that the Opera browser also causes my cMBP-15 to switch on the dGPU.

If you want to see when your laptop is switching into discrete graphics mode and subsequently shortening your battery life then download an app called gfxCardStatus.


___

 

[macintosh1097]

I was just browsing the internet. I went on macrumors to search for similar issues and I went on Yahoo. That's all that I did and it drained my battery 15%. I"ll let it run down a few times and see how it is in a couple of days. I have the current version MacBook Pro released in June.

 

[teeejay]

Sorry to sound stupid but, try lower your brightness

 

[snaky69]

Apple advertises 7.

Read the fine print.

This is lifted straight from the Apple website, and is how Apple gets the advertised 7 hours.

The wireless productivity test measures battery life by wirelessly browsing various websites and editing text in a word processing document with display brightness set to 50%.

What that means is: time machine is off, bluetooth is off, display brightness is at 50%, a pages document is open and they are browsing the internet on text based (no flash content) websites, refreshing every thirty seconds.

Unless your usage is as minimalistic, never expect a Mac to reach it's advertised battery life. A more realistic approach is to calculate about 2/3 of the advertised life for your Mac. I get roughly 5 to 5.5 hours on mine when I'm not too hard on it, which is right around 2/3 of 7 hours.

 

[8CoreWhore]

It's possible Spotlight has been indexing during that time (new drive) and that uses CPU.

Open Activity Monitor in the utilities folder - in Applications. It will show what is using the CPU.

I get 5 to 6 hours on a 13" with display full brightness. Yours is bigger. Apple calculates based on half brightness (I think I read somewhere). But you should get over 5 hours full bright.

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Look in your TV menu for "computer" as an input.

Generally, video looks good from computers, but web surfing looks bad...

 

[davidlv]

About the battery, you can't calculate it like that, I would recommend you to just run it down, also the system is brand new and the system still needs to calibrate the battery, just run it down 2 times or so and see what it does.

All of the new MBPs come with the battery already calibrated, and just running the battery down a couple of times is not the proper procedure to calibrate it anyway. Look it up on the Apple HP if you're interested. As said above, install the gfxCardStatus app to see which gfx card is running. My MBP will often say 9 hours remaining and then a short time later, after encountering flash on the web, it will say 5 hours, then after some text editing, that may be 6 and a half hours! Your's sound normal to me.