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New MBP only getting 2-3 hours of battery power.

fel10

fel10

macrumors 68020
Original poster
Feb 2, 2010
2,338
3,922
Woodstock, GA USA
So just like the title says. I'm only getting 2-3 hours of battery power on my new MBP. I calibrated my battery yesterday, to see if that fixed the issue, but it didn't. All I'm using is Safari and iTunes. The battery percentage seems to be dropping 1% every 2 minutes. Anything I can do to fix this. My 14 days return policy will be up this Sunday, should I try to exchange it b4 the 14 days is up??
 
fel10 said:
So just like the title says. I'm only getting 2-3 hours of battery power on my new MBP. I calibrated my battery yesterday, to see if that fixed the issue, but it didn't. All I'm using is Safari and iTunes. The battery percentage seems to be dropping 1% every 2 minutes. Anything I can do to fix this. My 14 days return policy will be up this Sunday, should I try to exchange it b4 the 14 days is up??
Click to expand...

Depends on what you're doing in Safari. Most likely, your settings and your activities are what's keeping your battery life short. If you're worried, have :apple: check it out. Just to put it in perspective though, you're overreacting a bit, because i drained my iphone 4 in 2 hours when i first got it just because it was new and exciting and I was using it very intesively. I'm thinking that's what's happening here.
 
Is it possible that your itunes is doing some importing or spotlight is indexing lots of files? Did you check the activity monitor to see what is causing the high load?
 
/user/me said:
Depends on what you're doing in Safari. Most likely, your settings and your activities are what's keeping your battery life short. If you're worried, have :apple: check it out. Just to put it in perspective though, you're overreacting a bit, because i drained my iphone 4 in 2 hours when i first got it just because it was new and exciting and I was using it very intesively. I'm thinking that's what's happening here.
Click to expand...

All I'm doing on Safari is checking the news sites like MacRumors, CNN, 9 To 5 Mac. Not watching any videos or anything. And I just fully charged my MBP today. Even though the battery icon said 100%, it was saying I only had 3:30 hrs left on my battery, and I wasn't even doing anything.
 
fel10 said:
All I'm doing on Safari is checking the news sites like MacRumors, CNN, 9 To 5 Mac. Not watching any videos or anything. And I just fully charged my MBP today. Even though the battery icon said 100%, it was saying I only had 3:30 hrs left on my battery, and I wasn't even doing anything.
Click to expand...

What about screen and keyboard brightness? are you running Parallels?
 
fel10 said:
All I'm doing on Safari is checking the news sites like MacRumors, CNN, 9 To 5 Mac. Not watching any videos or anything. And I just fully charged my MBP today. Even though the battery icon said 100%, it was saying I only had 3:30 hrs left on my battery, and I wasn't even doing anything.
Click to expand...
Your battery life from a charge is dependent on many factors, including screen brightness, WiFi, Bluetooth, apps/processes/widgets running, multimedia of any kind, etc. Use Activity Monitor to see if you have any runaway process that's consuming system resources, as well as your "Page Outs" and "Swap used" under "System Memory".

This should answer most, if not all, of your battery questions:
 
dusk007 said:
Is it possible that your itunes is doing some importing or spotlight is indexing lots of files? Did you check the activity monitor to see what is causing the high load?
Click to expand...

Here, I took a pic of "Activity Monitor". Nothing major running.
Screenshot2011-03-09at20408PM.png


And this what the battery icon was showing.
Screenshot2011-03-09at20334PM.png
 
fel10 said:
Here, I took a pic of "Activity Monitor". Nothing major running.
Screenshot2011-03-09at20408PM.png


And this what the battery icon was showing.
Screenshot2011-03-09at20334PM.png
Click to expand...

Just based on what i can see here, you're running wifi, bluetooth, itunes and safari. if you start or stop applications, you will notice that your battery life remanining increases or decreases appropriately.
 
fel10 said:
Here, I took a pic of "Activity Monitor". Nothing major running.
Click to expand...
Try again. Change the "My Processes" to "All Processes", then click on the CPU column heading to sort in descending order by CPU usage. Also check System Memory at the bottom, as I mentioned in my other post. Install iStat Pro to check your battery health.
 
i think the new battery is horrible because I had a 13" macbook pro late 2010 which I sold and it lasted me about 7 to 8 hours with full brightness, wifi on, while having many windows and memory hog sites like youtube.

I bought the new top of the line 15" and i get at most 3 hours running the same settings, when I put the screen brightness at lowest it increases to 5 hours...not to mention that I turned off the high end graphics.
Somehow the screen brightness is taking up a lot of battery, which wasn't the issue before...does HD resolution have anything to do with it?
 
Jphillippe said:
I bought the new top of the line 15" and i get at most 3 hours running the same settings, when I put the screen brightness at lowest it increases to 5 hours...not to mention that I turned off the high end graphics.
Somehow the screen brightness is taking up a lot of battery, which wasn't the issue before...does HD resolution have anything to do with it?
Click to expand...

I don't think so... My 17 inch maxed out MBP 2011, if I dim the screen down, turn off keyboard lights, bluetooth, etc. and am doing nothing intensive, lasted me an entire 9 and a half hour day... Granted it would sleep for a few minutes at a time here and there, and was just being used for word processing, so wifi was off too except at lunch. but it lasts just as long as my 2010 17 inch did. Battery life can be affected by so many variables...
 
iZero said:
I don't think so... My 17 inch maxed out MBP 2011, if I dim the screen down, turn off keyboard lights, bluetooth, etc. and am doing nothing intensive, lasted me an entire 9 and a half hour day... Granted it would sleep for a few minutes at a time here and there, and was just being used for word processing, so wifi was off too except at lunch. but it lasts just as long as my 2010 17 inch did. Battery life can be affected by so many variables...
Click to expand...

hmm i'm gonna do some testing today, I'm sure I can get 9 hours with all those settings off, but with the 13 inch I got about 7-8 with those settings on, so that's what throws me off.
 
Jphillippe said:
hmm i'm gonna do some testing today, I'm sure I can get 9 hours with all those settings off, but with the 13 inch I got about 7-8 with those settings on, so that's what throws me off.
Click to expand...

Well, I can usually get at least 6-7 hours if I have wifi on and use it very lightly. It depends, because I like to watch Youtube sometimes, and I tend to do a lot more things connected to the internet so it usually is more like 4.5-5.5 hours if I'm actually using it like that. Now, if I turn my brightness up, and keyboard lights, etc. it drops to about 2-3 hours. Watching video/listening to music with all that, even less. I know the bigger models will probably never be as long lived battery wise as the 13 inch just through the nature of being larger/having larger backlights/etc.
 
ive been getting around the 7 hours stated. granted i'm only browsing the web with 2-3 tabs open, it gets my thru my day at college with out haveing to charge it at all. this is with keyboard lights off, brightness on screen about 1/3 way up.
 
I have the same laptop as you but I have the Apple/Toshiba 128GB SSD. I get insane battery life...like...I haven't been able to calibrate it yet because it lasts so damn long lol. 4+ easy on the 6750M full-time...
 
/user/me said:
Just based on what i can see here, you're running wifi, bluetooth, itunes and safari. if you start or stop applications, you will notice that your battery life remanining increases or decreases appropriately.
Click to expand...

OP:

Guarantee you that Bluetooth isn't helping your cause. Especially if it's "searching" for devices.
 
It really varies, my predicted time left can go from 2 hours at 100% to 9 hours at 80%.
It can be even shorter if im maxing everything out while i use photoshop, illustrator and autocad itunes and firefox at the same time or something.

Try reducing screen and keyboard brightness and you might find it goes way up.
 
I think your AMD GPU is activated by some process - iStat is showing GPU temp.. at least on my 2010 MBP, GPU is shown as "-" when intel GPU is being used. That would account for some shortening in your battery life
Get gfxCardStatus and check what GPU is running.

Also, you can't trust that "time left." That is constantly adjusted depending on how much amp you are using at any given moment..
 
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