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Now i'm happy with rMBP battery life

R

randomnut

macrumors regular
Original poster
Aug 17, 2011
182
177
As some of you may have seen I was pretty vocal with my disappontment in the rMBP battery life. I was getting 4 hours on a good day just vanilla out of the box. Few installed apps etc. The two things that have made a difference are:

1. Turning off Bluetooth. Par for the course probably, but BT in this machine seems to be hideously more of a power draw than on any other machine I've used.

2. Power cycles. Although Apple says the battery in this comes pre-calibrated, i've found after 10 power cycles i'm now getting much better battery life.

I have just about managed 8 hours from a single charge today and am down to 4%, including web browsing, VPN/remote desktop over wifi, and around an hour Spotify (playing through the speakers, not headphones). Screen brightness 2 notches over half, keyboard illumination up two notches.

Actually now very impressed with the battery life. So anyone else disappointed with it out of the box, give it a chance to settle in. Not sure what's different about the battery in this machine, but it's had the worst out of the box performance of any macbook or even windows laptop i've owned before, but now it has the best battery life of all of them.

Can't wait for Mountain Lion now to see what improvements that brings.
 
randomnut said:
As some of you may have seen I was pretty vocal with my disappontment in the rMBP battery life. I was getting 4 hours on a good day just vanilla out of the box. Few installed apps etc. The two things that have made a difference are:

1. Turning off Bluetooth. Par for the course probably, but BT in this machine seems to be hideously more of a power draw than on any other machine I've used.

2. Power cycles. Although Apple says the battery in this comes pre-calibrated, i've found after 10 power cycles i'm now getting much better battery life.

I have just about managed 8 hours from a single charge today and am down to 4%, including web browsing, VPN/remote desktop over wifi, and around an hour Spotify (playing through the speakers, not headphones). Screen brightness 2 notches over half, keyboard illumination up two notches.

Actually now very impressed with the battery life.
Click to expand...

BT is the low power version in it isnt it? :rolleyes:

Flash is the biggest killer and also Google Chrome. Also force the Intel GPU and you should easily get 7+
 
pandamonia said:
BT is the low power version in it isnt it? :rolleyes:

Flash is the biggest killer and also Google Chrome. Also force the Intel GPU and you should easily get 7+
Click to expand...

If it is 'low power' then there's something wrong with it. Turning it off made a huge measurable difference.

Don't use chrome on this machine until retina update comes out, and I have flash block installed from day one, and also the tool for forcing the integrated gpu on battery. You know what they say about making assumptions....
 
randomnut said:
If it is 'low power' then there's something wrong with it. Turning it off made a huge measurable difference.

Don't use chrome on this machine until retina update comes out, and I have flash block installed from day one, and also the tool for forcing the integrated gpu on battery. You know what they say about making assumptions....
Click to expand...

Maybe you should have explained what you have done then to improve battery life so people dont have to assume you havnt done them when you complain about poor battery on a notebook that has been tested to have as high as 9hr of battery.

BT doesnt make much difference on my 2010 model and the rMBP has the new low power standard built in. It really depends if you are actually pairing stuff or just leaving it in discoverable.

A bad webpage is enough to cause a battery to drain at 1% a minute on my 2010 MBP. Facebook was stuck and wouldnt respond and my MBP was hot even on IGP. When i closed the tab my battery expected life went up 400%

crap happens
 
That's so weird. I've been consistently getting 6+ hour usage out of the box without really trying (going back and forth from integrated to discrete)

You should specify usage. "web browsing" could mean watching Hulu while browsing image heavy sites or it could mean reading wiki articles....
 
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