It is called activity monitor, and comes with your mac. It is located in /Applications/Utilities. When you click on the "energy" tab in activity monitor, there will be information on your battery.
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Only Getting 5 - 6 Hours MOST from October, 2013 MacBook Pro :(
- Thread starter treepuppy
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It is called activity monitor, and comes with your mac. It is located in /Applications/Utilities. When you click on the "energy" tab in activity monitor, there will be information on your battery.
For what it's worth, I ran some tests on different brightness levels on my 2.6GHz 13" rMBP.
These are all total power draw of my mac:
Minimum brightness: 4W
25% brightness: 4.3W
50% brightness: 5W
75% brightness: 6.3W
100% brightness: 9.6W
In light of general usage ranging from 5-10W for me, depending on the task at hand, you can save a lot of power just by decreasing the brightness to 75% (four bars below the max). It's also not worth going much below 50% for the sake of saving power.
I get 10-12 hours battery life, doing basic dev work with Safari, Terminal, Netbeans and Chrome. Significantly less using Lightroom or Photoshop, or running backups to the Time Capsule.
These are all total power draw of my mac:
Minimum brightness: 4W
25% brightness: 4.3W
50% brightness: 5W
75% brightness: 6.3W
100% brightness: 9.6W
In light of general usage ranging from 5-10W for me, depending on the task at hand, you can save a lot of power just by decreasing the brightness to 75% (four bars below the max). It's also not worth going much below 50% for the sake of saving power.
I get 10-12 hours battery life, doing basic dev work with Safari, Terminal, Netbeans and Chrome. Significantly less using Lightroom or Photoshop, or running backups to the Time Capsule.
Chrome has Flash built in. Flash kills battery life.
Chrome is just generally not very efficient either. It was only ever a "lightweight" browser in its first few releases when it lacked most of the features other browsers had.
With Firefox, you can set cache limit to say 100 MB but Chrome doesn't have this option and its cache can build up into hundreds of MBs which slows down Chrome a lot.
Also Firefox is much lighter on memory on multi-tabs than Chrome as well.
Does Apple ever mention what contributes to the 9 hour battery life? I.e. screen brightness, bluetooth etc. I would think "Up to 9 hours" is using most settings off, lowest screen brightness, keyboard backlight off, no flash etc. I usually keep my brightness at the third notch and only use the keyboard backlight in the dark and usually get about 7-8 hours.
edit: per apple's website:
Testing conducted by Apple in October 2013 using preproduction 2.3GHz quad-core Intel Core i7–based 15‑inch MacBook Pro units, preproduction 2.0GHz quad-core Intel Core i7–based 15‑inch MacBook Pro units and preproduction 2.6GHz dual-core Intel Core i5–based 13‑inch MacBook Pro units. The wireless web test measures battery life by wirelessly browsing 25 popular websites with display brightness set to 12 clicks from bottom or 75%. The HD movie playback test measures battery life by playing back HD 720p content with display brightness set to 12 clicks from bottom or 75%. The standby test measures battery life by allowing a system, connected to a wireless network, to enter standby mode with Safari and Mail applications launched and all system settings left at default. Battery life varies by use and configuration. See www.apple.com/batteries for more information.
I guess theres my answer.. I haven't really done any conclusive tests but I have never gone a full 9 hours before and I use a really low screen brightness.
edit: per apple's website:
Testing conducted by Apple in October 2013 using preproduction 2.3GHz quad-core Intel Core i7–based 15‑inch MacBook Pro units, preproduction 2.0GHz quad-core Intel Core i7–based 15‑inch MacBook Pro units and preproduction 2.6GHz dual-core Intel Core i5–based 13‑inch MacBook Pro units. The wireless web test measures battery life by wirelessly browsing 25 popular websites with display brightness set to 12 clicks from bottom or 75%. The HD movie playback test measures battery life by playing back HD 720p content with display brightness set to 12 clicks from bottom or 75%. The standby test measures battery life by allowing a system, connected to a wireless network, to enter standby mode with Safari and Mail applications launched and all system settings left at default. Battery life varies by use and configuration. See www.apple.com/batteries for more information.
I guess theres my answer.. I haven't really done any conclusive tests but I have never gone a full 9 hours before and I use a really low screen brightness.
There are links everywhere. Commonly known that Chrome heavily optimizes for speed, and Safari optimizes for user experience (balance speed and battery). Just google.