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Question about battery life for new MBP

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badlydrawnboy

macrumors 68000
Original poster
Oct 20, 2003
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I have a 13" 1.3 Ghz i5 Macbook Air. I regularly get 11-12 hours of battery life. The new MBP advertises 10 hours of battery life. If it really does get 10 hours, that's probably enough for me in most cases, but if it's more like 9 hours I'd be inclined to keep my Macbook Air.

How accurate has Apple been in battery life estimates for its most recent MBPs?
 
I'd say stick with the air, I noticed too that the battery life was left out of the presentation, this is exactly what I've said in previous posts, the only way they can really reduce weight is to cut battery size.

The new 13" retina has a 46-watt-hour battery with touch bar, 56whr without touch bar
By comparison, the 2015 (old) 13" retina had a 74.9-watt-hour battery.

The new 15" retina has a 76whr battery
The old 15" used to have a 99.5whr battery

This to me seems like a huge drop, the new skylake platform is more efficient but my gut feeling tells me the new systems will get the same if not a little less battery life than the 2015 (old) versions.

They sure saved that 1/2 lb though :).
 
Usually, Apple is fairly honest in their battery tests. Reviews usually get similar or sometimes even higher results in their tests. But of course we won't really know until they are properly tested.
 
Thanks everyone. It's a tough choice... there are a number of appealing features in the new MBP, but I'm not sure if they're worth a 1-2 hour (or more) drop in battery life.
 
Official 2015 rmbp has rated browsing time of 9 hours and 2016 one has 10 hours. I have 2012 rmbp, and during the first two years, it beated official battery life rating (5 hrs at the time, got 6-7 doing light browser and word processing, ppt). Expect to get a bit more than official one, unless you do intense works.
 
badlydrawnboy said:
I have a 13" 1.3 Ghz i5 Macbook Air. I regularly get 11-12 hours of battery life. The new MBP advertises 10 hours of battery life. If it really does get 10 hours, that's probably enough for me in most cases, but if it's more like 9 hours I'd be inclined to keep my Macbook Air.

How accurate has Apple been in battery life estimates for its most recent MBPs?
Click to expand...
Not sure how you picked your "name" here, but I loved Badly Drawn Boy's music in About a Boy. :)
 
I'm lucky if I get 5 hours out of mine, BUT I'm running some really heavy stuff on it and I usually keep the screen brightness very high. With my previous MBP models, I typically got between 3 and 4 hours on a fresh battery.

A couple of times I only used it for light activities for a long time without ever having a development server running and my usual half dozen of power sucking programs and it did last eight hours. Even with my most battery hungry items idle, I still have a bunch of background programs that most people wouldn't be running so I do believe that 9 to 10 hours for a more typical usage pattern would be realistic.
 
haremite said:
Not sure how you picked your "name" here, but I loved Badly Drawn Boy's music in About a Boy. :)
Click to expand...

I think you're the only person that's ever picked up on that reference!

Re: battery life. I'm down to *maybe* 4 hours. So lame.
 
badlydrawnboy said:
Thanks everyone. It's a tough choice... there are a number of appealing features in the new MBP, but I'm not sure if they're worth a 1-2 hour (or more) drop in battery life.
Click to expand...
I don't have the newest 12" MacBook, but I have a 2017 13" MacBook Pro, and both use USB-C charging.

I just thought I'd add that with USB-C charging, my 13" MacBook Pro battery can be charged from 10-15% to 50% in an hour or less, which is much faster than the older Macs I have had in the past. I imagine this is true for the 12" MacBook as well, and something to consider too when looking at the new MacBook lineups. If you need to top it off for that extra hour of use, it'd likely be faster than topping off the MacBook Air.
 
Use a 15" charger and your 13" will charge really fast

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I've used a MBA 11' 2015 for the last 3 years. I upgraded to a 2017 MBP 13' TB this year - I've owned it for about 1.2 months.

My MBA would get easily 9 hours of battery life - on light usage, 13+ hours.

My MBP gets about 7 with normal usage, 10 with light, and with heavy usage, man that thing can drain the battery like crazy.

As others said, I bought the MBP 15' charger (87 watts?) and wowie does that charge the MBP 13' super fast... Love it.

With super light usage in a conference recently in DC, I found it reporting 13-16 hours then going to 7 when I had to type, use the touchpad. After 6 hours of conference note taking in Word, I had 5+ still reporting. So with light usage it can sip battery.

Painter2002 said:
Will this hurt the 13" MacBook Pro or it's batter at all or no? I might just do this!
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Won't hurt the battery at all. The laptop will only ask for what it was designed to ask for. Just like using an iPad 12w charger with an iPhone 8+ - thing flies! :)
 
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BigMcGuire said:
I've used a MBA 11' 2015 for the last 3 years. I upgraded to a 2017 MBP 13' TB this year - I've owned it for about 1.2 months.

My MBA would get easily 9 hours of battery life - on light usage, 13+ hours.

My MBP gets about 7 with normal usage, 10 with light, and with heavy usage, man that thing can drain the battery like crazy.

As others said, I bought the MBP 15' charger (87 watts?) and wowie does that charge the MBP 13' super fast... Love it.

With super light usage in a conference recently in DC, I found it reporting 13-16 hours then going to 7 when I had to type, use the touchpad. After 6 hours of conference note taking in Word, I had 5+ still reporting. So with light usage it can sip battery.



Won't hurt the battery at all. The laptop will only ask for what it was designed to ask for. Just like using an iPad 12w charger with an iPhone 8+ - thing flies! :)
Click to expand...
Thanks for the feedback! Looks like I may be saving up for a 87 watt charger then! (I've been using the iPad 12w charger for my iPhones since the 7+, and boy does that make an ENORMOUS difference!)
 
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I hardly get 4 hours, let alone 10. I think I can hit 10 if I close every app and play an itunes video for 10 hours.
 
The way the tests are conducted means that the tests are somewhat display heavy when it comes to battery discharge rate (rather than CPU or GPU intensive).

There was quite a large battery capacity drop - and the main way they recouped this was actually not with skylake efficiency, but by the display technology, which uses 30% less power.

If you run tests which are more CPU/GPU intensive, you'll find the newer models have less battery life than previous models.

It really comes down to your usage as to whether you will notice a decrease in battery life or not. I presume most people's use case does not involve a lot of load on the CPU (as in, it is for very brief periods) and as a result will be happy with the battery life.

On the other hand, people who may multi task with VM's or have CPU intensive tasks, may find their battery dwindling faster than they are used to.

If you use external displays, I presume the 30% efficiency on the displays becomes moot?
 
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Ma2k5 said:
The way the tests are conducted means that the tests are somewhat display heavy when it comes to battery discharge rate (rather than CPU or GPU intensive).

There was quite a large battery capacity drop - and the main way they recouped this was actually not with skylake efficiency, but by the display technology, which uses 30% less power.

If you run tests which are more CPU/GPU intensive, you'll find the newer models have less battery life than previous models.

It really comes down to your usage as to whether you will notice a decrease in battery life or not. I presume most people's use case does not involve a lot of load on the CPU (as in, it is for very brief periods) and as a result will be happy with the battery life.

On the other hand, people who may multi task with VM's or have CPU intensive tasks, may find their battery dwindling faster than they are used to.

If you use external displays, I presume the 30% efficiency on the displays becomes moot?
Click to expand...
If you use Google Chrome, or Slack, or any other Chrome based app your CPU usage will be high enough to kill your battery in no time. At least in my experience..
 
Trixs said:
If you use Google Chrome, or Slack, or any other Chrome based app your CPU usage will be high enough to kill your battery in no time. At least in my experience..
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Well there are a lot of threads about Chrome and some other apps killing battery life on MacBooks, long before the TB models :). I know I ended up giving up Chrome for Safari back in 2014/15.
 
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I'm on Safari right now. When I began at 3:40 p.m. today, my MacBook was at 91% with only one tab open. At 3:46, the battery was at 89% so I opened tab #2. At 4:14 p.m. opened tab #3, MacRumors and my battery was at 79%. Now, at 4:27, its at 73%. This is ********, imo, , considering I have a new battery, new SSD, OS High Sierra, etc.
 
haremite said:
This is ********, imo, , considering I have a new battery, new SSD, OS High Sierra, etc.
Click to expand...

Do you have anything else running? Certain background apps can totally kill your battery life. Also a weak Wifi signal will cause a lot faster drain than a strong one. Was the battery life fine before? Is your screen on max brightness? That'll also drain your battery pretty fast too. I don't think any of the Apple battery life claims have max brightness in mind. I forget what they usually rate at, but it's a readable brightness, just not max.
 
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Ma2k5 said:
Well there are a lot of threads about Chrome and some other apps killing battery life on MacBooks, long before the TB models :). I know I ended up giving up Chrome for Safari back in 2014/15.
Click to expand...
That's true, but safari just sucks if you use Google Drive etc. I also feel like Safari battery life is not as great as it was (though def better than Chrome).

For me, if I want to use this laptop as a productivity device, only using Chrome and Slack basically, I get 3-4 hours of battery life.
 
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