REALLY frustrated/let down with new Macbook Pro

[diego1288]

I had written the following post a few weeks back:
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/1263489/

I have gone through an iMac and a Macbook in the past ten years. After having my Macbook for 4 years I decided to invest in a new Macbook Pro 15 inch. I bought my Pro and with Time Machine passed all of my info to the new one. I am starting to regret it because it is the only explanation I have for my problems.

My Pro is 20 weeks old and my battery is already down to 91% Health(verified with Coconut and iStat Pro). My battery does not last close to the 7 hours, I would say it is around 4 hours of just using internet and Mail. Whenever I use Skype or iChat, my fans rev up so much that I have to put the volume to the max to hear the other person. I constantly had these problems in my older Macbook and the only explanation that I have is that when I passed all of my info to the new one, that same thing that caused the fans, and temp is now oing the same in this one. I see no other reason for this. Could someone think of a solution? I really appreciate the help and sorry for writing too much. If someone needs more info in order to help me out please do not hesitate to ask me.

I got many responses and I was happy because I felt like my problem would be fixed. I tried everything that I was told to do. Today I finished cleanly reinstalling Lion on my brand new Macbook Pro and I am still having the same problems as before:
- my battery only lasts around 3 hours, with little use like surfing the internet and listening to music
- the fans rev up to around 6500 when watching videos online, like Netflix, is this normal?
- when using ichat/facetime/skype video they also rev up to those speeds, there my battery only lasts 30 minutes with 50% charge left.

I really don't know what else to do. I don't know whether Apple will take care of my problem or not. I don't know if it is the battery, the computer itself, I just don't know. I thought that the problem was somewhere in my Time Machine back ups, but after doing the clean reinstall without Time Machine, I don't believe this to be the problem. Any ideas/comments/suggestions??

Thanks so much for your time!

 

[Lee Adama]

if it's hardware related, take it back asap and see if a replacement is in the cards.

 

[diego1288]

if it's hardware related, take it back asap and see if a replacement is in the cards.

I bought it in mid July. I don't know whether they make exceptions or not.

 

[Mojo1]

The only way you will find out whether Apple will help you with your battery problem is to contact Apple. You can only go so far getting advice on a forum.

 

[Lee Adama]

I bought it in mid July. I don't know whether they make exceptions or not.

i think you need to contact them asap. Be reasonable, polite and stick to the facts. Bottom line is you and Apple both want a working laptop. If it's way past the return period, repair or some other assistance is not out of the question. YOu need to get with them and start talking to them.

 

[iThinkergoiMac]

To see your battery health degrade like that isn't out of the ordinary. It should stabilize soon, if it hasn't already. You'll never get the battery life that is claimed as that's only possible under certain conditions. Try turning down the brightness of your screen, the keyboard backlight, and make sure that bluetooth is off and Wi-Fi if you're not currently using it. If you have a lot of things running in the background, that'll kill your battery faster as well.

The fans spinning up is normal. It seems the loudness of the fans isn't, though. Your Mac is still under warranty, so you should be able to get Apple to do something about it.

 

[Freddy1765]

If the websites you frequent use flash plugins and you watch flash video that may be why the fan freaks out, and your battery drains so quickly.

 

[Sirolway]

Take a look at Activity Monitor & see if anything is using loads of CPU in the background. Online backup utilities like Carbonite, Mozy, Spideroak are common candidates. When I first got my 2009 13" MBP I only got 2 hours battery out of it .Took it back to APple, they replaced the battery & checked a bunch of stuff - couldn't find anything wrong with it. It was only subsequently I realised Carbonite had the CPU up to 100% all the time. Oops ...

 

[blueroom]

Netflix uses Silverlight and that'll get the fans going and the fans are a pretty good indication of how hard your CPU is working.

Fans on = short battery life.

 

[thundersteele]

If you think something is wrong with your macbook, why didn't you bring it to an apple store already? You write that you don't know if apple will take care of your problem or not. I can tell you, as long as you don't let apple know that you have a problem, they will _not_ take care of it!

The battery itself is still in the normal/acceptable range. You have to understand your system usage and how it affects the battery. We can not tell you if your system is working normal or not.

Coconut battery shows the current battery power usage in it's last row. If I'm on battery, surfing the web, I usually am between 10W and 14W. This gives me 6-7 hours. Note that I have flash uninstalled and use Safari as browser. Brightness is above medium, keyboard light off usually.
When I work on my machine, whenever I run some code on the CPU, the power usage goes up to 40W-50W. This is normal and expected. If the code runs for 1-2 hours, the battery goes down a lot. This is also normal.
When I play a graphics intensive game, the battery lasts less than one hour. Also normal.

Fans spinning up and low battery lifetime is a sign of something requiring a lot of CPU power. Check your power usage, and check activity monitor to find out which processes are using the CPU. I don't know how demanding Skype and FaceTime are, but fullscreen video chat is quite a bit of work for a computer.