rMBP battery concerns

[jjfcpa]

I have a MBP retina with 16 gigs of RAM and the 512 gigs SSD and while working at Startbucks this morning, I noticed the battery was down to 49 minutes and I had only been there for about an hour and a half.

I had done a little web surfing (no videos) and a little work in Filemaker.

I went home and let it drain till it got to standby power and then did a full charge. I started working at 3:00 p.m. and kept an eye on the battery indicator. I had set it to show the percentage remaining. I made backups of everything to a new USB 3.0 external hard drive and this took about 30 minutes. The battery was down to 96% - seemed very reasonable.

I then let it sit for an hour and a half and watched the Spain vs France euro game and shortly after 5:00 and checked the battery indicator. It was down to just 46%. This was way out of line with my expectations. It's almost like when I was actually using it, the computer was very frugal on power usage, but when I just let it sit, it was much more hungry.

Anyone have any similar experience.

BTW, I have the brightness down to 6 clicks (out of 16) wifi on, backlit keyboard light practically off, and the resolution set to 1680 X 1050.

 

[73CortinaV8]

you shouldn't drain Lithium rechargeables down. They don't suffer the memory effects of older batteries. In fact, draining them down can reduce their life.

 

[biscuitsxluv]

you shouldn't drain Lithium rechargeables down. They don't suffer the memory effects of older batteries. In fact, draining them down can reduce their life.

thanks for this. I didn't know that.

 

[G-Mo]

If you have a concern, take it to an Apple Store or AASP and have them run a battery test on the unit, that will determine if there's a battery issue or user expectations issue.

 

[doh123]

I don't get your point...
battery life always depends what you are doing... you can kill the battery in 30 minutes from 100% if you wanted to, or it could last over 7 hours.

if you want to get the most the battery, make sure when your on battery that your GPU never gets put on. get gfxCardStatus (version 2.2 for rMBP support) and you can lock on the Intel graphics on so it won't change, which will help a ton. You could be watching a movie and Flash might turn on the GPU, even though the Intel graphics could handle it fine. For battery life its always best to control the GPU yourself.

 

[brand]

thanks for this. I didn't know that.

Lithium-ion Batteries