rMBP: I don't get nowhere close to the 7hr battery life

[StuLax18]

No one called you an idiot, or even suggested that you are. I made a genuine offer to help. You've made it clear that you don't want an answer or resolution to your problem, as it appears you'd rather just complain about it and blindly blame ML without a single bit of factual evidence. Good luck with that.

Correct, I don't want any help, or be told about brightness or usage. I appreciate the offer for help, but I never asked for it. You're not going to see anything in activity monitor at idle while I take a screenshot to give any idea as to what the issue might be.

 

[thekev]

That's up to 7 hours. It's not a guarantee that you'll get 7 hours. There are many factors that impact your battery life. See the BATTERY LIFE FROM A CHARGE section of the following link for details, including tips on how to maximize your battery life.

This should answer most, if not all, of your battery/charging questions:

Apple Notebook Battery FAQ​

I get less than satisfactory battery life it seems. And don't try and give me that crap about what are you doing or what is your brightness at. When the recent update to ML I didn't really notice any battery improvement.

Brightness is one factor. While it seems to be less of a brightness change for LED backlighting, these things do lose brightness over time. I generally don't suggest the absolute highest setting, as it's really extremely bright and can tire your eyes if you're reading on it for a long period of time.

 

[derbothaus]

Here's an idea. Downgrade to 10.7.4. Oh, the logic.

 

[evilpaddy]

I tried playing some games and disabled the graphics switching to force the dedicated GPU. Huge power draw if you forget to turn it back off!

 

[JuJuBeee]

If you migrated from an existing time machine profile, check your running processes. I found a few rogue ones writing errors to the system log every 5 seconds. Killing them increased my battery life from about 3 hours to now 8+ hours (i run my brightness about 2-3 notches above the dimmest).

I know my brightness levels contribute to my longer than normal battery life but check your processes..that seemed to fix my problem.

 

[derbothaus]

I tried playing some games and disabled the graphics switching to force the dedicated GPU. Huge power draw if you forget to turn it back off!

It also sucks power when forcing the integrated when it is supposed to be using the dedicated.

 

[mzjin]

It's not screen brightness alone. You can refer to facts as crap if you wish, but they're still true. There are specific things that contribute to battery life. Ignoring those facts and just calling them crap isn't the most intelligent way to diagnose your specific battery issues. Rants don't solve problems.

The rMBP, while I had it, had severely lower battery life than the other Macbook Pros I've owned under the same usage patterns.