Senior Apple Advisor admits that MBPs have battery issues

[Tulani]

There is a limit to how "big" a battery a manufacturer can design and build into their products ....and laptops in this particular case

Lithium batteries are dangerous goods, much like gasoline, propane, and sulphuric acid

When you ship or import lithium batteries, including those contained in or packed with devices and equipment, you must meet shipping requirements and declare package contents to postal carriers, couriers or transport companies

So there is a design cap Apple will be able to work with in cases like this no matter how much we would want them to increase battery size.

 

[happypappy]

My 15" Touch Bar battery sucks!!!! I watch it drop at such a rapid pace no matter what apps I'm using. This needs to be fixed and fast.

 

[Capt T]

What is the screen brightness at?
What tasks are you doing?
Do you have multiple tasks running at the same time?

Apple is usually pretty specific about brightness and what tasks they used to test their battery life. Same thing with the iPads, if you have the brightness higher then Apple's test and doing tasks that push the CPU or GPU then you will have lower battery life.

 

[skids929]

My 15" Touch Bar battery sucks!!!! I watch it drop at such a rapid pace no matter what apps I'm using. This needs to be fixed and fast.

Yeah I had a 15 TB that I returned (mainly because it was too large for my needs) and I never got more than 7 hours out of it. Dial down your screen, keyboard backlight, but brightness and kill Siri. Might help. But anyone who says the 15s are better than the 13s is incorrect. My experience is they both are equal when it comes to battery drain.

 

[happypappy]

What is the screen brightness at?
What tasks are you doing?
Do you have multiple tasks running at the same time?

Apple is usually pretty specific about brightness and what tasks they used to test their battery life. Same thing with the iPads, if you have the brightness higher then Apple's test and doing tasks that push the CPU or GPU then you will have lower battery life.

Screen brightness set to about 70%
Keyboard backlit to 80%
Running Safari, Mail, Finder, Messages

 

[jacob_w]

There is a limit to how "big" a battery a manufacturer can design and build into their products ....and laptops in this particular case

Lithium batteries are dangerous goods, much like gasoline, propane, and sulphuric acid

When you ship or import lithium batteries, including those contained in or packed with devices and equipment, you must meet shipping requirements and declare package contents to postal carriers, couriers or transport companies

So there is a design cap Apple will be able to work with in cases like this no matter how much we would want them to increase battery size.

It's a good point. But I believe FAA's limit is 100Wh and the old 15" rMBP had a 99.9Wh battery. This year it's downsized to 76.

 

[bjet767]

I didn't think it was that significant at all considering the sacrifices made on the battery life.

I travel with two iPads and my laptop so every inch and 1/2 pound of weight really counts. As I said the 12" was a wonderful combo of weight and size, but recently I have the need to run Windows in a VM and the 12" does not have a fan so I discovered it slowed a lot. The problem is two fold with the 12" when VM is needed the CPU maxes out and the heat goes up and since it is passively cooled the heat causes the CPU to throttle back and slow down.

Additionally as the load increases the battery drains faster and again the heat increses and the CPU throttles down again. So the only answer is the 2016 13" MBP and I love it (speed and overall performance), but enjoyed the size and weight of the 12" a bit more.

Size (and weight) does matter.

 

[MarvinHC]

I travel with two iPads and my laptop so every inch and 1/2 pound of weight really counts. As I said the 12" was a wonderful combo of weight and size, but recently I have the need to run Windows in a VM and the 12" does not have a fan so I discovered it slowed a lot. The problem is two fold with the 12" when VM is needed the CPU maxes out and the heat goes up and since it is passively cooled the heat causes the CPU to throttle back and slow down.

Additionally as the load increases the battery drains faster and again the heat increses and the CPU throttles down again. So the only answer is the 2016 13" MBP and I love it (speed and overall performance), but enjoyed the size and weight of the 12" a bit more.

Size (and weight) does matter.

An 11" Air can handle Windows in VM, has a fan and is almost the same size and weight as the 12". Just sayin'....

 

[bjet767]

An 11" Air can handle Windows in VM, has a fan and is almost the same size and weight as the 12". Just sayin

I had an 11" Air, two in fact, the 2010 and an early 2014. It does VM only a little better than the 12" rMB. After moving to retina and a bigger screen I could never go back.

The battery on the 2010 was about two hours max and it did not have lighted keys, something I found was worth every ounce of power used, and was also very slow. The 2014 was literally the same speed as the 2015 12" except no retina.

BTW the 2010 is still going strong with the young lady I sold it to. Battery probably only lasts about an hour now though. 2014 I gave to my daughter in law.

 

[MarvinHC]

I had an 11" Air, two in fact, the 2010 and an early 2014. It does VM only a little better than the 12" rMB. After moving to retina and a bigger screen I could never go back.

The battery on the 2010 was about two hours max and it did not have lighted keys, something I found was worth every ounce of power used, and was also very slow. The 2014 was literally the same speed as the 2015 12" except no retina.

BTW the 2010 is still going strong with the young lady I sold it to. Battery probably only lasts about an hour now though. 2014 I gave to my daughter in law.

But the 'little better' is when both work normally. As soon as the rMB gets warmer, it throttles and hence slows you down significantly. Not a problem on the 11", plus the battery is better in real life. Retina aside, I still strongly believe that the 11" is the better Ultrabook vs. the 12", but anyway, this has been discussed in depth on this site.

 

[xspin]

currently doing only simple browsing

 

[kb3tzt]

I don't know if this has been brought up yet, but has anybody checked the power information under system information, after the os displays 100% charged. I did with the new 13" nab, and system information reported still charging with 700- 800 milliamps left to go. So in theory, if you pull the plug when the charge indicator says 100% you still could be down around 15%. this could lead to a false reduction in battery life, in what I've observed with this new machine.

 

[augustya]

People who want the latest and greatest at all costs can deal with these issues. Folks who want a refined and reliable model should wait one or two "spec-bump" revisions for the kinks to be worked out, which is good advice for pretty much every consumer product.

When you say spec bump do you mean next iteration like a next model or just OS or firmware updates.

 

[bjet767]

The problem with waiting is this, one will always be waiting for the next spec-bump because there always is another coming along.

Just buy when you can afford to fill a need or want. Keep it simple.

BTW I'm hoping the 13" MBP TB I just purchased will fill my needs for the next five years. i am considering adding the two year extension to my Apple Care though.



Ya goto embrace those emojis

 

[oneMadRssn]

When you say spec bump do you mean next iteration like a next model or just OS or firmware updates.

Next spec bump revision means the update that will likely come out next year. It will look the same mostly. It will have a different cpu and maybe different memory and ssd options.

 

[Karnicopia]

I wasn't able to get a good consistent test going just because I had a lot of intermittent usage over the past day or so but I do think I've resolved my issue because it was regularly using about 10%/hour since making my changes. Overall I had 26 hours on the charge and it only lost 5% overnight (there was a lot of other downtime too though as I also had to work on my work laptop).

The changes I made that actually had an impact were having my email check every 5 minutes (for some reason mail was taking up a huge amount of energy even though I was barely using it), I turned off the screen brightness auto adjust and left it and the keyboard at about 75% which is about as bright as I'd want either anyway. I also turned off where the screen gets dimmer off battery but that isn't going to help me really I just prefer the screen to stay consistent.

Since making these changes it sticks around 7-10%/hour unless I'm doing something really intensive like working on a lot of photos and even that is burning more like 15%/hour and not the 20%/hour it was doing before. Overall I can live with it, I didn't give up anything I really value and if I can get ~10 hours (which this seems to be averaging out to) I'm good with that. (13" TB Base with 512 GB)

 

[MOASLON]

Guys what app should I get to see the full consumption of my Macs battery?

Just got the TB 13 MacBook Pro Base 512gb with 8GB Ram.

Under the normal browsing usage at 75% screen brightness + music playing on Youtube at 40% volume it says I am getting around 6.5 hours.

 

[macintoshmac]

How can a firmware update fixes a hardware issue?

At best, there can only be workarounds.

A firmware update is the only thing that can "softly" fix a hardware issue, if at all it is possible. Other than that, you are right, if the issue is hardcoded in the hardware, nothing can be done.

 

[terminator-jq]

From what I recall, one of the big benefits of Skylake is better efficiency. Maybe Mac OS is not optimized for these processors. Either way, I'm finding it more and more difficult to keep defending this laptop. Apple needs to do something to make this right. A $1800 shouldn't cause this many complaints.

 

[mctrials23]

From what I recall, one of the big benefits of Skylake is better efficiency. Maybe Mac OS is not optimized for these processors. Either way, I'm finding it more and more difficult to keep defending this laptop. Apple needs to do something to make this right. A $1800 shouldn't cause this many complaints.

Its a question of whether these are a huge number of complaints or just that only the people with issues are on here complaining. If you took the whinging before this thing was actually in peoples hands as the truth then no one was buying one and they were the worst laptop ever.

 

[dgdosen]

Hoping to see an update to this thread - what is Apple support saying about these battery issues?

 

[danieleilertsen]

From what I'm reading here, it's the 13" TB's. People are reporting the 15" TB's are doing as expected with battery. My non-TB 13" gets the 10 hours consistently.

No. I have the maxed out 15".

I get 2-2.5 hours of battery life when using safari. Talked to apple support. They didnt admit anything, but wanted to recover data. But in the end, they recommended me to replace it.

 

[Grolubao]

Mine sucks too, I get around 2-3h battery. Amazing.... 15" BTO 512gb 450 Radeon

 

[garyleecn]

It seems to me that with the battery sized the way it is now, at 49Whr in the TouchBar model, 10 hours of battery life doesn't add up except under the lightest of usage scenarios. I'm sure that the efficiency of some components has been improved, but I'm skeptical they've improved them enough.

My 2015 rMB typically uses between 4-5W under light use, at ~60% brightness. With its 41Whr battery that's good for over 8 hours of use even at 5W. The new MBP has a larger, brighter screen, a much more powerful processor (28W TDP vs. 4.5W TDP), two fans, the TouchBar hardware, and two Thunderbolt daughter cards, among other things. So with all those additions, it needs to use the same 5W as my rMB in order to hit the stated 10 hours of battery. Seems unlikely.

in my observation, during very light use such as me writing this reply to you, the MacBook Pro 13in (top spec, with 16GB ram BTO) is consuming 3-4w of power in total. I mean it's not just CPU+GPU+ram+etc, it's 3-4w draw from the battery.
so with ~40WHr battery, I guess 10 hour is possible. it's just you won't be able to use much more than light web browsing.

 

[jaack]

I'm in the same boat, I'm roughly getting half the battery life of what I'd get on my 2015 MacBook Pro

Any updates from Apple on this?