why is my battery so terrible??

kingofwale

kingofwale

macrumors 6502a
guys.. I'm getting no more than 6 hours on this thing.

what annoys me is that I am barely doing anything,

*2 Firefox tabs (one for facebook, another for MacRumors)

*Brightness (all the way down to second last lowest)

*keyboard light (all the way down to second last lowet)

*I am downloading something in the background



Another issue, my battery cycle is at 21 when I got it (Brand new from Bestbuy). I ran coconut battery app, it tells me my battery health is at 98%

Can't say I'm not at last a little disappointed with this. Considering it's "all day battery life".
 
battery health is normal at 98.
Use activity monitor to see if there is anything in the background that is using CPU.
Did you reboot a couple of times?
 
lo100469 said:
battery health is normal at 98.
Use activity monitor to see if there is anything in the background that is using CPU.
Did you reboot a couple of times?
Click to expand...
nothing else is draining the battery. Firefox at 114 (under energy impact), no idea what that means

other things together are under 20
PBG4 Dude said:
Try replacing FireFox with Safari and see if your battery runtimes improve.
Click to expand...

trying that now. but i haaaate safari. haha
 
kingofwale said:
guys.. I'm getting no more than 6 hours on this thing.

what annoys me is that I am barely doing anything,

*2 Firefox tabs (one for facebook, another for MacRumors)

*Brightness (all the way down to second last lowest)

*keyboard light (all the way down to second last lowet)

*I am downloading something in the background



Another issue, my battery cycle is at 21 when I got it (Brand new from Bestbuy). I ran coconut battery app, it tells me my battery health is at 98%

Can't say I'm not at last a little disappointed with this. Considering it's "all day battery life".
Click to expand...

You may have a battery situation as I got a solid 8-9 hours yesterday down from 100% to 3% from 12 noon - 9PM with mixed heavy, light and standby use. I was happy with that.
 
Maclee2010 said:
You may have a battery situation as I got a solid 8-9 hours yesterday down from 100% to 3% from 12 noon - 9PM with mixed heavy, light and standby use. I was happy with that.
Click to expand...

lo100469 said:
I have Safari at 30, so Firefox at 110 is probably was causes the drain.
Click to expand...

thanks guys! i will do more testing tonight... Freaked out a bit last night, but it was the first day I had it. haha

----------
lo100469 said:
I have Safari at 30, so Firefox at 110 is probably was causes the drain.
Click to expand...

my mistake, the average for firefox is around 45. i was watching netflix with it earlier on (but plugged in) so the average should be lower

you mentioned reboot, how would that affect it? I have yet to reboot it once
 
I have the same problem, whether I use Safari or Firefox.

You may want to try a few things :

- Check that Spotlight has finished indexing and that you don't have a heavy download, like Dropbox first sync, running. If that's the case, wait them out (probably a few days).
- Check your energy settings (no power nap on battery, allow disk to sleep, etc)
- SMC reset
- PRAM reset

Didn't help for me. I did a complete erase and reinstall of 10.10.3 this week-end and it seems to be better, though not as good as expected, still much better. I've just restored my profile so I'll know if there's a problem there.

My "battery health" is 96% with ~15 cycles. I'm still thinking of returning it if this last test doesn't work.
 
kingofwale said:
guys.. I'm getting no more than 6 hours on this thing.

what annoys me is that I am barely doing anything,

*2 Firefox tabs (one for facebook, another for MacRumors)

*Brightness (all the way down to second last lowest)

*keyboard light (all the way down to second last lowet)

*I am downloading something in the background



Another issue, my battery cycle is at 21 when I got it (Brand new from Bestbuy). I ran coconut battery app, it tells me my battery health is at 98%

Can't say I'm not at last a little disappointed with this. Considering it's "all day battery life".
Click to expand...

If you're attempting to maximize battery, here's my suggestions to keep it running well (and well maintained):

- use Safari, which is highly optimized to sip as little CPU resources within OS X as possible
- install Adblock Plus extension in Safari to limit loading of needless ads (especially animation & video based ads)
- install ClickToFlash extension in Safari to prevent loading of resource-sucking Flash animations (and ideally loads HTML5 video instead)
- turn off Transparency in Settings --> Accessibility --> Displays (needless eye candy)
- turn off the Bluetooth radio if not needing it, in Settings --> Bluetooth
- have a decent WiFi connection when using, by option-clicking the Airport icon and confirming something stronger than -75 RSSI (e.g. -50 to -70)
- install iStat Menus to keep an eye on on which & when certain apps are eating many CPU resources (I run it on all my Macs -- highly recommended)
- run a maintenance app like Cocktail once a month to optimize your operating system
 
headcase said:
If you're attempting to maximize battery, here's my suggestions to keep it running well (and well maintained):

- use Safari, which is highly optimized to sip as little CPU resources within OS X as possible
- install Adblock Plus extension in Safari to limit loading of needless ads (especially animation & video based ads)
- install ClickToFlash extension in Safari to prevent loading of resource-sucking Flash animations (and ideally loads HTML5 video instead)
- turn off Transparency in Settings --> Accessibility --> Displays (needless eye candy)
- turn off the Bluetooth radio if not needing it, in Settings --> Bluetooth
- have a decent WiFi connection when using, by option-clicking the Airport icon and confirming something below -70 RSSI (e.g. -50 to -70)
- install iStat Menus to keep an eye on on which & when certain apps are eating many CPU resources (I run it on all my Macs -- highly recommended)
- run a maintenance app like Cocktail once a month to optimize your operating system
Click to expand...

thank you very much, will try a few of those things.

are there Firefox equivalent of those things I bolded? Like I stated before, I love firefox. lol
 
kingofwale said:
thank you very much, will try a few of those things.

are there Firefox equivalent of those things I bolded? Like I stated before, I love firefox. lol
Click to expand...

Adblock Plus is available on most browsers. To prevent loading of Flash, do a search on their Add-ons page, as there is a few plugins that accomplish that.
 
Yes, ditch Flash if you can. Enable Safari's developer mode and switch to the iPad agent which will cause websites to switch to HTML5 to run video. If you absolutely need Flash, use a click-to-enable plugin.
 
I am a solid theory why the battery life estimate is bad.

it's the "Turbo Boost". anything remotely gets touched (Such as loading a new page on Macrumor forum). I see under Activity Monitor that the Energy Impact shooots up from 10 to over 100.

now it does go back down fairly quickly, but during that time, the estimate goes way out of wack.


Can someone who is more knowledgeable shed some light on my theory?
 
kingofwale said:
I am a solid theory why the battery life estimate is bad.

it's the "Turbo Boost". anything remotely gets touched (Such as loading a new page on Macrumor forum). I see under Activity Monitor that the Energy Impact shooots up from 10 to over 100.

now it does go back down fairly quickly, but during that time, the estimate goes way out of wack.


Can someone who is more knowledgeable shed some light on my theory?
Click to expand...
TurboBoost is normal and automatic. It's just the way that the CPU "accelerates" to handle the task at hand. Like a car going up a hill, or passing on the highway...sometimes it needs more gas. The issue is which programs are causing it to need more,power. As others have said, Safari is optimized to use less gas, where chrome and other browsers (Firefox) may cause the CPU to run faster and drain battery resources more. The Verge had an article showing that running Chrome instead of Safari caused the battery to drain 3.5hours faster....
 
CanadaRAM said:
Have you calibrated the battery yet?

Charge the battery all the way to 100%
Run it on battery alone all the way down to the 'I gotta Shut Down now" message
Charge the battery on AC with the machine OFF until it is 100%
Click to expand...
That is not the proper procedure for calibrating batteries that require it, and the built-in batteries in the newer Mac unibody notebooks come pre-calibrated and do not require regular calibration like the removable batteries in older Apple notebooks.
kingofwale said:
no.. literally just got it. will do that tonight
Click to expand...
No, don't.
 
kingofwale said:
guys.. I'm getting no more than 6 hours on this thing.

Can't say I'm not at last a little disappointed with this. Considering it's "all day battery life".
Click to expand...

Every Apple product has always been like this (in my experience). They advertise one thing, deliver another. When I had a MBPr, they said 9 hours, I'd get 8, the Macbook Air (2014) they said 9, I'd get about 6-7... The new Macbook is supposed to get 9, I get 6 or so like you.

When Apple releases their numbers, they turn off the screen saver and load the most basic of web pages while on 1 tick of brightness. Of course you'll last all day. But for me, I want 2/3 brightness, and I want to use the browser of choice, and load 10 tabs if I want.

My car says it'll get 38 miles per gallon, but really I get like 30 mpg... because I don't drive it in a wind tunnel with a mechanical accelerator that maintains exactly 55 mph and leave the AC off. LOL

And no, the Ronco food dehydrator doesn't work as well as they show on the infomercial.
 
shenan1982 said:
Every Apple product has always been like this (in my experience). They advertise one thing, deliver another. When I had a MBPr, they said 9 hours, I'd get 8, the Macbook Air (2014) they said 9, I'd get about 6-7... The new Macbook is supposed to get 9, I get 6 or so like you.

When Apple releases their numbers, they turn off the screen saver and load the most basic of web pages while on 1 tick of brightness. Of course you'll last all day. But for me, I want 2/3 brightness, and I want to use the browser of choice, and load 10 tabs if I want.

My car says it'll get 38 miles per gallon, but really I get like 30 mpg... because I don't drive it in a wind tunnel with a mechanical accelerator that maintains exactly 55 mph and leave the AC off. LOL

And no, the Ronco food dehydrator doesn't work as well as they show on the infomercial.
Click to expand...

In small print, Apple notes that preproduction versions of standard models were used and details the testing methodology accordingly:

"The wireless web test measures battery life by wirelessly browsing 25 popular websites with display brightness set to 12 clicks from bottom or 75%. The HD movie playback test measures battery life by playing back HD 720p content with display brightness set to 12 clicks from bottom or 75%."

Looks like they use a higher brightness than you use for their testing. It's also very easy to get better mileage than on the sticker for lots of cars.

No sure were you get you claim of 1 click of brightness used in Apple testing.
 
looks like dropbox, uploading/downloading drains battery.

now I'm using VLC/tabs but no downloads. now it's 83% and 8 hours left
 
cfedu said:
In small print, Apple notes that preproduction versions of standard models were used and details the testing methodology accordingly:

"The wireless web test measures battery life by wirelessly browsing 25 popular websites with display brightness set to 12 clicks from bottom or 75%. The HD movie playback test measures battery life by playing back HD 720p content with display brightness set to 12 clicks from bottom or 75%."

Looks like they use a higher brightness than you use for their testing. It's also very easy to get better mileage than on the sticker for lots of cars.

No sure were you get you claim of 1 click of brightness used in Apple testing.
Click to expand...

Drink the kool-aid dude.
 
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