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Your MBP Battery life

GaryNoine

GaryNoine

macrumors member
Original poster
Jul 28, 2015
82
37
Atlanta
Just wondering, suppose your MBP had a 100% charge and you used it continuously, doing casual tasks (basic web surfing, editing documents, etc. nothing too heavy), about how long would it last?

Wondering because I've noticed if I use mine in such a manner (ie. continuously without taking break), I can get maybe two hours before I'm down to 10%.
 
It really depends on the applications you're using and screen brightness.

My 2015 13" rMBP gets between 10-12 hours on a charge of I'm just browsing the Internet with Safari.
 
GaryNoine said:
Just wondering, suppose your MBP had a 100% charge and you used it continuously, doing casual tasks (basic web surfing, editing documents, etc. nothing too heavy), about how long would it last?

Wondering because I've noticed if I use mine in such a manner (ie. continuously without taking break), I can get maybe two hours before I'm down to 10%.
Click to expand...

What you are doing is pretty irrelevant, you need to look in Activity Monitor for what the MBP is doing, that will be everything you are doing but possibly some other stuff too...2hrs is pretty short, I get 2-3x that and my batt is down to 88% of its original capacity.
 
Agree with @simonsi that Activity Monitor gives you a much better understanding of energy consumption as web browsing can really vary based on content.

However in that scenario I usually won't get less than 5-6 hours on my MacBook Pro (in signature) - average brightness, WiFi on (obviously), Bluetooth off. And as @T5BRICK has mentioned, if you just browse with Safari (which is much more optimised than Chrome at the moment) I get around 10 hours at least easily.
 
GaryNoine said:
Just wondering, suppose your MBP had a 100% charge and you used it continuously, doing casual tasks (basic web surfing, editing documents, etc. nothing too heavy), about how long would it last?

Wondering because I've noticed if I use mine in such a manner (ie. continuously without taking break), I can get maybe two hours before I'm down to 10%.
Click to expand...

Mine regularly gets 10+ hours

2015 13" pro.

I've seen estimates of 13-14 hours out of it before, but that's not doing much.

It will very much depend on the applications you run.
 
I have the 15" 2015 i7 high end MBP. I've been able to get about 5.5 hrs using Safari, Tweetbot and a few other apps that aren't processor intensive. Brightness at halfway.

I've also gotten about the same usage on my new 2012 13" MBP, brightness a few notches past halfway same exact apps.
 
Just now it went from 100-46 in 20 min and I was just surfing the web(firefox) and watched half of a YT video. Normally I'll get between 1.5 to 2 hours.
 
HeyKatie said:
Just now it went from 100-46 in 20 min and I was just surfing the web(firefox) and watched half of a YT video. Normally I'll get between 1.5 to 2 hours.
Click to expand...

You always get less battery life with Firefox or Chome compared to Safari, depending on your model as well of course.
 
I have a late-2102 rMBP (with Ivy Bridge CPU) and Apple gives a battery life of around 7 hours with standard/casual usage; though they never recommend the level of screen brightness. Well, I can really get that 7 hrs. with standard usage, keeping my brightness at around 33%, auto-brightness disabled and using only Safari...
 
HeyKatie said:
Just now it went from 100-46 in 20 min and I was just surfing the web(firefox) and watched half of a YT video. Normally I'll get between 1.5 to 2 hours.
Click to expand...

Don't use firefox. Use safari, your battery life will be way better.

That said, a 2011 model's battery could be pretty dead by now, you might want to check the battery condition
 
GaryNoine said:
Just wondering, suppose your MBP had a 100% charge and you used it continuously, doing casual tasks (basic web surfing, editing documents, etc. nothing too heavy), about how long would it last?

Wondering because I've noticed if I use mine in such a manner (ie. continuously without taking break), I can get maybe two hours before I'm down to 10%.
Click to expand...
I'm guessing you're a Chrome user?
 
throAU said:
Don't use firefox. Use safari, your battery life will be way better.

That said, a 2011 model's battery could be pretty dead by now, you might want to check the battery condition
Click to expand...

My safari is pretty much unusable :( I started a thread explaining what's going on. I also replaced the battery in June.
 
GaryNoine said:
Actually no, only Safari. I guess having a Word document or two open might cause some drainage, but shouldn't be as much as I'm experiencing.
Click to expand...

That's strange. I would definitely check out the Activity Monitor to see what's draining the battery. I normally have Safari open, iTunes playing in the background with Excel and Word open and I'm still at 5-6 hours battery life at least - medium brightness, WiFi on, bluetooth off.

Do you maybe have too many plugins in Safari that can be a problem? Or Mail.app open with fetching a few email accounts constantly?

There are a few battery life apps on the App Store to see what is the condition of your battery, you might want to check them out too.
 
I use a 2014 15" rMBP with iGPU and I normally get 8-8.5 hours with Safari and iTunes, WiFi on, Bluetooth off,40-75% brightness. While using Chrome I get around 5-6 hours, and also while using VLC for playing videos I easily get 5-6 hours. The background processes running all time include Battery Monitor, Boom 2 , CDock, iStat Menus, MacsFan Control, Spectacle, Alfred, Better Touch Tool and a couple more I can't remember (as currently I'm using my office pc)
 
GaryNoine said:
Actually no, only Safari. I guess having a Word document or two open might cause some drainage, but shouldn't be as much as I'm experiencing.
Click to expand...
Something's taking up CPU time, that kind of usage should net you at least 5 hours of battery, unless all you do in safari is flash based.
 
2013 15" I think 3-6h are realistic. If you stream videos it is 2h like twitch.
6h is the most i get with normal use. More I think you got to have a really slow surfing/reading speed. I have no idea how some people get more than 6h while actually doing stuff.
The 13" is more efficient. Skylake 15" might gain a lot of real world battery life as Intel plans to bring the quad core socs down to the single chip dual core power consumption.
 
Today, I got well over eight hours on my 2012 13" non retina MBP. This was the second run using the battery since buying the computer last week. I used Safari, Firefox and iTunes to play music. Brightness between full and halfway.
 
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