However, many of the posts relate to actual battery life experienced.
#BATTERY LIFE NEW MACBOOK PRO 2016 SOFTWARE#
It seems, then, that the company needs to do some software work to smooth out estimates to more of an average. It’s important to remember it’s an estimate based on what your computer is doing at the specific time it updates. You may see the time remaining drop significantly, for instance, if it updates while opening a very large file or starting up an application.
The battery status menu updates frequently and changes depending on your screen brightness and system workload. My understanding is that the CPU used in the latest models performs rapid switching between low power and high performance modes as required, and this can lead to wildly-varying battery life estimates. However, my actual usage in a test running it down to 3% was a little over six hours, so there is clearly a big discrepancy between estimated and actual life. However, even with Photoshop closed – and both the battery monitor and Activity Monitor confirming that nothing was using the Radeon Pro 460 GPU – the estimate did not improve. I ran the machine like this for 20 minutes to see if it changed, but no: My own test, for example, showed an estimated life of 3h 49m with the battery fully-charged – but this is with Photoshop using the discrete GPU, which uses far more power. It appears that, even with the battery charged to 100%, some machines are calculating an estimated battery life of as little as three hours.
The position is complicated by GPU use and the difference between estimates and actual life …Ī proportion of the complaints are based not on actual battery-life, but rather on the estimated remaining life shown when you click the battery icon in the menu bar. But not even close to the 10 hours promised. If I do nothing but very light web browsing in Safari and brightness around 50% I can get it to about 6 hours. I’ve got my 15″ MBP a few days ago and I’m pretty disappointed by its battery life. While manufacturer claims are often based on unrealistic scenarios, a number of owners on both Apple’s support communities and Reddit are reporting numbers in the 3-6 hours range. There are growing complaints about the new MacBook Pro models delivering battery life well below Apple’s claimed ten hours.