Low Battery Life on 2020 13" Macbook Pro

chhayrithy wrote:

I bought a 13" 2020 MacBook Pro (i5 10th generation 512GB/16GB ram) back in June of this year and have noticed that a full battery only lasts about 3-5 hours. This is simply from normal/casual web browsing on Chrome. I know Safari is easier on the battery (from what I read), but I'm very surprised that simply using Chrome would make that much of a difference. I waited a few months before reporting/submitting a ticket to see if after time it would improve, but it hasn't. Any thoughts? I have screen brightness to 50% (not preferred, trying to save as much battery as possible) and again, not using doing anything heavy like video editing or anything. Wondering if I may have a defective laptop and/or battery? Thank you for any help and insight!

Apples projected battery times are highly idealistic and only under the most optimized conditions, No key board back light, screen dimmed low, Integrated GPU, etc

— your real world time seems more normal.

My battery runtime is low

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204054#runtime

You can get a good look at your Battery from System Information

>(Option key) System Information>Hardware>Power>Battery

ex. 16" MBP late 2019

MacBook Pro (13-inch, 2020, Four Thunderbolt 3 ports) - Technical Specifications

https://support.apple.com/kb/SP819?locale=en_US

About battery health management in Mac notebooks— 10.15.5

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT211094

I just upgraded form an early 2015 13" MBP to a 2020 13" 2020 MacBook Pro (i5 10th generation 512GB/16GB ram), and am getting 2-3 hours of battery life. The performance is actually worse than my 2015 model. Apple support told me that Chrome is the cause. I'm skeptical, since the Energy>12-hr Power score is 30.36, not a lot more than Mail at 21.69 and Spotlight at 3.62.

Are your running anti-virus software or any so-called "cleaning" apps? They don't help battery runtime.

Chrome has always been tough on battery runtime on both Mac and Windows notebook computers. If you run Activity Monitor (in your Utilities folder) and set the View to "All Processes" after Chrome has been running a while, you will see a lot of Chrome-related processes, mostly its minions called "helpers." Add them up--you get a large amount of your energy and CPU cycles going there.

Video is also hard on runtime. If you are doing online video meetings, you are working both the CPU and GPU very hard. Expect to wee the battery run down faster.

Another thing I've seen over the past few years: Some web pages, left open in the background, can use huge amounts of resources and shorten runtime dramatically. I can produce that on demand by leaving the Amazon home page open in the background in Safari. Activity Monitor will help you identify web pages you do not want to leave open.

Not sure if you have read this article, please see if it helps.

About Mac notebook batteries - Apple Support

and

About battery health management in Mac notebooks - Apple Support

You can try a SMC reset.

How to reset the SMC of your Mac - Apple Support