I took my Macbook Retina out of the box and immediately charged it to 100% and it has only given me 2:32 minutes on battery life. Should I wait to do a full cycle of a battery charge on it, or is something wrong? Isn't it supposed to last 7 hours?
MacBook Pro, Mac OS X (10.7.4), 15" Retina Display Macbook Pro
Let the battery completely discharge and then fully charge it and leave it charging another hour or so after it says it's fully charged. Repeat this process perhaps once a month if you notice the battery not charging properly. This process helps the battery calibrate.
Yes the advertised is seven hours. Apple gives this figure measuring the battery with 50% screen brightness while surfing between 25 popular web sites. I have had my retina display MacBook Pro since Tuesday and I am not getting quite seven hours, but I am doing more than just web surfing.
The two hours and thirty two minutes you got would be normal for certain sustained intensive iMovie tasks; or, say you were streaming a Netflix movie via Wi-Fi, brightness cranked up, all battery saving measures off you'd also only see around two and a half hours. But outside of these extremes you should be doing much better than 2:32.
I am sitting here writing this on my retina display Mac, and brightness is just under 50%, there is 54% showing on the battery remaining, and the drop down is showing 4:40 as I am not taxing the computer at all just writing and posting for the moment.
Should I let the battery die so far that it shuts my computer off?
Yes.
I'm running the highest resolution as well, can that effect the battery life substantially?
That's exactly the conclusion reached by the folks at IFixIt.com when they gutted one of the Retinas to see what's inside. Seems most of the interior is taken by the huge batteries in an attempt to reach 7 hours runtime. Want a bit of computer p-o-r-n (i.e., lots of naked chips)? Enjoy: http://www.ifixit.com/Device/MacBook_Pro_with_Retina_Display
The guy at the Apple store told me that these batteries don't have memory like the old ones, so there's no need to run it down then fully recharge it.
Call support and ask them to trouble shoot it, and if you still don't get better battery life, have Apple replace your MBP.
Heh, here we go...
Hardly a day has passed and from the traffic in the forum, it would appear that the pile of dead unrepairable Retinas keeps on growing steadily and surely at the shops.
Running the screen as if it's a virtual 1920x1080 screen shouldn't be the problem. I was reading another thread like this thread and one of the posts reminded us that when you first start using the new computer, Spotlight will be very busy indexing everything as those libraries must be built dynamically. If you noticed the system was very busy for quite a while, it may have been Spotlight and that would certainly use up battery until the libraries are built. After the initial build, it's not a strain to keep them updated of course. If you run Activity Monitor and sort the display of the process by CPU usage, you'll see a process mds among others; I believe that's related to Spotlight.
these batteries don't have memory like the old ones
They do not suffer from the "Memory Effect" of Nickel Cadmium batteries. You need to let it run down ONCE so that it can calibrate where the endpoints of battery capacity are.
After that, the recommendation is to USE the battery once a month. You need not run it way down.
I have been having the same issue with mine. The battery is lasting about 2.5 hours. Also the metal part above the key board before the display gets extremly hot. Not warm...but HOT and untuchable. I just spoke with applecare and they said that this is a defect...a defective battery and want to replace the entire machine.
My battery is only lasting 3 hours. I am going to try and run the battery down and let it charge back up. I will let you guys know what happens.
I have had my macbook retina since day one, i only seem to be getting about 2.5 hours of battery life. I have let it drain and recharge a few times now. Display brightness is about 3/4 but that is a significant battery life loss. Hope there is some sort of fix for it
I am just running safari this is the only thing that is using the CPU. My macbook pro retina is still getting bad battery life. I tried draining it and several other things. I tried running the display at 20% brightness that didn't help much either. Any other ideas before I talk to mac technical support? OR is anyone else having this problem?
Macbook Pro Retina battery problem?
