Macbook Pro retina battery drained in less than 3 hours

Flash (which is what Youtube requires) does use a lot of battery and drains is rather quickly.

You could go to 'Applications > Utilities > Activity Monitor' and see which processes are using the most RAM and CPU power, as these are most likely the reason your battery is draining so quickly.

I also recommend keeping the brightness quite low and turning the keyboard backlighting completely off, to help save battery power.

If worst comes to worst, pop into an Apple Store and ask the Genius' the same question.

Hope this helps.

Plug it in when ever possible.

The battery drain is most likely due to the YouTube videos you were watching. It's using a lot of power for the CPU/GPU so it's normal to drain quickly. Check your drain when you're not running apps that stress the CPU or GPU. If it's still a fast drain, then you may have a hardware issue.

My battery drains fast when I'm doing full backup clones to an external USB drive and Disk Utility restores to USB thumb drives. I did 4 full clones and 2 DU restores and my battery went from 95% to ~42% in 2 hours.

The battery is good for about four hours (if that) on my 2.6GHz. I am hoping for an Apple uopdate to fix a few things sometime soon.

Great observation regarding Google Chrome Canary. I use Safari. I've also read where Canary beta has some issues so hopefully Google will iron those out soon.

I use Safari and am lightly web browsing and having terrible performance. 3 hours max, brightness at 1/3 and keyboard brightness off, BT off, no other programs open, Activity monitor is clean. It is driving me nuts!

I FINALLY FIGURED OUT THE ISSUE! Its a simple terminal command. There is a corrupt file that Migration Assistant created and this will fix the issue:

Hi,

Now with the same situation you described before, how long it gives you max?

EDIT: Never mind, I just saw what you said some where else"I am now getting 8+ hours of battery on my MBP Retina." That's perfect.

Thanks

Message was edited by: Maziyar

You should be getting at least 7+ hours of battery time on your MBP-R if you follow some of the suggestions that have been posted here (perhaps I'll just put them in a text file as I get tired of writing the same things over and over again!).

1. Only use web browsing/email while on battery: keep your viewing of YouTube or other videos to a minimum.
2. Do not run CPU intensive applications while using battery power: always keep Activity Monitor running so that you can see any runaway processes. Anything using over 13% of the CPU should be quite or the process killed.
3. Reduce screen brightness to about 4-5 bars and backlit keyboard either off or at one bar (I'm outside in the dark mostly when I'm on battery power and one bar is just fine).
4. Run, at most, 4-5 applications. I generally have Outlook (email client), Firefox, TextEdit, Word, Acrobat, and a few small apps running but I always have Activity Monitor running as well.
5. Use an app such as gfxCardStatus (ready for Mountain Lion in it's latest release) to make sure that discrete graphic switching is on - on battery, you want to use the Intel 4000 GPU.

There are likely some more tips I could write, but if you follow these simple tips, you should be able to get 7+ hours from battery use.

Good luck,

Clinton

All good tips. Sadly, it sort of defeats the point of having such powerful hardware when the battery runs down so quickly under load. That said, mine (base model with the RAM upgrade) is hopefully being assembled in China as I type.

I think the way to understand the battery life is to see the new rMBP as a Mac Pro replacement that you can use for basic to moderately-taxing computing tasks when away from your home or office. I don't think anyone has ever expected to get a full day of production level work (such as high end CAD, 3D animation, video editing, or serious professional photography) from a notebook.

Of course, I feel for the original poster, it's definitely upsetting to see just how poorly Adobe coded flash (or just how lame it is that there aren't better hardware based accelerators to manage battery life while playing flash videos).

Chernin wrote:

I don't think anyone has ever expected to get a full day of production level work (such as high end CAD, 3D animation, video editing, or serious professional photography) from a notebook.

I actually think that you can accomplish at least 99% of what you mention on a MacBook Pro (latest models) with a good external display. It will not, nor is it meant to, replace a Mac Pro, but it will certainly do more production work that an iMac. At least for professional photography work. MBP's have great graphics, fast CPU's and can handle a fairly good bit of RAM - nothing like a Mac Pro but most people buy them for the protability factor. 17" MBPs are very popular with video editors, photographers, etc. and at an affordable price point compared with Mac Pros.

Just my 2¢...

Clinton

Sorry, what I meant was I don't think professionals expect to be able to go an entire day (or close to it) doing production work on a single battery charge regardless of the marketing claims.