New Macbook Pro Retina - Fully Charged, only 3.5hours of web use?

You've got 14 days to exchange and/or return your Retina if it doesn't improve.

If you're watching videos on the net, like youtube, that also decreases your battery life.

In any event try the following and see if it increases your battery life.

Turn off automatic brightness.

Turn off bluetooth if you're not using it.

See what you have loading on your login items - delete the ones you don't need.

Open up activity monitor and see what's going on under all processes. highlight the one's using the most %CPU and hit quit process.

See if the above tips improves your battery life.

It should last for at least 7 hours on light useage as per apple's suggestion.

It could be anything.

Also, don't let your battery get fully discharged. That will do more harm than good to your Retina.

You can run maxed out, full brightness, every app open, when you're using your adapter. It's when you're on battery power that you want to decrease the brightness of both the screen and the keyboard and close anything except, perhaps, your browser, email app, a text editor, Activity Monitor (which I always run) and maybe a few other apps.

As Bimmer notes, you should use Activity Monitor, in your Utilities folder, to check for any runaway processes. If anything is gobbling up more than 10% of your CPU, quit the application or kill the process.

You should be able to get your full 7+ hours even with Retina display. Also use an app such as gfxCardStatus to make sure that you're running off of your Intel HD Graphics 4000 GPU.

If you still find that you're not getting at least 7 hours of battery life, do as Bimmer recommends and take it back to Apple - you have 14 days to exchange it or get a full refund.

Good luck,

Clinton

You're welcome.....

good luck man......

I still got another 2 weeks to wait for my Retina to get delivered to me...

clintonfrombirmingham wrote:

You should be able to get your full 7+ hours even with Retina display. Also use an app such as gfxCardStatus to make sure that you're running off of your Intel HD Graphics 4000 GPU.

You're good.....Totally forgot about the discrete video......

Docks run amuck seem to be a problem creeping up lately. I don't know that if you kill the process, it might happen again. Just keep Activity Monitor open and check on it periodically.

I'm following this thread - https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4055526?tstart=0 - at the moment. Another Dock run amuck post.

Good luck,

Clinton

Glad you got it all sorted out.

That's the reason I wanted you to check out your activity monitor since that's where you'll find the culprit.

I'm having the same problem. I run my Macbook Pro Retina rather lightly and without full screen brightness and never get more than 3.5 hours of battery life. Once it showed I'd get 7, but a few minutes later it moved to 3 hours.

Activity monitor doesn't show anything. I'm about to investigate the

gfxCardStatus suggestion, but if folks have any other ideas please let me know.

Should I call AppleCare?

Update: I tried the gfxCardStatus but don't understand what I'm looking at. I'd really appreciate anyone's help.

when you're on activity monitor are you looking at "all processes" or "my processes"?

In any event, if your battery is not lasting more than 3 hours, it's best to have a chat with apple or see them in person to see if there is something wrong with your Retina.

good luck

Activity monitor in "all processes, hierarchically." Nothing is above 5% -- heck, there's not much running at all! Weird.

Yes, for some reason the battery life on the MacBook pros are not so good they usually use 1% of battery for every 1.5 minutes. If you turn your brightness down and turn the keyboard brightness down, then the battery should have longer life.