Macbook Pro Retina Battery Life

It's been a known issue for awhile that Mountain Lion has pretty terrible battery life. It's not your MacBook's fault, but the software itself.

I have no idea when Apple will push an update to fix the battery life issues but my suggestions would be the following:

- Keep location services off unless needed

- Keep brightness @ about 50%

- Keep bluetooth off unless needed

That should help a little bit for now. Cheers!

Its just terrible. New MacBook Pro 15" and same crappy battery life as with my iphone 4s... Cannot say how annoying this battery problem is with Apple. Dropping 4k on a MacBook that last not longer then 2-3h with medium usage is a nightmare. In this day and age there should be 10h+ to be demanded by customers. The worst of all they don't care.

PS: You suggestions didnt really work for me. Xing fingers someday we will have a better bettery life.

Best,
Dave

Hey guys, I may have a solution to all the problems you guys are facing with your battery lives, consulted AppleCare, and apparently the battery life has little to do with the PRAM and SMC, you can reset it all you want, some of you may see some results because of it but honestly, it has nothing to do with it. Here's what they told me to do, and it improved my battery life (or actually this was the supposed battery life) from 3 hours at 100%, to 7:02 at 100%, and I've been getting that every single time I fully charge my Mac. Sometimes, I've reached 9 hours and that's very satisfying, trust me.

Ok, the first thing you'll wanna do is turn off the "adjust screen brightness automatically" option, because apparently, this option comes as a default setting with Mountain Lion. Here's how you do it, (completely dummy-proof)

Go click the Apple logo on the top left hand corner of your screen (for those who already know how, go to system preferences and deselect the "automatically adjust brightness" option), click on "system preferences" and click on Displays, which will bring you directly to this screen below.

After deselecting it, you'll wanna check if your brightness is at it's maximum because for my case, it was at maximum and bringing it down would add around 2 hours to your battery life. Click F1 to reduce your screen brightness to around half, from here you should be able to get around 5 hours.

After that you'll wanna check your keyboard brightness because apparently the auto brightness would consume a lot of power. Go to system preferences, then select keyboard, and deselect adjust keyboard brightness in low light.

Great, now you're almost good to see your battery life revive. But first press the F5 button to make sure your backlit keyboard is not blasting light, around half will pretty much suffice. And there, 9 hours of battery life (for me) and you should probably see 7 hours or more.

If these didn't work for you, I'll be happy to ask AppleCare for you, but it'll probably be better if you brought your mac to a genius bar, or contact your own local AppleCare, because if these didn't work then you might be either running too many applications, or your battery is fried, 🙂 Cheers!

And guys, just to add, you WILL not see immediate results, like you should not be expecting the battery life to change immediately after you deselect these options, because the computer still needs time to calculate how much time you have left, which might take from 30 seconds to around 5 minutes, not sure, just guessing. Anyway, here's what I got after I did what I did.

It fluctuates a lot, apparently, but the battery life will last more than 7 hours for sure, it seems the indication doesn't really matter. Good luck.

yeah you could have a bad battery, but then again no apple product lasts close to as long as Apple claims. I onlly get 1 hour on my MBP

In January I bought a late 2012 MacBook Pro 13" Retina with i7 and 256GB. Magazine reviews warned me that the Retina version was prone to consuming the battery faster, so the little tricks such as what Bowie Salvatore mentioned earlier are a good start to energy saving.

Another Mac guru also suggested a Desktop background that isn't so stark and full of contrast. In other words, the darker the screen, the better. With the Retina display, this makes sense to me. But I'm sure it's a debatable point because others may say it's more the brightness that affects battery depletion.

For about 1 hour now my keyboard lighting has been off, display brightness at appr. 25 percent, Blue Tooth and WiFi off. I used the laptop earlier today for about 10 minutes, and a few days ago for about 30 minutes. It is clear that the more things "On" the faster the battery drains.

Current battery is at 78 percent and shows 8:50 remaining. The percentage sounds about right after about 1:40, but the time remaining appears wishful thinking. They do not really correlate. Till now my MacBook has only recorded a total of 5 full charges.

This may be a deceiving practice, but when using it with full [display] lighting and simultaneously running power-hungry apps like Photoshop and iMovie while also online, and, maybe having Word open too, I have kept the computer plugged into the wall socket. I know the battery needs to be regularly run down and charged to keep it's capacity optimized. But I'm hoping that by keeping it plugged in from time to time for intense use will go easier on the battery's life.