2016 macbook pro 15" with touch bar poor battery life

I agree there are just too many variables and too much noise, now, to make much sense of what is happening. The only thing I think we can say for sure is that there is a very real problem with battery life across all late 2016 MacBook Pro models, regardless of build. It looks like there might be several issues, presumably related. It's not affecting everyone, but given the amount of traffic here and elsewhere, it seems fairly widespread.

I think a lot of people, myself included, will be waiting for the official 10.12.2 release. Even though others have shown that the various pre-release versions do not fix this problem, people will be hoping to see a resolution in the next official release of macOS. That release might well happen this month, but who knows?

If 10.12.2 doesn't fix things, I think there might be an avalanche of machines being returned.

Wonder how how this will play out in the press? Battery problems are making headlines: the iPhone 6s problems, Samsung's nightmares.

Just to add, I have a similar problem - and on a 13" machine (with touch bar), not the 15", so as others have pointed out, the GPU can't be the whole story. I did a clean install, reinstalling all my apps; and I know that none of them are obviously the problem, as they're exactly the same as on my three-year-old previous MacBook Pro and I'm currently getting less battery life than on that old machine.

Have you done the SMC Reset that brought some relief to a few readers here?

Adding information here. Just one more anecdote with no science behind it.

I have a 15" model which shows the reduced battery life (3 to 4 hours depending on what I'm doing). I have Energy Saver set to automatically switch graphics modes. I used the "About This Mac" dialog to monitor which graphics card was in use.

After boot and login I did web and email stuff. Check mode and get "Intel" – the low-power one.

Start up "Photos" but don't do anything. Check mode and get "Radeon" – the high-power one.

Quit "Photos" and wait a few seconds. Still "Radeon".

Do some email and web stuff for a minute. Still "Radeon".

Do some email and web stuff for five more minutes. Now it has switched back to "Intel".

So my computer does switch back to Intel. It just takes a few minutes.

By the way guys, how do i know if the SMC reset is successful? Cause i tried it and i still get an estimate of 4 hours remaining.

Tried after SMC reset, nothing changed. Just booked an appointment at local Apple store.

Same issue here with 4-5 hours at best, so I contacted Apple Support about it via Apple's chat service, and after they flooded me with questions about how many Safari tabs I have open and how much I use iCloud, they told me I should do the SMC reset and look to my MagSafe light indicators for cues. Jeeze. Very helpful when we don't have MagSafe connectors anymore, or lights in our connectors for that matter. This just signals that we bough a beta product and Apple employees have no clue about it until it comes out of this secret beta.

Anyways, the SMC reset did not help so we spent a good time going over the energy impact ranking of my apps in Activity Monitor, very insightful and deep conversation, with Safari and Photoshop taking the top spots with low numbers. So nothing really makes sense here. When I asked if there was a way to see how much energy the Touch Bar was consuming, they ended the chat session.

What really gets me is that my typical work use case involves a series of apps including Xcode, but since I'm in a design stage of a project, I haven't used Xcode in this new Mac. What do you think that would do to battery life? Is it a MacBook "Pro" when you get 4 hours of it? A heavier workload on older hardware yielded at least double the battery life, and that's just unacceptable. I'm left scratching my head over this since there's no updates almost a month after launch, Apple needs to step it up.

I use Xcode. The editing part doesn't use much power. It's only a big problem if the program you're developing does intensive graphics and you spend a lot of time debugging.

It's the CPU-intensive stuff like games, image-editing and video-editing that really eats power.

It's been suggested that using the discrete graphics chip might have something to do with this but others, without such a chip, have reported the same problems, and so that's all inconclusive.

If it helps, there is definitely something strange going on with the discrete graphics for those of us who do have them. According to my Activity Monitor, Energy tab, I'm currently running on the high performance graphics card, but none of the apps listed are requiring it. It's been like this for several hours. Should have switched back by now. Seems that for some reason macOS doesn't want to switch back to the integrated graphics. Either that or the Activity Monitor information is wrong.

As I said above, I don't think this is *the* cause of the battery issues, but if what I'm seeing is real, it won't be helping. I think we have several problems, some affecting different builds, some not.

Many people have reported this problem, so hopefully Apple will acknowledge it. I got my computer 2 days ago, and have been experiencing shorter than anticipated battery life. While only running safari and outlook, I am only getting 4-5 hours per charge. I did a test this morning with a colleague in a meeting as follows:

My colleague and I sat down this morning and both had 100% charge. He has an early 2015 13" MacBook Pro with Retina display with the same specs as mine (512gb hard drive, 8 Gb RAM). After 45 minutes, I was down to 87% running just outlook and safari. He was only down to 97% and was running 4 safari tabs, 3 different powerpoint presentations, outlook, prism (data analysis software) excel, and word. He was estimated to have 9 hours of battery left while I was down to 4.5 hours. I know they are different computers with different components but the battery in mine should not be so much worse than his is.

All of this is after I had called apple support and re-installed Sierra OS.

Please Apple, come up with a solution. Even if I trade in a get a new one, I am not confident that it will be any better with so many people reporting the same issues.

I was exactly the same as you on 2 different MBP's the new one had the same issue. Until I erased my disk using the disk utility, re-installed OS, manually installed all my apps and did not do a migration. Now I'm getting a good 9 hours of light use safari, mail etc.

But, when I use photoshop the discreet graphics card kicks in and I used about 50% of my battery in 2.5 hours last night. Crazy battery use ... That's the only issue, my previous MBP did not die anywhere near as fast with using Photoshop.

There will be a fix for your issues, don't waste time with getting new machines.

The problem I observed was that even though the OS reports that it has switched back to the Intel GPU - it hasn't really. It continues to use the dGPU silently while telling you it is using the iGPU -- the evidence for this, to me, is that the temperature and battery usage remains high until the computer is put to sleep and awoken again.

I tested again one more time earlier - while I am doing a 'battery race' with my work colleague. Sure enough, I opened Photoshop, and closed it (so my laptop "switched back to the iGPU", and reported the iGPU as being in use), but my battery continued to drain fast. After 15 minutes (and losing 3% of my battery -- and also losing my lead on the battery race vs his 2014 13" MBP) I put it to sleep for 10 seconds and woke it up. Here I am, 4 hours later, still on 22% after running all day.

Consequently, his battery is now a fair bit lower than mine, %-wise!

hmm....here's something new. http://appleinsider.com/articles/16/12/07/apple-email-response-suggests-that-gpu -issues-on-2016-retina-macbook-pro-fixed-in-new-sierra-version

maybe this will help the battery issue too?

I tried the same thing but using World of Warcraft as my dGPU program. It did not work. I guess i'm gonna try it with Photoshop to find out. I just watched a 40 minute episode and it went from 60% down to 49%!!

I think that it won't help 13" MBP owners since it has no dedicated GPU.