2016 macbook pro 15" with touch bar poor battery life

Well sorry I get irritated after four days of struggling. You said: 'best not to guess what is happening'. I don't want to guess what is happening, I want to know what is happening. Knowing is being able to solve it. I thought this forum was all about that. The question is simple: what can cause this WindowServer to go crazy? And @ leo015: I think I'm close to a solution, that's why I'm still on it. Besides: if it is some software that is conflicting, I'll probably have the same problem on an other machine.

If you pay close attention to your mAh, it actually changes. It can go up and go down. You are still above the design complicity so there is no problem there.

Also, at 100% your battery is not actually fully charged. If you go to the apple sign and click about this mac then click the system report… go to power.

Usually right when it hits 100% the mAh is not fully charged...

So you might need to leave it on the charger a little longer to get the full 100%

I have tested and retested and found that the battery drains approx 10% per hour under light uses (itunes playback with visualizer, movies and web browsing). and have gotten between 8.5 and 9.5 hours consistantly (9.5 when I let the music play but the screen is allowed to sleep) on my 15 mbp with 460 gpu.
BUT
the time remaining indicator is all over the place saying as little as 3hrs remaining when the battery is full.
conclusion... the system is miscalculating the time remaining...
The batteries ARE CAPABLE of giving the runtimes promised.
This means there are THREE likely causes to the issues most people have been having:
1) defects in batteries due to suppliers quality control? (possible but no reports of fires to my knowledge).
2) mac os drivers issues (software update should fix).

3) 3rd party software/driver conflicts (again THOSE vendors should offer a software fix).

aside from that; THANK YOU to the community here for all the help... I had a B1T@# of a time getting my old CS6 software installed and it took help from these forums and adobes to get through that mess.. lol but at least I don't have to shell out more cash for new software. 🙂

How can we know without you supplying information, this thread is long on questions and short on explanations. Show me an Etrecheck report and I will try to figure your problem out, but as you know I already disapprove of guesswork you should be able to guess that I wont guess.

Schmrtzzz wrote:

Well sorry I get irritated after four days of struggling. You said: 'best not to guess what is happening'. I don't want to guess what is happening, I want to know what is happening. Knowing is being able to solve it. I thought this forum was all about that. The question is simple: what can cause this WindowServer to go crazy? And @ leo015: I think I'm close to a solution, that's why I'm still on it. Besides: if it is some software that is conflicting, I'll probably have the same problem on an other machine.

Once more I will ask you, did you make up words and then pretend that I said them, yes or no?

Well, actually, i'm not above design capacity now..

I've noticed it's going up and down, but before today i had <103.3% and now its 99.8%

I had the issue with my first MBP 15 inch touch bar, got a new MBP, still had the issue then erased disk, reinstalled Sierra and seemed to have resolved the issue for at least a week. Getting a good solid 9 hours of usage (light, safari, mail etc). Now slowly the issue seems to be creeping back. I can't quite work out whats eating into the battery but I'm now on 26% and it is 16.26 when it was showing 100% charge at 12.00. I was running dropbox the whole time, however, I have about 5 mins before starting to write this post quit dropbox and now the battery estimate is slowly increasing. Showing 1:43 with 26% battery remaining. Seems dropbox does use quite a lot of energy for sure. It all feels too fragile for an Apple product.

However, the problem is that apple are slow to find a fix for this, really hope they manage it. Because I was able to use my 2015 MBP 13inch and get much better battery life. My gripes are as follows:

Certain applications use the discreet graphics card and they rinse the battery rapidly. The battery life is halved. Whilst I understand that Photoshop should use the Radeon graphics card, why must it be activated even when the application is sitting idle, minimised in task bar. Surely it makes more sense that the discreet graphics card is only activated when actually processing something heavy.

In addition, certain websites kick in the discreet graphics card when searching the news or anything with a lot of images. Whilst I recognise that this might be a fault of some of these websites being too graphics heavy. As someone who is not very well versed in these things it makes more sense to me that apple can configure the firmware to ensure that the discreet graphics card is not activated as easily as it does.

For example: Google maps (when using safari) always triggers the discreet graphics card and it will remain on until I close that tab in the browser. Surely that doesn't make sense. I'd use apple maps but unfortunately Google maps is just much better and has mapped areas which apple maps has not reached yet.

I just wonder whether these issues might be possible to fix or must we acknowledge that the discreet graphics card will stay on a lot of the time whenever tapped into an application/ website which "might" need its usage.

Update: So while yesterday my battery life was amazing and I though it had finally stabilised and fixed, today it's not even close. Maybe this is because I did not charge it properly compared to the night before where I left it charging overnight, yesterday i just charged it for like 1:30-2 hours. These are my results today. No idea why it turned to **** again

14:06, 98%, 5:39 remaining, safari

14:40, 91%, 6:47 remaining, sleep

15:43, 88%, 8:30 remaining, (estimate made by laptop not running anything)

16:48, 72%, 4:03 remaining, safari

The point is that right now with the clean install and only the system on it, the problem is gone. I have to put the rest back bit by bit, and then check everytime if the problem returns. Only after it returns it's useful to run Etrecheck, I suppose. Have to find the time to do all that.

I'm *think* my battery is actually delivering 10 hours of life, just that my estimation calculation looks way off at times.

I'm in the process of installing macOS 10.12.2 and hoping that this will improve matters. Nothing I can see in the official release notes, though.

I'll post here once I've had some time on battery on 10.12.2

You own a watch or anything else that can tell time, if you do don't *think* it, measure it.

Schmrtzzz wrote:

The point is that right now with the clean install and only the system on it, the problem is gone. I have to put the rest back bit by bit, and then check everytime if the problem returns. Only after it returns it's useful to run Etrecheck, I suppose. Have to find the time to do all that.

Do whatever you want to do, try to find the time to answer questions that are asked of you in future.

I just applied today's update, here's the before/after scenario:

Before

10.12.1 (16B2659)

Battery charge: 100%

Battery time left: 3:49

Apps using significant energy: Safari

After

10.12.2 (16C67)

Battery charge: 100%

Apps using significant energy: No apps using significant energy

Battery time left: Indicator is gone, but the battery dropped 5 percentage points in 20 minutes, which isn't amazing but better than before.

I'll keep testing on battery power and let you know. It's just weird that it seems the estimated time left is now gone. Kind of like sweeping dirt under the carpet.

I say "think" because that's exactly what I mean. Measuring the amount of time my battery takes to discharge would still not rule out a problem just because I got 10 hours. Much depends on what my machine is actually doing. So I repeat - I *think* that my machine is delivering 10 hours of life, given my current workload, but maybe it's only doing that because my workload is fairly light. Or maybe because half the OS is dead and not doing what is should be because of an even deeper bug, thus consuming less energy. Who knows?

bigdave1357 wrote:

I say "think" because that's exactly what I mean. Measuring the amount of time my battery takes to discharge would still not rule out a problem just because I got 10 hours. Much depends on what my machine is actually doing. So I repeat - I *think* that my machine is delivering 10 hours of life, given my current workload, but maybe it's only doing that because my workload is fairly light. Or maybe because half the OS is dead and not doing what is should be because of an even deeper bug, thus consuming less energy. Who knows?

So, you would rather guess at battery life rather than know what it is. You are of course welcome to deal with this anyway you like.