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cab5g Author

Level 1

48 points

2016 macbook pro 15" with touch bar poor battery life

I just received my new 15" MacBook Pro with touch bar. The battery life is horrible!!! I have Safari open with 6 tabs and with 95% battery, I am told that I have under 3 hours of battery life left! I thought these things were supposed to get 10 hours? I ran the battery down in 3 hours last night only browsing the web. I wasn't watching videos, just browsing. Is there something wrong with my laptop?

MacBook Pro with Retina display, macOS Sierra (10.12.1), 15" with touch bar

Posted on Nov 20, 2016 10:07 AM

Top-ranking reply

TheMindReise

Level 1

9 points

Posted on Mar 5, 2017 11:31 AM

Hey everyone,

Received a new MacBook Pro with Touch Bar 15" as well, and like several of you, was shocked by the short battery life, even with the software updates. After some extensive trial and error, I have remedied my battery woes! Sharing out in case it helps any of you.

The largest change in my case was as some suggested, an SMC reset AND a NVRAM Reset. After doing both, my time remaining shot from 3-4 hours to 9-10 hours and even longer with further tweaks. I was shocked, but was able to verify the change based on using the Battery Guru app. The Milliamp output has been cut nearly in half to ~600 and the machine is significantly cooler during light usage. See below.

A little background:

As mentioned, my average was 3-4 hours with light usage. This was playing Spotify, writing emails, and surfing Safari only.
I have been using Fruitjuice and Battery Guru to monitor and verify usage time and energy output. Both put the machine at roughly 3-4 hours of battery time and on BG, I had an average ~1100 Milliamp output.
Assuming the higher output was the screen, kept brightness to 75% and reduced keyboard lighting to its lowest setting.
Confirmed Spotlight, Photos and iCloud had finished indexing before making a judgement.
Even after all of the above, still 3-4 hours.

But then: I noticed something was amiss when charging the device. The last time I did so, I found the machine running hot and I noticed the fan was going nuts. That lead to the SMC and NVRam reset. After doing so, voila! 9-10+ hours of battery life!

But not only that, I've been able to extend the battery even more so, doing some additional suggestions that the forums have suggested.:

Revisited my startup apps in Login Items and removed things like Skype for Business, Adobe Creative Cloud and several update checkers. Though several of these were negligible, some suggested S4B and Adobe may be eating up more resources and some have reported improvements.
Due to the recharge incident, I decided to disable Power Nap while on battery. I'm going to see if I run into the issue again while Power Nap is on charge, will report if it occurs again.
Download Turbo Boost Switcher to disable Turbo Boost. I found this adds around an hour of battery life back and the milliamp output can drop around 400 during light usage. Performance doesn't seem to be affected when doing light usage. I turn it back on when I'm working on more intensive applications or plugged in.
I keep my keyboard lighting low and brightness around 75%.

Anyway, that's been my experience, and I'm now very happy with the machine and thrilled that I don't feel the battery anxiety I once had. It would seem that there is something glitchy in either the hardware and software still, but hopefully it's just a SMC/NVRAM reset fix for many.

Good luck out there.

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540 replies

BocaBoy

Level 1

90 points

Dec 25, 2016 12:02 PM in response to rkane

I'm not sure about the extension, but I don't want to return the machine. I really like it. The performance and screen are what I expected. I even kinda like the Touchbar. I just want the battery to get close to what was advertised.

I have to feel that now that Consumer Reports made this an issue, it will get management's attention where it might not have from the postings in this forum.

Dec 25, 2016 5:55 PM in response to BocaBoy

Agree - really is a lovey machine but not prepared to have to wait for Apple to fix it (if they can). Some reports suggest that this is the best it can do given the form factor/physical size limitations of the battery. Who knows but all I know is that it's not acceptable & removing the time remaining indicator in the latest iOS update seems a little...well...odd

Thanks for the heads up on the holiday extension - it does clearly states the following so I can't see why it wouldn't apply (mine was delivered on the 24.11);

Holiday Return Policy

Items purchased at the Apple Online Store that are received between November 10, 2016 and December 25, 2016, may be returned through January 8, 2017. Please note that all other terms and conditions provided in the Apple Online Store Sales and Refunds Policy are still applicable with respect to such items purchased. All purchases made after December 25, 2016 are subject to the Standard Return Policy.

Dec 26, 2016 10:04 PM in response to bennett76

While I can certainly understand Consumer Reports' reluctance to recommend the MBP based on their battery experiences (a typical user shouldn't have to understand all the subtleties of what may or may not be going on under-the-hood), I did want to mention that since resetting my SMC several weeks back, I've been seeing pretty reasonable battery life duration with my 2016 MBP/15/16GB/1TB.

Today, for example, I was actively using the machine for almost 9.5 hours (of which about 30 minutes was sleep at lunch). I was mainly doing research--so reading, with some typing, using Kindle, Safari and some related apps. Nothing heavy-duty (no video-related work, no VM running, a bit of editing). If you subtract out the sleep time, after just under 9 hours of active use (display never turned off, set at 6 bars brightness, touch bar almost always lit, keyboard backlight off) I had over an hour estimated time remaining. Pretty similar time to Apple's estimate--although under considerably different usage scenario. I'm also running gfxCardStatus and remained on the integrated graphics almost all the time and was careful to close extra Safari tabs (rather than let them accumulate).

I've included a screen snippet from Activity Monitor to show the energy stats, graph, and apps involved:

All my more recent tests have shown similar performance--no huge variations like CR was seeing. (More than that, if I fire up Chrome instead of Safari my energy usage degrades--the opposite of what CR saw.)

For me, ever since resetting the SMC, the battery performance I'm seeing is pretty close to what I was hoping--although I do have to be proactive about managing graphics use and energy-sucking apps--and significantly better than my 2011 MBP 15".

Dec 27, 2016 3:03 AM in response to bennett76

Quick update: no problems with Apple in terms of sending the machine back (Holiday Return Policy). Sorry to see it go, but hoping it gives them a few months to iron this all out - I'm just not prepared to wait just in case it turns out to be a more fundamental HW issue.

Dec 28, 2016 9:13 PM in response to ACGarland

Thought I'd augment my previously-report of 15" battery life with some info on a 13" from today. The unit is a 2016 MBP/13"/TB/3.3 GHz i7/16GB/1TB and I've been doing similar "research" use all day today. Display brightness set at 6 bars, keyboard backlight off. Display constantly on and touch bar lit the entire time--except for two periods totally 2.5 hours during which the unit was asleep.

(Not sure why, but the image I uploaded above isn't displaying correctly for me--hopefully it will show up in the post OK.)

Time on battery: 12:03

Time remaining: 00:30

Charge remaining: 5%

As I said, of the 12 hours so far, only 9.5 were 100% active (2.5 asleep). So looks like workable time is about 9.5 hours--reaching barely to 10 under this constant, but light duty test. So seems about like expected.

In setting up this 13", I did a migration from another machine, but then immediately reset the SMC afterwards--have no idea whether battery life would have been worse if I hadn't. Just decided to go ahead and do that since it made a big difference with the 15" unit. Also left it set up on power overnight configured never to sleep--to allow indexing and other setup activities to run to completion before starting out today on battery.