2016 macbook pro 15" with touch bar poor battery life

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.

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.

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".

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.

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.

Exactly the same happened to me! Before, I consistently got 8-11 hrs on moderate use.

In the activity monitor app you can see which specific program is using the iGPU or the dGPU.

And they do something? They change your battery? How is it?

P. S. Will say, Final Cut Pro handles the GPU switching properly, so it must be possible to solve this issue with software.

You get 12 feet 20 inches from the battery, sometimes 17 feet 39 inches?

How unusual

no, csound you smart-apple. What is wrong with you!

He gets 12 degrees and 20 minutes longitude

😁

Bocaboy, what's the spec on your machine ? Which GPU?

AMD Radeon Pro 455

I am using my laptop about 1 week. And my uptime nearly 2 and a half days. Should I wait for more?