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.
G
