2016 macbook pro 15" with touch bar poor battery life

I will chime in as well. Subjectively my new 13" MBP with touch bar has about the same battery life as my 5 year old Mac air with original battery. I use an iPad Pro as well. In short, am quite disappointed by the battery life of what should have been a great machine.

If you bought it direct from Apple, you can return or change it at an Apple Store, except when you bought it refurbished (which requires return to source in case of D.O.A.

If you bought it from a Reseller, you need to discuss your options with the Reseller, not direct with Apple. Apple will repair it anywhere, but you can only return/exchange machines you bought direct from Apple.

Okay, I've now seen this for myself. I'm certain that this is a firmware/software problem, with the computer incorrectly reporting the battery status – both to the user and to itself. It shuts down because it incorrectly thinks it's going to run out of power, not because the battery really has a low capacity and needs replacing. I'm sure this will be all over the Mac news sites in the next week or so, and then Apple will issue an update.

I'm having the same issue! After an hour of email and web use this morning my battery is already 72%. This is not good... if I'm on location using Final Cut I'll be sunk. Hopefully a software update will fix this.

Are you guys on 12.2.2 Beta by any chance? Because am.

No, I am on 10.12.1. Again, I stress that my computer is a 13" MBP with touch bar. I gather I can get 6 hours on one charge doing light things like mail and Safari. This seems to be on par with reviews that I read by Mossberg and others. I suspect there is something wrong on the software side right now.

My battery problems are no where as bad as your's. Nevertheless, it is no where near 10 hours for "light use". I would say more like 6 hours if I am lucky. Also, I did not use the migration assistant.

Checks this out, impressive for a 2'500 $ piece of kit ...

Yes, evaluating the 15" MacBook Pro (and mine came to $3100), running a few Safari tabs, Mail, Outlook, Messages, Slack, Evernote, and Terminal, and my battery is showing 3:30 remaining at 97%. Activity Monitor shows 96% idle.

I seriously hope that this can be resolved through an update, because this is not impressive.

FYI - running 10.12.1, and this was a clean setup, no migration assistant used.

Well, it was easy to get rid of one possible cause of the problem: I used Boot Camp and installed Windows 10. Windows 10 reports battery life similar to that of macOS 10.12. And the battery life drops at about the same rate as macOS 10.12 if you're doing roughly the same things (playing a movie while browsing web pages in Safari/Edge). So it it's a but in macOS then precisely the same bug occurs in Windows 10.

However ...

When I started my tests (one in each OS) the predictors said that the battery would last another 3 hours 20 minutes. I ran my tests for 30 minutes. And after 30 minutes the predictors said that the batter would last another 3 hours and 10 minutes (not quite to the minute but close enough). So in both OSes the predicted battery life dropped 10 minutes in 30 minutes of use.

This suggests to me that the problem is not with low battery capacity, but with the prediction system. The prediction system uses the charge remaining in the battery, and the current drain rate, to predict how much longer the computer can function. The problem is this: the figure for the charge remaining the battery is not digitally produced by the battery. Instead it is a calculation based on the PD across the battery and graded on a curve. The curve has to be custom-created by the manufacturer based on their knowledge of how the battery preforms in real life. The curve is stored in firmware.

The computer uses the same result you do for its judgement. If it thinks that the battery will last less than another (for example) five minutes it will put the computer to hibernate mode. So if the curve is faulty, so is the computer's judgement about when the computer should hibernate.

My guess, based on the above, is that the battery does have something like whatever capacity Apple claims it does; the battery's power/charge curve, or some other part of power assessment, is incorrect in firmware; and that Apple will release a user-installable fix correcting this rather than repairing or replacing these computers.

+1 for battery life disappointment. My 13" MBP (w/ Touch Bar, 3.3GHz i7, 16GB, MacOS 10.12.2) is consistently getting 5.5hrs of actual use - I have run several battery cycles from 100% until it dies. I have been on wifi and purposely not doing anything taxing (mail, safari, notes, message, and a couple other apps). I called Apple Support on Monday and they did a a couple diagnostic checks before making me a Genius Bar (GB) appt. GB did not know what to do - I was the first 2016 MBP they had seen. Machine is great otherwise. How do you enable solar power on the touch bar? 😐

That's some great detective work and speculation!

On my new 15" MBP (a $4,000 version) it's not just the predicted time that's bad it's the actual time. I charged to 100% then unplugged, I used the computer to surf the web with only Outlook running in the background. After 2 hours, I got the message that my battery was low (menu bar said 14% left). Within another 15 minutes it shut down. Activity monitor says that Safari was using a lot of power and I'm finding I can't quit Safari, I can only force-quit it, whenever I run it. I reset the SMC (or whatever it's called) and now I'm getting nearly 3 hours of battery life! (I guess that's "almost" 10). After recharging to 100% then unplugging, and with no programs running (except coming to this site on Chrome instead of Safari) and the screen at about half brightness, Activity Monitor says right now says that the computer has been on for 2 hours 10 minutes and has 1 hour 18 minutes of time remaining. Very concerning.

Finally! Early adopters of new machinery where you have a potential issue and wonder if anyone else is having It but you wait for ages for forums to appear!

The answer is YES! I'm having pretty horrendous and erratic battery life/estimated time remaining on my 15' Touch Bar MacBook Pro with 2.9ghz and Radeon Pro 460 GPU. I initially thought that having the higher specced graphics card would eat into the battery but I didn't know they switched between the 2 automatically (my last Mac of 5 years didn't do this) depending on what app I'm using.

Im glad im not alone on this one. I don't want to have to go through the faff of returning another new Apple product. The last 3 new ones I bought. iPad Pro, iPhone and an Apple TV were all replaced. Im either just unlucky or Apples QC is down the toilet

Either way I'm currently sitting on 35% battery and I'm getting 49 min predicted left. There is definitely a software issue here. Even if the prediction is wrong it still wants to put the machine to sleep. So our machines could be sleeping even if there is another 2 hours of juice left in them.

The more noise made about this issue the quicker Apple will take not of it. I will follow this thread closely

This was what I was getting earlier on web browsing. Pretty poor if you ask me!