2016 macbook pro 15" with touch bar poor battery life

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

Hello,

I’ve the same issue as most of you here. I have a MacBook Pro (15-inch, Late 2016) with 2.6 GHz i7, Radeon Pro 450 and 1TB storage. Some days ago I’ve got the LG Ultrafine 22 Inch Monitor. So the GPU is often switching between Intel and ATI, when I go into battery mode. Today I examined the problem with the help of IStatMenu and made some Photos:

1.) Radeon GPU Highside before Reboot (9.73W)

2.) Battery PBus before Reboot (1.43A)

3.) Estimated Battery Lifetime before Reboot (3:59)

4.) Graphic before Reboot (Intel)

Then I rebooted the Mac with power from the charger without Monitor and pull the power plug at 100% battery.

The GPU was on Intel then.

5.) Radeon GPU Highside (0.09W)!

6.) Graphic after Reboot (Intel)

7.) Estimated Battery Lifetime after Reboot (10:18)!

8.) Battery PBus (0.62A)!

Before I've got the Monitor, I already have recognized this power-issue, but I've had no idea to pin this problem down.

So my conclusion of that all is, that under some circumstances, the ATI Graphic did not switch off when switching to the Intel. Maybe it is, when pulling the Monitor (and charging) cable, but here I’m only guessing. There may be many more causes. But I hope, and it looks like, a firmware update can fix this.

Hope that helps a bit. 🙂

I checked on Apple's adapter website. They explicitly note that all video adapters are consuming power:

"This adapter draws power from your MacBook even when the Mac is asleep. If your computer isn't connected to AC power, be sure to unplug the adapter to avoid draining your battery."

Using USB-C and Thunderbolt 3 (USB-C) ports and adapters on your Mac notebook - Apple Support

It seems that at least for me, this is where the 3-4 hours of battery life is coming from. Unplugging them increases the battery life to the promised 8-10 hours.

Can anyone who still has this problem on any Late 2016 MacBook Pro (with or without Touch Bar) please try the following.

1. If you have not already updated to macOS 10.12.3, do so.
2. If you boot into Windows using Boot Camp, use Apple's Update utility to make sure you have the latest Windows drivers installed. If you do not have a Windows boot partition, you can ignore this step.
3. Completely charge the battery, until the computer says it is at 100% charge.
4. Unplug the computer from the power adapter and use it without plugging it back in until the power is completely drained and the computer has automatically gone into hibernate mode. This does not need to be one continuous session. You can turn the computer off and on again, switch between macOS and Windows, start and stop games, do whatever you want. Just don't plug the computer in until it has automatically gone into hibernate mode.
5. Plug the computer back in again and allow it to fully charge before unplugging it again. Again, you can turn it off and on, do whatever you want. Just don't unplug it until it reports 100% charge.

From this point on you should be getting roughly the advertised amount of battery life, not the 3 to 4 hours reported here by some users. If not, please post here saying that you have performed a complete power cycle since updating to macOS 10.12.3.

Please note that if reporting that you get a certain amount of time when operating on battery you need to have actually got that time. Software which predicts the amount of time you'd get can report incorrect figures. Reports based only on the amount of time predicted by software should be ignored.

Thanks. My MacBook 2016 with touch bar is suffering with the same battery issues that everyone pointed out. I've just followed your steps and will report back later today on my results.

• Applied SMC/NVRAM reset
• Disabled powernap while on battery
• Removed login items - iTunes helper, Adobe, WebEx etc
• Keeping keyboard lighting to 75% or less

After doing all the above, I don't see Safari using significant energy anymore. Hoping it has resolved my issues. Will report back later today.

🙂 Guess, they will not do very much, some drivers maybe. Even the testing I have to do on my own😁. I don't have any complaints against the battery. IMHO it seems to be ok. If it does what what it should!

So I've had licked some blood and did some further testing today:

I have concentrated on the parameter "Radeon GPU Highside" in IStatMenu and could recognize four different states:

1. ca. 0.1W when the Intel GPU is working and the ATI is switched off. This seems to be normal at Intel, whether on battery or on charger.

2. ca. 5W when the ATI GPU is working and the Intel is switched off, whether battery or charger.

3. ca. 14W when the ATI GPU is working and the LG Monitor is plugged in.

4. and this is ridicioulus, ca. 9.5W, when the Intel GPU is working, but the ATI isn't switching off properly.

The fourth state is what is causing problems. When on battery, the estimated runtime shows between 3:30 and 4:30 at 100%. And that is not ok. But IMHO it is not a battery-problem but a GPU-problem because it is draining so much power. So if it is a hardware-problem, we all will get a new logicboard, not a battery🙂. But I don't think so. I tested a lot today with/without monitor, different Apps with GPU-usage and long time I was not able to switch the GPU properly. Only a restart could fix that problem, and (surprise, surprise), when I launched Final Cut Pro (Trial), the spook was over. Strange.

I hope, Apple will fix that before my Final Cut Trial ends.

P. P. S. To be more specific: Starting FCP once after boot solvers the problem here. Even pulling the monitor is no issue anymore. Perhaps they forgot a kext at boot-time, which is loaded by launching FCP.....

I'm approaching the deadline after which I won't be able to return my MBP. I don't have the technical expertise as some on this forum but I have reinstalled Sierra and have reset the SMC but still only get at most 4 1/2 hours. I was going to return it earlier but I totally love the speed of this machine compared to my previous MBP which was from late 2008. Can someone make a recommendation as to whether I should keep it or return it (with the hope that they'll fix this problem at which point I'll get another one)? I haven't really absorbed the information on this thread about the Intel and Radeon video cards. I just want this thing to work without me having to be a technician. I've been mindful of the energy usage of the apps that I'm running by keeping an eye on the Energy section of the Activity Monitor. Also, I keep bluetooth and wifi turned off (as I'm using an Ethernet connection).

I'll probably also call AppleCare tomorrow to see if they have any recommendations.

I'd hate to return it but 4 hours of battery life is less than half of what it's supposed to get, right? I must admit that I can't see that well with the brightness turned very far down, so it's most of the way up.

Thanks again for any suggestions.

My advice: return it. Didn't want that either, but you shouldn't have to go through all this trouble to get an expensive machine like this going, with no guarantee that it will be a 100 percent okay. The next update will have Kabylake or better Cannonlake or maybe even the first Apple computerchip and hopefully the battery they wanted for this version but failed the final test.

[Btw: my 13" i7 wasn't real speedy, or at least I didn't notice it in the 12 days I tried to get it to work how it should.]

Hi

I tried it with the suggestion of Apple Care. Did not work. I ran some data extracts at 100% battery, 50% then zero 4 hours. Now I extracted information for Engineers at Apple to review. Waiting a couple of days for their solution.

I am happy yours works now.

Well sadly I ended up returning the computer because....

1) I was running out of time according to the return policy

2) I'm extremely busy running a business (which is why I bought this in the first place)

3) No satisfactory answer to a fix

4) We're not talking chump change here, over 3K for my setup!

My 3 year old + MacBook Air of a fraction of the cost will suffice until they get serious about QC again

Thanks Schmrtzzz. AppleCare on the phone couldn't help me and tomorrow morning I have a Genius appointment. I"m pretty sure I'll end up returning the machine before I leave the store because I could tell from the AppleCare phone call that they're still collecting information and don't have a fix yet. And since I leave town for a couple of weeks on Monday and don't want to pass the deadline to return it I'm thinking that's what's going to happen.

Please keep us posted, rkane. The trackpad on my old MBA stopped working so I had to buy a new one. It gives mostly 12'20" battery time, sometimes even 17'39", so yes, these estimates are not very reliable, but it never gives only 4 to 5 hours or a miserable 2'19", like I had on my MBP. Yeah, I know, different machine, shouldn't compare the two, but there is really something wrong with this machine. Maybe they told you more in the store?

I'm on my second new MBP (15") and I still only get 2.5 hours out of the battery with fairly simple demand (e.g., email). It also freezes as others report. Several of the connections to the Apple USB-C adapters (e.g, HDMI, USB to DVD) do not work consistently or require a "work-around." I have been a faithful Apple buyer for many years and this is the first time I have had this many insolvable problems. Very, very frustrating and, considering the cost, inexcusable.

I guess I have been lucky. This is my 2nd tbMBP. I first bought the base and couldn't live with 256GB. I didn't notice bad battery life on that one either. one came from Apple on 5th Ave. and the other Apple SoHo. I have been getting at least 9 hrs on my space grey 2.7/512/455 on 10.12.2 with normal use. This is my first mac and I didn't use any sort of migration. I set up everything manually and I have been using safari exclusively. I haven't installed flash nor java nor do I plan to. Time machine set to back up when plugged in only. I am debating exchanging it for the same config with a 460 but that would leave me without a machine for 3-4 weeks and I don't think it's worthwhile since the 460 won't make much difference. I didn't buy this to play games and even the 460 is weak compared to Nvidia's Maxwell and Pascal dGPUs.

I have 2 days left to make up my mind on whether to keep the machine. The CR tests sound ridiculous. Chrome uses more power than Safari and it seems like many people with the battery problems are using Chrome.

For those experiencing 3-4 hrs this must be a software issue. If you are running something like Premiere the whole time I could under stand the lower figures, but not just with light use. I am using the latest version of Office 2016 btw and no Dropbox sync. Actually all of my installed software is on the latest version.