Battery performance on High Sierra

Hi,

Sorry for my bad english...

I have this problem too since High Sierra Update. I have a 2016 15" Macbook Pro, i7 6700HQ with Radeon Pro 450.

Less than 3h30 battery life over 7-8h before !

Good news, I think I know what is the problem...

I observed that the integrated GPU (Intel HD 530) consume a lot of power (6 W), even my mac is idling. In this case, with the software Intel Power Gadget, i noticed that the intel GPU frequency is stuck at 1Ghz, with no reason.

I've also noticed that in certains circumstances, both power and frequency were low, and battery life rises up !!

I tried hard to reproduces that circumstances for the past 5 days, and there are my results :

- Battery 100%, wake up from sleep, iGPU : 0,36 GHz / 0.80 W, 8h30 😃 battery life remaining with internet browsing, word editing and other basic stuff.

- Battery 100%, wake from sleep, Mission control command (3 fingers slide bottom for exposé for exemple) : iGPU : 1,03 GHz / 6 W, 3h30 battery life remaining with internet browsing, word editing...

In fact, at the exact moment when I do a mission control gesture, iGPU starts to drain the battery. I was able to reproduce that with all the gestures i use for mission control :

- 3 fingers slide bottom for exposé

- mouse at the corner for desktop show

- 3 fingers spread for launch control

- ...

I join a screenshot of Intel Power Gadget which shows what is happening.

So far, with all gestures deactivated, my battery life is as good as before... But I know it's a poor walk-around...

So next, I've planned to go to a genius bar to show the problem, because I use mission control a lot.

You guys might be able to check if your problem is similar, you just need Intel power Gadget and it's free...

I hope that was useful...

Regards, Rémi from France 🤘🤘

To contact Apple support you need to use the support phone number for your country. These forums are manned by volunteer end users who have no special ways to contact Apple. As a 2017 MBP should still be under the original one-year warranty there should be no charge for a phone consultation. If you are within range of an Apple retail store, make a Genius appt to have the computer examined.

In the meantime you can try an SMC reset:

How to reset the System Management Controller (SMC) on your Mac - Apple Support

Use the instructions for notebooks with "non-removeable" batteries.

Dear Fry, you are not addressing Apple here. We are all end users like you.

And, while, reading this thread I did some testing and found that another company should be the target of users' ill will. I've had my 2012 MBP running on battery for several hours working the forums when I noticed the percent battery charge was unusually low for what I'd been doing (OS 10.13 was installed in November so I'm used to its runtimes). Earlier, in helping with another thread, I had opened a new window to help with a question about logging into Amazon.com from High Sierra. No issues with Amazon log-in but I'd left that window open when I returned to the window the set of tabs I use for working the Apple forums. So, minutes ago, I opened Activity Monitor and found that Amazon.com was using from 25-55 units of my energy at any given time. Here I caught it at nearly 35.

Apple forums with 18 tabs open were using less than 1 percent per tab. I closed the Amazon window and immediately regained 45 minutes of runtime.

Activity Monitor properly set to show "All Processes" (via its "View" menu) can reveal a lot, and often some things that are not Apple's doing.

Hi,

I was finally able to solve my battery issue...

I figured out that was... wait for it... Intel Power Gadget which cause iGPU draining power. The same program which allowed me to know that iGPU was incriminated !

I uninstalled it (in a long process in uninstalling et re-installing programs to determine the power-angry one), and my autonomy is back again, mission control or not !

As I write these lignes, activity monitor says 10:14 hours battery life left !! Awesome !!

Good luck in finding your battery issue cause !

Rémi from France.

Yep, that was Intel Power Gadget... Initially, I installed it when I received my mac in january 2017, but I update it when I upgraded to High Sierra, 3 weeks ago. That was when battery issue started...

Has anyone tried SMC reset? (How to reset the System Management Controller (SMC) on your Mac - Apple Support) and maybe even a clean (re)install? (https://www.imore.com/how-do-clean-install-macos) I was looking forward to update my MBA 2015 (from Sierra to High Sierra) and keep checking forums all over but I am seriously concerned over battery life. The battery life is the main reason to have a macbook for me.

Hi Zyg4,

As I look to your screenshot, Safari and Seamonkey are draining power (a lot).

Is Seamonkey a background program ? In this case, it should be not have a 15+ energy impact !

Try to uninstall it...

You can also try to sort activity monitor by Energy impact (clic on the top of column "Energy impact"). So you'll see which app are power-angry.

About your activity monitor, how did you put the "Avg Energy Impact" column ? I don't have the option in mine, and the informations provided by this column might be decisive !!

For the record, it seems that my battery life is even better with High Sierra (without Intel Power Gadget). 4h+ lite activity (browsing, powerpoint, word, youtube...) at mid brightness >>>>> 58% battery life remaining (6:20 hours).

Come back in a few days and confirm this. I think you will find it is a temporary situation caused be the need to index more than is usually the case.

MacOS in indexing your drive this is going on right now with my MacBook and will stop in about 1-4 days depending on how big your drive is normally I get 4-5 but when indexing I get 1-2

Personally I have a 100 Gb usage out of 256. Indexing happens in El Capitan, Sierra High Sierra. All things accounted for, days later, Sierra or High Sierra provides half the battery life. This issue has been thoroughly documented in the forums. The Why is Apple's to answer. Think about it: let a playback loop for movies, up to 3 movies with High Sierra or Sierra. Same movie, 6 times with Sierra and Stop Chrono. When travelling, I get nearly 15-18 hours of movies and surfing time. Also Standby works as intended. If I close it at 46% and turn it back on two weeks later, 46%. Whatever management system introduced with Sierra (the one which removed the time), or with the iPhone, it halves the usability of the laptop. Let us not forget I also bought a 2017 MBP, looped the same chrono process, and 40% less time than my heavily used 2015 model (though the 2016+ MBPS had a physically smaller battery pack inside, but claims gave them 11 hrs of usage I coul dnever reproduce past 7hrs)... As the 2015 MBP works so well with El Capitan, unless Apple opens battery management access with the next OS (as they are about to do with the iPhone), I will not upgrade the OS past El Capitan, nor will I buy a new MBP from them until the butterfly gimmick is gone, the touchbar, and battery capacity re-increased.

I have a mid 2015 MacBook Pro and noticed the same battery problem since I upgraded to High Sierra. I attached an external mouse to the MacBook to test. Under Sierra, the mouse lit up (MacBook awake) only once a while for a very short period of time (1 minute or so) and then the mouse light went off (MacBook went to sleep). I noticed that since the upgrade, it took a much longer for the mouse's light to go off when my lid was closed. It took 30 minutes before the mouse becomes inactive (light went off) and then after about 13 mins, the mouse light came back on again(MacBook wake up again) for another 30 minutes. My conclusion is that under High Sierra, even when the lid is closed, MacBook's wake up time is much longer. So may be it is the reason why the battery is drained much faster.

I hope that Apple will come up with a Fix for this battery problem.

I've reported a similar problem (with a MBP 15 2017): In Sierra I got 4 hours—never the advertised 10—with normal web browsing and Office applications. I thought HighSierra I would solve this problem. Now I get 2 hours: battery drops at about 1% a minute.... I'm about to do a SMC reset, but based on at least one of the posts here it doesn't work. I don't think it hurts to try.

I did the SMC reset and it didn't mess up anything on my computer. First I got the impression battery life had increased a bit but now I' back at 5h, halve of what I had before. Gonna go to the Genius Bar today about this and a broken USBC port.

But as you said, SMC reset doesn't hurt. Please try and let us know if it did something for you?

When I tried Sierra and High Sierra the battery drop was 40-50%. Imagine watching 2 movies per charge, no wifi, travelling, versus 4-5. Yes, from 12-15 hrs video viewing to 7? But I am using the 2015 MBO, the last great MBP made with El Capitan..

I've reset the SMC. And the results are virtually null: in 2 hours, I'm down to 17%.