4 ms·

You should upgrade to the 2014 or 2015 MacBook Pro, battery life is easily 8 hours.

wcarron 10y ago
It is most definitely not. I can barely squeeze 6 hours out of mine. Running chrone, small node servers, and mongo processes, keeping background processes to a minimum and screen brightness as low as I can stand. It's deplorable, and I'll be switching to the Surface Pro to run linux as my next machine. At least then I'll get a proper command line for 'meh' battery life.
- heywire 10y ago
  I found that modgod used to cause my battery life to suffer. Completely idle, it hovered around .5 - 1.0% CPU. Looking at the issue [1], it seems that they solved the issue this summer (I haven't been doing anything with mongo lately, so I can't say if it helped my battery life or not). [1] https://jira.mongodb.org/browse/SERVER-2114 https://jira.mongodb.org/browse/SERVER-2114
- merpnderp 10y ago
  In my tests Chrome uses far more power than Safari and significantly more than Firefox.
  - wcarron 10y ago
    Yup, Chrome does that for me, too. But I find firefox's UI just...so fucking awful. And the dev tools are simply inferior. Need chrome, if only Apple would pay attention to user needs.
    - caconym_ 10y ago
      I'm not sure exactly what the difference (if any) is between Chrome's dev tools and Chromium's dev tools, but Opera AFAIK uses Chromium's tools and the battery life on my 12" Macbook under normal web browsing in Opera (with adblocker and battery saver turned on) routinely exceeds 10 hours. I do a bit of light web development work every now and then but I'm not really qualified to comment on how good the developer tools in question actually are. To me, they seem to have some nice features and they do what I need.
    - isaac_is_goat 10y ago
      I switched to Opera a long time ago. It has the same backends as Chrome (webkit/v8), and the same developer tools but muuuuuuch better battery life.
      - wcarron 10y ago
        I haven't used Opera. I'll check that out, thanks.
        isaac_is_goat 10y ago
        There's also an Opera extension to install Chrome extensions for the Chrome marketplace, it's really awesome so you don't need always need Opera specific extensions...most of the super popular ones like ublock, https everywhere, etc. are already there.
- op00to 10y ago
  You'll see the same problems of short runtime. All those processes are causing the CPU and hardware to wake up more frequently, tanking your battery life.
  - wcarron 10y ago
    > At least then I'll get a proper command line for 'meh' battery life. I'm aware, as I stated above. I know they consume a lot of power, but I'm tired of the apple ecosystem being like '__NEW THING__ that doesn't actually help me in any measurable way.! Buy now for only two easy payments of 1 arm and 1 leg.!' I'm switching because I can get hardware that's just as good with the surface, and still keep my linux environment, and not have to worry about some fucking stupid ass touch bar and shitty specs being forced down my throat come upgrade time.
- stevefeinstein 10y ago
  I don't begrudge you the best hardware to scratch your particular itch. But if I may ask what's improper about bash on a Mac?
  - wcarron 10y ago
    Tbh, it's mostly the lack of a full keyboard. I'm kinda irked by not having the key combinations and shortcuts I'm used to. Also, I use Vim as my editor and it's impacted similarly. There are, however, things like ack, that I have running linux (out of the box, btw) that I had to find a replacement for on macOS. It's mostly small stuff.
merpnderp 10y ago
I still get between 8-10 hours on my 2013 15" MBP. The new one does seem like a major downgrade, which is too bad as I was thinking about a replacement.
- cududa 10y ago
  What's your pattern for charging? Almost always plugged in? Use until dead then recharge and only plugin until full, etc? I just had my late 2013 MBP batteries replaced by Apple 2 months ago (machine purchased July 2014). Battery life is already dropping precipitously - so perhaps it's how I charge the machine? I can't find any background services that should cause this to happen. When I got the machine I could easily do 8 hours now 6.5 if I'm very lucky
  - merpnderp 10y ago
    I'm very rarely on battery. Cycle count says 180, but I've likely only full discharged a dozen times. But if I'm running Safari, VSCode and then a few background build watch tasks, it just sips juice from the battery.
KirinDave 10y ago
I have a Macbook pro purchased this year. I didn't notice substantially better battery life with the older ones.

It is most definitely not. I can barely squeeze 6 hours out of mine. Running chrone, small node servers, and mongo processes, keeping background processes to a minimum and screen brightness as low as I can stand. It's deplorable, and I'll be switching to the Surface Pro to run linux as my next machine. At least then I'll get a proper command line for 'meh' battery life.

heywire 10y ago
I found that modgod used to cause my battery life to suffer. Completely idle, it hovered around .5 - 1.0% CPU. Looking at the issue [1], it seems that they solved the issue this summer (I haven't been doing anything with mongo lately, so I can't say if it helped my battery life or not). [1] https://jira.mongodb.org/browse/SERVER-2114 https://jira.mongodb.org/browse/SERVER-2114
merpnderp 10y ago
In my tests Chrome uses far more power than Safari and significantly more than Firefox.
- wcarron 10y ago
  Yup, Chrome does that for me, too. But I find firefox's UI just...so fucking awful. And the dev tools are simply inferior. Need chrome, if only Apple would pay attention to user needs.
  - caconym_ 10y ago
    I'm not sure exactly what the difference (if any) is between Chrome's dev tools and Chromium's dev tools, but Opera AFAIK uses Chromium's tools and the battery life on my 12" Macbook under normal web browsing in Opera (with adblocker and battery saver turned on) routinely exceeds 10 hours. I do a bit of light web development work every now and then but I'm not really qualified to comment on how good the developer tools in question actually are. To me, they seem to have some nice features and they do what I need.
  - isaac_is_goat 10y ago
    I switched to Opera a long time ago. It has the same backends as Chrome (webkit/v8), and the same developer tools but muuuuuuch better battery life.
    - wcarron 10y ago
      I haven't used Opera. I'll check that out, thanks.
      - isaac_is_goat 10y ago
        There's also an Opera extension to install Chrome extensions for the Chrome marketplace, it's really awesome so you don't need always need Opera specific extensions...most of the super popular ones like ublock, https everywhere, etc. are already there.
op00to 10y ago
You'll see the same problems of short runtime. All those processes are causing the CPU and hardware to wake up more frequently, tanking your battery life.
- wcarron 10y ago
  > At least then I'll get a proper command line for 'meh' battery life. I'm aware, as I stated above. I know they consume a lot of power, but I'm tired of the apple ecosystem being like '__NEW THING__ that doesn't actually help me in any measurable way.! Buy now for only two easy payments of 1 arm and 1 leg.!' I'm switching because I can get hardware that's just as good with the surface, and still keep my linux environment, and not have to worry about some fucking stupid ass touch bar and shitty specs being forced down my throat come upgrade time.
stevefeinstein 10y ago
I don't begrudge you the best hardware to scratch your particular itch. But if I may ask what's improper about bash on a Mac?
- wcarron 10y ago
  Tbh, it's mostly the lack of a full keyboard. I'm kinda irked by not having the key combinations and shortcuts I'm used to. Also, I use Vim as my editor and it's impacted similarly. There are, however, things like ack, that I have running linux (out of the box, btw) that I had to find a replacement for on macOS. It's mostly small stuff.

merpnderp 10y ago

I still get between 8-10 hours on my 2013 15" MBP. The new one does seem like a major downgrade, which is too bad as I was thinking about a replacement.

cududa 10y ago
What's your pattern for charging? Almost always plugged in? Use until dead then recharge and only plugin until full, etc? I just had my late 2013 MBP batteries replaced by Apple 2 months ago (machine purchased July 2014). Battery life is already dropping precipitously - so perhaps it's how I charge the machine? I can't find any background services that should cause this to happen. When I got the machine I could easily do 8 hours now 6.5 if I'm very lucky
- merpnderp 10y ago
  I'm very rarely on battery. Cycle count says 180, but I've likely only full discharged a dozen times. But if I'm running Safari, VSCode and then a few background build watch tasks, it just sips juice from the battery.

KirinDave 10y ago

I have a Macbook pro purchased this year. I didn't notice substantially better battery life with the older ones.