4 ms·

I guess this really just confirms what I've suspected: the only way to get decent battery life out of a Mac is if you are literally using it for nothing but sim

I guess this really just confirms what I've suspected: the only way to get decent battery life out of a Mac is if you are literally using it for nothing but simple web browsing or watching a movie and doing nothing else. Non-Apple apps are death for battery life. I think I'd be lucky to get two hours of productive development time on my laptops. 1.5 hours is probably closer to reality. I have two BatteryBox devices that add about 45 minutes to 1 hour each to runtime and it's impossible to get productive work done without them. Perhaps Consumer Reports should try testing battery life by running other apps?

geerlingguy 10y ago
I put my MacBook Pros through a grueling battery test (basically build and destroy a VM successively, sustaining 100%+ CPU, tons of disk I/O, and maxing out WiFi bandwidth intermittently) for my blog post elsewhere on HN. Worst-case, the 13" Pro with Touch Bar gets 3.5 hours. The Function Key model gets 4 hours. And the 2015 Pro gets 5 hours. In light usage (e.g. while writing said blog post, and watching an occasional HTML5 YouTube video, and listening to some music in iTunes through AirPods), I can get 8-10 hours without issue. 1-2 hours sounds like you may have an app that's more buggy than the worst that I'd allow to run on my laptop... Edit: Link to said test script: https://github.com/geerlingguy/macbook-pro-battery-test https://github.com/geerlingguy/macbook-pro-battery-test
- caycep 10y ago
  pretty much. I have a 2 year old MBP 13" and it lasted most of a 9 hr flight recently.
zitterbewegung 10y ago
Can you recommend a company that has good battery life for high intensity workloads? I'm genuinely curious.
- mmastrac 10y ago
  No, as I've been in the Apple ecosystem for about 10 years and haven't shopped around. I used to have a Dell beast of a laptop back then that was 1) very heavy, 2) very hot and 3) would last for hours of development time. I would actually trade whatever weight would be necessary to get my useful portable development time up to 3-4 hours.
  - caconym_ 10y ago
    These days I think you'll find that laptops on the thinner and lighter side rely heavily on CPU throttling and other power saving features, as well as efficient software, to achieve good battery life. You may need to go the "brick" route if you have a heavy workload, whether or not that's due to inefficient software. I've found these days that a lot of software is simply poorly written and drains much more power than it should (the Atom editor is a good example).
    - mmastrac 10y ago
      Does such a brick still exist? I've seen the new Razor gaming laptop beasts and wondered if they might do as a development laptop with lots of juice.
      - caconym_ 10y ago
        Those Razer beasts are exactly what I was thinking. Probably anything with a primary use case of running a discrete GPU on battery power will be a good bet for heavy CPU workloads too.
- Raphmedia 10y ago
  Your best bet is to have a laptop with detachable batteries that you can easily swap.
  - mmirate 10y ago
    Sidenote, detachable batteries are also useful in that the overall service lifetime of a battery can easily be shorter than that of the rest of the laptop.
    - Raphmedia 10y ago
      It also keeps battery swelling from wrecking your motherboard.
      - eridius 10y ago
        It also means the battery can't have a funky custom-designed shape that devices with integrated batteries can, meaning the battery has a lower capacity. That's a really big reason not to use detachable batteries.
        mmirate 10y ago
        > It also means the battery can't have a funky custom-designed shape that devices with integrated batteries can ... so you're saying that designing for a detachable battery forces a certain finesse when designing the rest of the internals, so that there is not any funky-shaped gap big enough to put an entire LiPo cell. Also, one can easily make an "extended" model of replacement battery, which protrudes rearward (or downward[1]) of the rest of the case. [1]: http://www4.pcmag.com/media/images/396005-lenovo-thinkpad-x250-right-side-with-extended-battery.jpg?width=630 http://www4.pcmag.com/media/images/396005-lenovo-thinkpad-x2...
        Raphmedia 10y ago
        Batteries protruding downward is genius! Every laptop should have them!
- walterbell 10y ago
  Thinkpads that support hot-swapping of batteries.
- Someone1234 10y ago
  Thinkpad T###p series (e.g. T460p). It isn't good due to magic or some other vaporous marketing buzzwords. It is good because you can just install big batteries and swap them out in sleep mode. Get one or more 6 cell 72Wh rear batteries (6,666 mah). Alternatively get one or more Lenovo Power Bank 10,000 mAh (100 Wh give or take). The advantage of the Power Bank is that you don't even have to put the computer to sleep. One extra 6 cell 72 Wh battery is a lot less heavy than you're imagining (approx 1/2 pound). I'd even go as far as to say that your Macbook's dongles weigh more than doubling the battery life of the Thinkpad T460p.
- aidenn0 10y ago
  HP zBooks have 90Wh batteries and you can configure them with a 1080p display and no discrete graphics (just make sure you do spring the $50 for the UWVA; that's HP code for "not a crappy TN panel"); if you have no need for GPGPU and don't go crazy with the CPU/RAM you put in then you can get quite good battery life out of them. You used to be able to get laptops with batteries that fit in the optical drive-bay so you could expand the battery life, but that appears to be a non-option now that internal optical drives have gone the way of the dodo. [edit] A friend pointed me to this as well: https://www.anker.com/deals/powerhouse2 https://www.anker.com/deals/powerhouse2 it weighs as much as the first laptop I ever used, but has 400Wh.
rayiner 10y ago
Until the most recent batch, Apple laptops have just had straight up the largest batteries of everything except Thinkpads with batteries that stick out. E.g. the much touted "bigger battery" of the new HP 15" x360 only brings it even with the new Touchbar MBP, which has a 25% smaller battery than the previous MBP. Samsung's current 15" laptop has a battery that's about half the size of what is in the new MBP. Non-Apple apps don't kill battery life. What kills battery life is shitty apps like Chrome (or anything based on Electron). VSCode for example will cut battery life to 6 hours versus 10+ for Emacs. Just simple stuff like typing and scrolling takes huge amounts of CPU. Even just sitting idle it's using 1% or so CPU.
- ariwilson 10y ago
  Serious question, why does Chrome eat battery like crazy on Macs but has great battery life on Chromebooks?
  - dragonwriter 10y ago
    I hardly think it is surprising that Chromebooks would be better optimized for running ChromeOS than Macs are at running Chrome.
nodamage 10y ago
> I think I'd be lucky to get two hours of productive development time on my laptops. Is this speculation or have you actually measured it?
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
anthonybsd 10y ago
>1.5 hours is probably closer to reality Ughh.. no. I'm on an 6 year old Macbook with SSD which had fresh battery put in a year ago. Running IntelliJ, web server, JS build tools (they run in the background), and over a dozen apps (i.e. slack, browser etc.) lasts me about 3 hours.
- eropple 10y ago
  This jibes with my own experience. My 2014 Retina MBP averages around three hours when running an Android emulator, the React Native tools, PostgreSQL, and IntelliJ for my backend, plus whatever browsers I'm using along the way.
- freehunter 10y ago
  14 month old rMBP here, I spend all my day with Safari and Firefox open plus Slack and Word/Excel, plus connected to a remote desktop session and I can basically always expect 3-4 hours under those conditions. If I'm visiting a client and turn off wifi and just take notes in Word, after an 8 hour day I can usually still make it through the evening with some light Netflix.
Spooky23 10y ago
This isn't a Mac specific issue. Most of the efficiencies in battery life That have taken place in the last decade are all about CPUs and their components lowering their idle power consumption. I have a circa 2014 MacBook Pro that I use as my daily driver. The battery life is great -- so long as I don't light up VMs, run OneDrive for Business or a few other misbehaving apps. I'd challenge you to identify another laptop that's better without making other sacrifices. My old ThinkPad T series had great battery life, but you had to deal with the bulk and weight of a huge battery.
hyperbovine 10y ago
As usual, another comically hyperbolic diatribe against Apple possessing little to no basis in actual fact.

geerlingguy 10y ago

I put my MacBook Pros through a grueling battery test (basically build and destroy a VM successively, sustaining 100%+ CPU, tons of disk I/O, and maxing out WiFi bandwidth intermittently) for my blog post elsewhere on HN. Worst-case, the 13" Pro with Touch Bar gets 3.5 hours. The Function Key model gets 4 hours. And the 2015 Pro gets 5 hours. In light usage (e.g. while writing said blog post, and watching an occasional HTML5 YouTube video, and listening to some music in iTunes through AirPods), I can get 8-10 hours without issue. 1-2 hours sounds like you may have an app that's more buggy than the worst that I'd allow to run on my laptop... Edit: Link to said test script: https://github.com/geerlingguy/macbook-pro-battery-test https://github.com/geerlingguy/macbook-pro-battery-test

caycep 10y ago
pretty much. I have a 2 year old MBP 13" and it lasted most of a 9 hr flight recently.

zitterbewegung 10y ago

Can you recommend a company that has good battery life for high intensity workloads? I'm genuinely curious.

mmastrac 10y ago
No, as I've been in the Apple ecosystem for about 10 years and haven't shopped around. I used to have a Dell beast of a laptop back then that was 1) very heavy, 2) very hot and 3) would last for hours of development time. I would actually trade whatever weight would be necessary to get my useful portable development time up to 3-4 hours.
- caconym_ 10y ago
  These days I think you'll find that laptops on the thinner and lighter side rely heavily on CPU throttling and other power saving features, as well as efficient software, to achieve good battery life. You may need to go the "brick" route if you have a heavy workload, whether or not that's due to inefficient software. I've found these days that a lot of software is simply poorly written and drains much more power than it should (the Atom editor is a good example).
  - mmastrac 10y ago
    Does such a brick still exist? I've seen the new Razor gaming laptop beasts and wondered if they might do as a development laptop with lots of juice.
    - caconym_ 10y ago
      Those Razer beasts are exactly what I was thinking. Probably anything with a primary use case of running a discrete GPU on battery power will be a good bet for heavy CPU workloads too.
Raphmedia 10y ago
Your best bet is to have a laptop with detachable batteries that you can easily swap.
- mmirate 10y ago
  Sidenote, detachable batteries are also useful in that the overall service lifetime of a battery can easily be shorter than that of the rest of the laptop.
  - Raphmedia 10y ago
    It also keeps battery swelling from wrecking your motherboard.
    - eridius 10y ago
      It also means the battery can't have a funky custom-designed shape that devices with integrated batteries can, meaning the battery has a lower capacity. That's a really big reason not to use detachable batteries.
      - mmirate 10y ago
        > It also means the battery can't have a funky custom-designed shape that devices with integrated batteries can ... so you're saying that designing for a detachable battery forces a certain finesse when designing the rest of the internals, so that there is not any funky-shaped gap big enough to put an entire LiPo cell. Also, one can easily make an "extended" model of replacement battery, which protrudes rearward (or downward[1]) of the rest of the case. [1]: http://www4.pcmag.com/media/images/396005-lenovo-thinkpad-x250-right-side-with-extended-battery.jpg?width=630 http://www4.pcmag.com/media/images/396005-lenovo-thinkpad-x2...
        Raphmedia 10y ago
        Batteries protruding downward is genius! Every laptop should have them!
walterbell 10y ago
Thinkpads that support hot-swapping of batteries.
Someone1234 10y ago
Thinkpad T###p series (e.g. T460p). It isn't good due to magic or some other vaporous marketing buzzwords. It is good because you can just install big batteries and swap them out in sleep mode. Get one or more 6 cell 72Wh rear batteries (6,666 mah). Alternatively get one or more Lenovo Power Bank 10,000 mAh (100 Wh give or take). The advantage of the Power Bank is that you don't even have to put the computer to sleep. One extra 6 cell 72 Wh battery is a lot less heavy than you're imagining (approx 1/2 pound). I'd even go as far as to say that your Macbook's dongles weigh more than doubling the battery life of the Thinkpad T460p.
aidenn0 10y ago
HP zBooks have 90Wh batteries and you can configure them with a 1080p display and no discrete graphics (just make sure you do spring the $50 for the UWVA; that's HP code for "not a crappy TN panel"); if you have no need for GPGPU and don't go crazy with the CPU/RAM you put in then you can get quite good battery life out of them. You used to be able to get laptops with batteries that fit in the optical drive-bay so you could expand the battery life, but that appears to be a non-option now that internal optical drives have gone the way of the dodo. [edit] A friend pointed me to this as well: https://www.anker.com/deals/powerhouse2 https://www.anker.com/deals/powerhouse2 it weighs as much as the first laptop I ever used, but has 400Wh.

rayiner 10y ago

Until the most recent batch, Apple laptops have just had straight up the largest batteries of everything except Thinkpads with batteries that stick out. E.g. the much touted "bigger battery" of the new HP 15" x360 only brings it even with the new Touchbar MBP, which has a 25% smaller battery than the previous MBP. Samsung's current 15" laptop has a battery that's about half the size of what is in the new MBP. Non-Apple apps don't kill battery life. What kills battery life is shitty apps like Chrome (or anything based on Electron). VSCode for example will cut battery life to 6 hours versus 10+ for Emacs. Just simple stuff like typing and scrolling takes huge amounts of CPU. Even just sitting idle it's using 1% or so CPU.

ariwilson 10y ago
Serious question, why does Chrome eat battery like crazy on Macs but has great battery life on Chromebooks?
- dragonwriter 10y ago
  I hardly think it is surprising that Chromebooks would be better optimized for running ChromeOS than Macs are at running Chrome.

nodamage 10y ago

> I think I'd be lucky to get two hours of productive development time on my laptops. Is this speculation or have you actually measured it?

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

anthonybsd 10y ago

>1.5 hours is probably closer to reality Ughh.. no. I'm on an 6 year old Macbook with SSD which had fresh battery put in a year ago. Running IntelliJ, web server, JS build tools (they run in the background), and over a dozen apps (i.e. slack, browser etc.) lasts me about 3 hours.

eropple 10y ago
This jibes with my own experience. My 2014 Retina MBP averages around three hours when running an Android emulator, the React Native tools, PostgreSQL, and IntelliJ for my backend, plus whatever browsers I'm using along the way.
freehunter 10y ago
14 month old rMBP here, I spend all my day with Safari and Firefox open plus Slack and Word/Excel, plus connected to a remote desktop session and I can basically always expect 3-4 hours under those conditions. If I'm visiting a client and turn off wifi and just take notes in Word, after an 8 hour day I can usually still make it through the evening with some light Netflix.

Spooky23 10y ago

This isn't a Mac specific issue. Most of the efficiencies in battery life That have taken place in the last decade are all about CPUs and their components lowering their idle power consumption. I have a circa 2014 MacBook Pro that I use as my daily driver. The battery life is great -- so long as I don't light up VMs, run OneDrive for Business or a few other misbehaving apps. I'd challenge you to identify another laptop that's better without making other sacrifices. My old ThinkPad T series had great battery life, but you had to deal with the bulk and weight of a huge battery.

hyperbovine 10y ago

As usual, another comically hyperbolic diatribe against Apple possessing little to no basis in actual fact.