Battery Life on MacBook Pro 16.

[nozveradu]

I am having issues as well. I am doing fairly straightforward Python coding, few tabs in Safari, and Mail and Outlook app in background, and the Activity Monitor shows me anywhere between 4.5 - 6 hours battery life from 100%, which is fairly disappointing. I was expecting at least 9 hours with that sort of work load. I have got i9 2.3/32GB/5500M 8 GB/1 TB. Also, I have noticed that Coconut shows different levels of battery charge compared to the battery icon in the toolbar.

That's why I like the new 13inch so much. It's either because of the super low base clock (1.4 i believe), or the lack of graphic card (less screen as well). I get around 11-14 hours coding and watching youtube tutorials, browsing docs. It literally last me 2 days without charging with my regular use. My 15 inch 2018 can only get around 7-8 hours doing the same task.
So my take is, if you don't need the power (as I am a coder), better get the smaller one.
[automerge]1575850353[/automerge]

@vkmd and @joelhinch , thanks for the info guys. I look forward to seeing the battery performance post indexing. If the battery life is bad, for a $4000 machine, I could go for a 13 inch MBP plus a desktop setup.

I'll hold out on the purchase until more data is available.

Definitely go for the other route. I end up selling my 15 MBP, went for the base 13 with 256g for mobile working (coding), and I build a pc with 27'' monitor, rtx2070, to do heavy duty work (gaming).

 

[joelhinch]

Quit Chrome chrome completely and am noticing a massive difference. It's a complete power hog. Now just using Safari, Firefox, Mail, Outlook + OneNote, Teams, Messages, Things, Word, open in the background. ~60% brightness and getting a consistent 10hr estimate (from 99% to now at 89% which has been at least an hour or more, so pretty accurate so far).
(Had already disabled GPU acceleration in Chrome and MS Teams, as this turns on the dGPU just by having the apps open)

 

[Psyclism]

Run these commands in the terminal:

sudo pmset -c gpuswitch 2

sudo pmset -b gpuswitch 0

The -c switch tells the computer to autoswitch iGpu/dGpu when plugged in
The -b switch tells the computer to ALWAYS use integrated when on battery power (prevents the switch to dedicated)

 

[NeroAugustus]

Chrome is the bane of battery life. No idea why it's still the case when mobile devices are supposedly all the rage.

Anyone knows if Brave is as bad? It's chromium based so I'm not getting my hopes up.

 

[nlr]

Run these commands in the terminal:

sudo pmset -c gpuswitch 2

sudo pmset -b gpuswitch 0

The -c switch tells the computer to autoswitch iGpu/dGpu when plugged in
The -b switch tells the computer to ALWAYS use integrated when on battery power (prevents the switch to dedicated)

does using the iGpu always use less power than the dGpu on all tasks?

 

[Psyclism]

does using the iGpu always use less power than the dGpu on all tasks?

Integrated is power frugal. Discrete is very hungry.

 

[danwells]

Where the whole machine uses significantly under 10W on light tasks (typical office workload), the Radeon alone uses 15 or so even at minimum power - watch out for some app unexpectedly turning it on...

Of course, heavy use drains the battery really rapidly (but that's true of all workstation laptops - you should almost think of them as two machines - a nice laptop for basic office tasks on battery with a 10-hour battery life, plus a photo/video/graphics workstation that wants to be plugged in).

 

[Sowelu]

Run these commands in the terminal:

sudo pmset -c gpuswitch 2

sudo pmset -b gpuswitch 0

The -c switch tells the computer to autoswitch iGpu/dGpu when plugged in
The -b switch tells the computer to ALWAYS use integrated when on battery power (prevents the switch to dedicated)

Silly question, but... do you have to run these commands individually to initiate the behavior of each (in an either/or situation), or can you run them both at once so that both C and B are always activated?

 

[Psyclism]

Silly question, but... do you have to run these commands individually to initiate the behavior of each (in an either/or situation), or can you run them both at once so that both C and B are always activated?

Run them one after the other. Each command sets a different system flag. They're persistent once set. However, if you go into power options in Preferences and set the flag to autoswitch, it appears that these are reset to defaults.

Here are the flag options for pmset
-a - global (same behavior for charging and battery states)
-c - charging
-b - battery

Here are the possible options for gpuswitch
0 - integrated GPU only
1 - discrete GPU only
2 - autoswitch GPU


If you want to revert to default, run:
sudo pmset -a gpuswitch 2
which sets the global flag to autoswitch no matter which power source you're running on, replacing any individual power options set earlier.

 

[Sowelu]

Run them one after the other. Each command sets a different system flag. They're persistent once set. However, if you go into power options in Preferences and set the flag to autoswitch, it appears that these are reset to defaults.

Here are the flag options for pmset
-g - global (same behavior for charging and battery states)
-c - charging
-b - battery

Here are the possible options for gpuswitch
0 - integrated GPU only
1 - discrete GPU only
2 - autoswitch GPU


If you want to revert to default, run:
sudo pmset -g gpuswitch 2
which sets the global flag to autoswitch no matter which power source you're running on, replacing any individual power options set earlier.

Awesome, thank you!

 

[sat24]

does using the iGpu always use less power than the dGpu on all tasks?

When forcing iGpu always it seems like browsers end up using more CPU to do their thing so its not like u save a lot of energy (but u save some)

 

[joelhinch]

When forcing iGpu always it seems like browsers end up using more CPU to do their thing so its not like u save a lot of energy (but u save some)

This is incorrect. The dGPU IDLES at 15w, uses way more when in use. The CPU uses hardly anything more. So yeah. Massive saving.


Test case.
Chrome - 50% brightness - iGPU
12w system usage.

Same test - dGPU
30w system usage.

 

[am2am]

I have found something interesting which may impact battery life on MBP16. I have described it in a separate post: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/mbp-16-dgpu-always-active-when-two-users-are-logged-in.2215142/.

If you have multiple accounts/users on your machine - make sure you log-off all accounts and have active only the one you are working on. Your battery life will be better.

Long story short:
- single user on iGPU - average total power consumed (stat menus) ~7-15W with light work (safari)
- more than one user logged it - average total power consumed ~15-20W with the same light work.

The contributing factor here is the power drawn by dGPU (yes dedicated graphics despite laptop running on iGPU) - for single user it is ~ 0,05-0,07W, as soon as you have another user active in the background it is ~ 5W.

It looks like dGPU is active with multi accounts situation despite overall system reporting only iGPU active.
See below istats sensors reading in both cases - you can verify that in both cases system reports only iGPU active.

 

[am2am]

If you want to revert to default, run:
sudo pmset -g gpuswitch 2
which sets the global flag to autoswitch no matter which power source you're running on, replacing any individual power options set earlier.

I believe this should be
sudo pmset -a gpuswitch 2

 

[Psyclism]

I believe this should be
sudo pmset -a gpuswitch 2

You're right! My bad. Post revised. pmset -g shows current settings

 

[nlr]

I started using the app endurance and now can get 12-13 hours on the 16 macbook pro. its the perfect solution for me because I am not a pro user.

 

[MrGunnyPT]

Mine absolutely rocks out at 11h.

Unless I'm using parallels and other VMs solutions... otherwise it's 5-6h

 

[jkinsman]

Just got my Macbook pro and I was not using anything with the dPGU. I just had a terminal window open doing some copying of files. I went through 60% of the battery in one hour.

I sure hope things improve. That is a far cry from 11 hours. I am pretty sure my old 2011 macbook pro could beat that!

 

[topcat001]

With a few terminals open and Safari playing Netflix fullscreen I get a consistent estimate of 12 hrs, over a couple of hours, i.e. 2 hours later the estimate is 10 hrs remaining. This is pretty good! Of course if I do rapid page loading with Firefox the estimate is much lower.

 

[workerbee]

Just got my Macbook pro and I was not using anything with the dPGU. (…) I went through 60% of the battery in one hour.

It‘s almost certainly indexing stuff, and probably the Photos deamon is also going nuts. In a day or two, battery times should look much better (I hope, as I‘m tempted to get a 16“ to replace my rMBP which only gets 2-3 hours on a full battery charge)

 

[novo]

I was so disappointed when comparing your discharge percentages to my constant 23%, until I realized I was charging my phone, lol. Thought I'd share this facepalm moment with y'all.

 

[Francesco Cinque]

16'' - i9 2.3 - 16gb ram - Radeon 5500 - 1TB ssd
Catalina 10.15.2

I am experiencing a terrible battery life too. Using my Mac with regular tasks (like web browsing, mail etc) it is around 1% of battery usage every 2 minutes.. do de math to understand my battery life. I can also tell you that in 8 hrs of standby the battery have drained 7% of its charge.

So I went to the Apple store here in Milan (Italy) and the guy told me that I was basically his first case on a Mac Book Pro 16, because it's a new product. He also told me that he had no papers from Apple regarding this problem. He started the battery test using his iPad and the result was ok. Then he searched with me on the internet for other people having the same trouble and he came to this post, so I decide to share with you my experience too.

Oh, a couple of things:

- He told me to test if it was related to a certain app with a higher battery consumption, so we erased the Mac and restored to factory default. I've tested it for 6/8 hours, the problem was still here even with the Mac brand new "out of the box".

- He also told me to try to reset the battery, discharging until 0% (let the Mac shut down by itself) and then recharge to 100%. Same story here, the problem is still there.

I also don't know if Battery Health 3 is very reliable, because the app is telling me that I have 18hrs remaining after 5min of typing (while in the screenshot, 5 mins ago, was 20hrs). Oh, display brightness 35%


This is not my first Macbook, I had a white unibody in 2013 and an Air in 2016... but I never, ever, experienced such a terrible battery.. It's like a windows laptop, probably worst compared to a Dell XPS.

 

[cybeross]

2.4 8-core 32gb ram 8gb video - While backup and sync was running I watched it go from 100% to 0 in no more than an hour, tops.

Now it says ~7hrs from full charge with basically nothing happening. I also feel like when it's napping it's using too much battery as well. I believe spotlight has finished, backup and sync has finished, but at first glance it appears that battery life might be quite bad...

Hopefully it levels off in a few days, but just providing another data point!

 

[Glockworkorange]

I am lucky to get 4hrs. All i do is use Outlook, surf the web and use slack. How is this OK? Surely, there will be a software update to rectify this. This can't be normal?

I don't wan't to send the machine back, its great otherwise -- but, a 4hr battery life is just unusable.

I have a similar set of work for a good chunk of the day and I am getting 10 hours. Are you using Chrome? Because that will slay battery.
[automerge]1576385355[/automerge]

is 10 hours realistic with web browsing, videos and slack?

For me, yes, assuming I use Safari. Chrome cuts it to 5.5 or 6

 

[Francesco Cinque]

Is anyone returning his Macbook? Or do you suggest to keep it? I'm a little bit confused to be honest. I love the laptop but this battery duration.. Here in Italy I have 14 days for the returning and I want to be sure that the problem will be fixed