Out of curiosity, is the battery that is showing the lower mAh manufactured by Simplo, and the other (overstated one) manufactured by DSY?
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Battery Life on MacBook Pro 16.
- Thread starter Nikita Zelenyuk
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Out of curiosity, is the battery that is showing the lower mAh manufactured by Simplo, and the other (overstated one) manufactured by DSY?
Yes the 95% health and lower capacity is manufactured by SMP and the other one is DSY.
Both on battery at mo low one says 8 1/2 remaining and other says 16h remaining both doing nothing with same config.
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This is screen shot of higher capacity (DSY)
![Screenshot 2020-01-08 at 12.26.05.png]( "Screenshot 2020-01-08 at 12.26.05.png")
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and this is screen shot of lower capacity (SMP)
![Screenshot 2020-01-08 at 12.28.35.png]( "Screenshot 2020-01-08 at 12.28.35.png")
Both on battery at mo low one says 8 1/2 remaining and other says 16h remaining both doing nothing with same config.
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This is screen shot of higher capacity (DSY)
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and this is screen shot of lower capacity (SMP)
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I returned the first MBP16" because of the short battery life. I received a new one in the end of December and its just as bad 
Its even draining during the night when its in sleep mode. I have not been doing any very heavy work during this time. only indesign, photoshop, illustrator.. I use safari and not many open sites at the same time.
Its even draining during the night when its in sleep mode. I have not been doing any very heavy work during this time. only indesign, photoshop, illustrator.. I use safari and not many open sites at the same time.
I like ot use iStatMenu as my starting point. You can see the instantaneous power draw from CPU and GPU. That can help you pinpoint what is drawing power.
![1579173986658.png]( "1579173986658.png")
Possible issues can be connected equipment that draws power from the MBP or the GPU being activated by the Adobe SW. This can easily increase the power draw to 30 - 40 W which with a 100 Wh battery will bring down the battery life to 2 - 3 hours. These effects you will not see in the Activity Monitor.
Possible issues can be connected equipment that draws power from the MBP or the GPU being activated by the Adobe SW. This can easily increase the power draw to 30 - 40 W which with a 100 Wh battery will bring down the battery life to 2 - 3 hours. These effects you will not see in the Activity Monitor.
You may want to have a play with disabling turbo boost? I do this when I'm out and about to get better battery life - there's some compromise on performance though.
I think it's okay now. I never reset PRAM or SMC or any of that. Not a big believer in those things as panaceas.
We just bought a second MBP (2019) 16 inch, let's see if this one has the same initial growing pains, but as far as mine battery life seems fine now.
We just bought a second MBP (2019) 16 inch, let's see if this one has the same initial growing pains, but as far as mine battery life seems fine now.
Assuming you've checked the Sys Prefs Energy Saver settings, the most likely culprits are:
1) Apps keeping it awake. Check the "Preventing Sleep" column on the Energy tab in Activity Monitor.
2) Sub-optimal PMSET settings.
Before you let it sleep next, close all your apps and then verify in Activity Monitor that there is nothing that will prevent sleep. If it's still giving poor performance then I would double check your sysprefs and then check with PMSET to get more details.
I have had large battery discharge overnight before (not on a 16") and using PMSET I was able to resolve it. It went from losing 20% - 35% overnight to losing 3%-6%.
The battery life with my 16" has been pretty great, even with Chrome and all its Electron friends (VS Code etc); getting 8 hours+.
However there have been a few times where I've got half of that, and those seem to be tied to the discrete graphics/Radeon getting stuck on. Even though Activity Monitor claims its on Integrated Graphics, checking iStat Menus shows "Radeon High Side" still drawing 5W. Quitting Chrome and Chrome-related apps results in the Radeon dropping back down to 0.1W and then I can relaunch Chrome etc and it stays powered-off and I get double the battery life. It's a workaround but annoying to have to monitor and wrangle this.
However there have been a few times where I've got half of that, and those seem to be tied to the discrete graphics/Radeon getting stuck on. Even though Activity Monitor claims its on Integrated Graphics, checking iStat Menus shows "Radeon High Side" still drawing 5W. Quitting Chrome and Chrome-related apps results in the Radeon dropping back down to 0.1W and then I can relaunch Chrome etc and it stays powered-off and I get double the battery life. It's a workaround but annoying to have to monitor and wrangle this.
The same is with more than one user/account logged in. Despite showing only integrated card Radeon draws 5W. As soon as you leave only one user/account logged it power goes down to 0.1W. I've learned to logout other users which gives me ~30% more battery time. I hope apple fix it with future updates.
Thanks for pointing that out. Was pondering utilising multiple accounts -- my "work" account and my "personal" account, so I could better separate my life/work. This basically says that's broken... :-(
yes - I was posting it before. Look at istats data below.
I have circled in red that system is reporting integrated GPU only and with second account logged in Raden power draw jumps from 0,1W to ~5W. If you look at total power it is obvious your battery life goes down significantly with more than 1 user logged in.
If I work with only 1 user I can easily get 8-9 hours of battery, with multiple accounts this drops to 5h
Have installed iStat Menus. Bit annoyed that the (cr)App store version doesn't have fan control, but at least it doesn't have the irrelevant weather nonsense.
My "Radeon High Side" is drawing 5W. Rebooting brought it down to 0.1W. Nice. So slowly starting up my applications and the culprit surpisingly wasn't MS orofice and neither the hideous MS Teams crapp...
It was VMWare (used for ASP.NET development). Found a setting on the VM to "Always use high performance graphics". The Mac Activity Monitor shows "integrated graphics". iStatMenus shows that the Radion's burning my battery, so Activity Monitor's lying.
Rebooting the VM and turning that graphics setting off yields no change in performance whatsoever (only gamers and 3D design applications need high performance graphics), but now not triggering the high current Radeon.
Looking forwards to having more than 4 hours of battery life.
Thanks
My "Radeon High Side" is drawing 5W. Rebooting brought it down to 0.1W. Nice. So slowly starting up my applications and the culprit surpisingly wasn't MS orofice and neither the hideous MS Teams crapp...
It was VMWare (used for ASP.NET development). Found a setting on the VM to "Always use high performance graphics". The Mac Activity Monitor shows "integrated graphics". iStatMenus shows that the Radion's burning my battery, so Activity Monitor's lying.
Rebooting the VM and turning that graphics setting off yields no change in performance whatsoever (only gamers and 3D design applications need high performance graphics), but now not triggering the high current Radeon.
Looking forwards to having more than 4 hours of battery life.
Thanks
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Have installed iStat Menus. Bit annoyed that the (cr)App store version doesn't have fan control, but at least it doesn't have the irrelevant weather nonsense.
My "Radeon High Side" is drawing 5W. Rebooting brought it down to 0.1W. Nice. So slowly starting up my applications and the culprit surpisingly wasn't MS orofice and neither the hideous MS Teams crapp...
It was VMWare (used for ASP.NET development). Found a setting on the VM to "Always use high performance graphics". The Mac Activity Monitor shows "integrated graphics". iStatMenus shows that the Radion's burning my battery, so Activity Monitor's lying.
Rebooting the VM and turning that graphics setting off yields no change in performance whatsoever (only gamers and 3D design applications need high performance graphics), but now not triggering the high current Radeon.
Looking forwards to having more than 4 hours of battery life.
Thanks
Seriously, rather than spend hours trying to fight with applications that are unnecessarily requesting hardware acceleration, just run this command in terminal:
sudo pmset -b gpuswitch 0 This completely disables the dGpu when you're on battery. Even if an application calls for it, it won't turn on. In fact, it won't even turn on when you connect an external display.
I've been running my machines with this setting for two months and have had absolutely no issues and consistently get 8-10 hours of battery life doing stuff, even when I have 20+ Chrome tabs open.
This was one of the first thing I tried when I saw that "Radeon High Side" was stuck drawing 5W, and it didn't make a difference. It still kept pulling 5W power to "Radeon High Side". The problem is that part of the system doesn't even realise that its using the discrete GPU (i.e. Activity Monitor shows integrated).
It might work if I never needed the Radeon on to begin with, but I have to have it on when it's on AC power in clamshell mode and connected to an external display, and then I want it to reliably switch off when on battery power. It's a transition back to "off" that it fumbles and I hope they fix in 10.15.3.
Yep, nothing. If you're going to plug into a monitor but still run on battery, simply run the same command again but set the gpuswitch value to 2 instead, which reverts to the standard factory setting. Or better yet plug the laptop in, since you're going to be near power anyway, and the default plugged in profile will kick in allowing the dGPU to enable.
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I have no idea if this is a solution for the dual login issue, and unfortunately it sounds like it isn't. However, this setting only affects the gpu switching when the laptop is on battery. When it's plugged in it uses a different profile and the dGPU will switch as expected. I use it like this every single day - external Cinema Display when plugged in to my desk, but laptop screen only (and dGPU disabled) for use on the go or on the couch. I haven't felt the need or had a reason to modify these settings since the day I set them.
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Weird, tried it right now and it gave the problem:
- Had it connected in clamshell mode to a DisplayPort over US monitor with USB-PD (Dell U3219Q), driven by the Radeon
- Ran pmset to disable the discrete GPU when in battery mode
- Unplugged the USB cable. Waited to ensure the computer was sleeping properly.
- Opened up the lid, checked Activity Monitor:
- and iStat Menu
- which shows that it's still powering the Radeon.
- Then I quit Chrome (no change), then Postman (no change), and finally VS Code and then it dropped to 0.16W
- I did not have to quit Parallels even though Activity Monitor showed that as the only thing with "Graphics Card: Yes".
- I relaunched Chrome, Postman and VS Code and it remains at 0.13W.
Attachments
Nope
As others reported the problem remains. The system reports MBP use internal GPU so the settings forced in terminal works fine, but Radeon High Side is taking 5W..
I've been running that mode for weeks but still had the infernal short battery life -- now obvious that it's caused by the Radion remaining on despite the OS thinking it's off.
Interestingly, after the joy and excitement of discovering the culprit for keeping the Radion burning 5 Watts (VMWare), turning off it's setting meant reducing the Radion to a couple of hundred milliWatts.
Alas this has now changed to 2 Watts when on battery, so very much the same symptoms that @am2am describes. Strange that it's 2 Watts and not 5 Watts.
Finally, this problem seems to be solved for me.
My battery life was around 3.5 - 4 hours of light use. Activity monitor estimations were always in the same way. I decided not to make important changes to the configuration because if Apple says battery should last 11 hours, I understand that I should get 11 hours using standard configuration.
What I did notice was the computer getting hot and fans running noisy during the first days. After some days, those behaviors became less frequent, so I thought the system was finishing all of those under-the-hood setup processes. Anyway, battery life was still in the 3.5 hour range.
Then I decided to start looking a way to solve my battery issue. After several software updates, uninstalls, computer restarts, and so, nothing really changed, and it was time to start playing with system resets.
After performing a SMC reset, things started looking different. At first, activity monitor estimated that the battery remaining would last 5 hours. A small improvement. But that number started to increase quickly to 6, 7, 8 hours... It finally stopped at 18 hours! Of course, something should be wrong, but since the largest number I had before was 4 hours, I thought there should be some kind of real improvement.
I made some light work on the Mac, and battery consumption kept congruent with those numbers.
After that I fully recharged my battery. I used it for 1.5 hours discharging 3% of the battery. The computer lost another 1% overnight, so it was 96% at the morning. After some work, it is now at 91%, and Activity Monitor says it will last for another 12:56.
I know I have to test it under more demanding work conditions, but at least it seems like I'm going to get those 11 hours finally.
This is the process I used to perform the reset. I hope it brings good news to others.
support.apple.com
My battery life was around 3.5 - 4 hours of light use. Activity monitor estimations were always in the same way. I decided not to make important changes to the configuration because if Apple says battery should last 11 hours, I understand that I should get 11 hours using standard configuration.
What I did notice was the computer getting hot and fans running noisy during the first days. After some days, those behaviors became less frequent, so I thought the system was finishing all of those under-the-hood setup processes. Anyway, battery life was still in the 3.5 hour range.
Then I decided to start looking a way to solve my battery issue. After several software updates, uninstalls, computer restarts, and so, nothing really changed, and it was time to start playing with system resets.
After performing a SMC reset, things started looking different. At first, activity monitor estimated that the battery remaining would last 5 hours. A small improvement. But that number started to increase quickly to 6, 7, 8 hours... It finally stopped at 18 hours! Of course, something should be wrong, but since the largest number I had before was 4 hours, I thought there should be some kind of real improvement.
I made some light work on the Mac, and battery consumption kept congruent with those numbers.
After that I fully recharged my battery. I used it for 1.5 hours discharging 3% of the battery. The computer lost another 1% overnight, so it was 96% at the morning. After some work, it is now at 91%, and Activity Monitor says it will last for another 12:56.
I know I have to test it under more demanding work conditions, but at least it seems like I'm going to get those 11 hours finally.
This is the process I used to perform the reset. I hope it brings good news to others.
Reset the SMC of your Mac - Apple Support
The SMC is responsible for managing power on your Mac. Resetting it can resolve certain uncommon issues related to power or thermal management.
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"Radeon high side" circa 5W - a reason?
I use the 16" primarily with Cinema Displays at home and in the office, occasionally as a laptop.
When the Radeon high side's running at zero(ish) the battery lasts a long time. When running at 5W with no external monitor connected and allegedly running on internal monitor, the battery life's less than 5h.
Working on the sofa whilst watching the telly; noticed it was at 5W. So closed a couple of VMWare VMs and quit VMWare. It then dropped to zero Watts. Hmm.
Now showing more than 11 hours battery life!
Need to keep an eye on this. Wouldn't be the first time VMWare's the problem.
I use the 16" primarily with Cinema Displays at home and in the office, occasionally as a laptop.
When the Radeon high side's running at zero(ish) the battery lasts a long time. When running at 5W with no external monitor connected and allegedly running on internal monitor, the battery life's less than 5h.
Working on the sofa whilst watching the telly; noticed it was at 5W. So closed a couple of VMWare VMs and quit VMWare. It then dropped to zero Watts. Hmm.
Now showing more than 11 hours battery life!
Need to keep an eye on this. Wouldn't be the first time VMWare's the problem.