Miserable Battery Life on 2016 MacBook Pro with Radeon Pro 460 | Hacker News Reader

Miserable Battery Life on 2016 MacBook Pro with Radeon Pro 460

eatupmartha.com

15 pointsasd24 comments

The 2016 MacBook Pro (15-inch) has a 76.0-watt-hour lithium-polymer battery. The AMD Radeon Pro 460 has a TDP of 35W and will have to run at close to full power to fill a Retina display's 5 million pixels at reasonable frame rates (running with less-than-optimal OpenGL drivers; Civ VI doesn't support Apple's "Metal"). The 2.6Ghz "Skylake" i7 (i7-6700HQ) has a TDP of 45W that won't be maxed, but there's also display backlight, WiFi and some other stuff to be powered. So yeah, one hour seems reasonable.

At this point it seems "My MBP 15" has sucky battery life" or "The new MBP sucks!" is a karma gold mine -- I actually own a tbMBP 15" and haven't had any battery nor functionality issues with it. It's an all day programming device for me and suits that purpose very well.

Whole day? How many hours of running battery do you consider whole day?

My 15 dies somewhere between 3 and 4 hours (Java/C++ dev) and the lack of battery capacity is very noticeable (previous 15 with nVidia ran for about 5 hours)

I program in eclipse and get all day battery life.

I'm just using vim and spotify and get like 4 hours of battery life. I really do think some MBP's have faulty batteries and it's not a software issue. My 13" 2014 MBP gives me 7+ hours under the same workload.

Do an exchange. I program using eclipse and get all day battery life.

Sure, but I'm not a masochist :P

[jaw hits floor] I'd like to see a timelampse of this. It's not that I don't trust you, but I find it hard to believe that a new battery could safely discharge that quickly. Also, for your next test, keep playing until your machine fully dies. Maybe the low battery warning is faulty. Worth as shot.

I can corroborate; I have the new 15", 2.6Ghz version and spent the weekend before last playing Civ while travelling. With the brightness settings on low, native resolution and all game settings on low, it took 1 hour and 26 minutes for it to go from 100% to shutting itself off.

I was just as surprised as you are. The laptop got uncomfortably hot as well. I was very disappointed and had to purchase an inverter on the road to use my adapter.

This is nothing new though... Every laptop I've owned (including many PowerBooks and MacBook Pros) has gotten about 1-2 hours when playing a game that maxed the GPU and CPU. How does a ~80-100Watt hour battery get more than 1-2 hours of running a ~40-50W CPU and 30-40W GPU? Physics says no.

I'd be more inclined to agree with you, if my last MacBook has compatible performance. I got easily double the playtime out of my MacBook Pro Retina.

Oh, there's plenty of batteries that can discharge quickly. You have to see my Clevo laptop. With an i7 6700k and a GTX 1070 in there, the 100Wh+ battery lasts less than an hour...

LiPo packs that can discharge their rated capacity in just a few minutes have been around for a few years. They're typically used in things like RC helicopters: http://www.tested.com/tech/502351-rc-battery-guide-basics-li...

That's pretty typical for windows laptops when you play games. Or at least it used to be. Still not good though.

While of course there needs to be a review about a possible bug in the software/hardware implementation of the new MacBook Pros, one just needs to divide the battery capacity of the machine by its TDP to get a lower bound for the battery life - so one hour is not off for a machine as powerful as the MacBook Pro. I am using the 2015 version. It has a larger battery - 99 Wh, but still, depending on the software, I can use it up in 1-2 hours easily. Of course, on less taxing loads I do get around the advertised run times.

So then the trade-off seems to be, don't use all of the hardware you paid for, and the battery will last for a while, or use all of it and it will die out in an hour. Its weird to have such an extreme tradeoff for a pro device that's meant to be used as such. How long before the OS throttles the CPU like a mobile OS when you use "too much" CPU?

If only these Macbooks came with a dongle to connect to some source of electricity! But nooo – Apple just had to remove this "MagSafe" connector! I have no idea how they can call this a "Pro"! I've been in this business for a long time, and I know very many very professional professionals, and they are all moving to Linux to play Civ VI.

But we're beyond wires now. Moving away from wired headphones, certainly no wired ethernet because that's only for those filthy non-professionals, I figure they would have designed it so you can squeeze 3 hours out of it like the competition. But maybe they want us professionals to take more breaks, because we're working too hard, because you know.. we're professionals using a professional device.

Fun fact: Louis Rossman tested that and he showed that they don't really throttle back. They just run balls-to-the-wall at 90C or 99C depending on what was tested. Dont be surprised when heavily used machines (in terms of actual power used, not standing around for 10 hours/day with text editor open) will start failing quickly

Sorry I don't know who that is. Link?

this[0] is the video from Louis Rossman that the grandparent was talking about.

0. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JCCvEzqDq8U

Unless several other games exhibit this issue, I'd consider this to be an issue with Civ VI.

I'd bet that this same program eats the battery of any Mac, hence it being a Civ issue, not a Mac issue.

Call me on this if I'm wrong.

So what's the battery life like on the same test with the last gen MBP?

My 15" 2013 with discrete graphics has 95Whr battery but can't run civ VI on a decent frame rate without going into strategic view (which reduces graphics load somewhat). In that mode I've been able to get ~ 2 hours maybe just a hair under the last time I tried it on a flight.

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