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Comment by themagician | Hacker News Reader

I don't have one of the new ones (yet), and maybe it's just me, but I find the battery life to be completely bananas for the few week or so after a reinstall. Even more so today with iCloud. The amount of background downloading and indexing for iDrive, iCloud, Photos, etc. is bananas for the first week. I recently re-installed on my older MacBook Air and the battery life was like 1.5-4 hours for the first week or so. Now it seems back to the normal range.

I wonder how people are really testing the battery life on these? It seems the only fair way to do it is not log into anything.

Maybe what macOS really needs is a system preference like, "Disable background tasks when running on battery."

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I have a full 200 gig icloud drive filled with photos and when I got my 2016 macbook earlier this year it took a couple weeks for it to finally finish processing everything. Here I thought the point of having all the images in the cloud was so the devices didn't have to process all the images every time you re-install/get a new device. Is it really too much to ask for photos to simply pull images only on demand and not try to download as much as it can if there's space available?

This laptop is supposed to have an "all day battery" but in reality I only get 5-6 hours of fairly lightweight usage.

This fits with what I've seen. Got the new 15" a few weeks ago, and transferred my old system over to it. Battery life was 5 hours at best, usually less (actual usage, not estimated). But then just a day or two ago I'm suddenly getting 8-9 hours with no problem, no change in usage or applications. I don't have much data in iCloud either, as far as I know.

If it is related to background indexing, I'm surprised that there doesn't seem to be much visibility into it. None of the Activity Monitor tabs or tools such as htop revealed any particular heavy CPU/disk usage to which I could attribute the poor battery life.

I've noticed mds (the spotlight indexer) will occasionally, and randomly peg one or more cores on my machine. It seems to come in fits and starts, but it's definitely a battery hog when it's running.

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