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Comment by symfoniq | Hacker News Reader

A co-worker who upgraded last week to a 2016 MacBook Pro from a 2013 is complaining about battery life, too. He used to get 10+ hours and now he's lucky to get six.

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Having owned MacBooks/PowerBooks/iBooks in various configurations over the past 15 or so years, what models were getting real-life 10 hour lifetimes, and while doing what? I've never seen anything near that on anything I've owned before.

Likewise, I've owned a huge number of mac laptops since the titanium PowerBook and I don't think I ever managed to get more than 4-5hr of real work use (adobe suite etc) I've always been confused by these 10hr claims and have never expected more than 4-5

I could get around 10 hours on my 2013 MacBook Pro doing mostly Web development in a text editor with the screen brightness set fairly low. My coworker is a writer, so he's not using Adobe CS or anything like that.

If you just use a laptop for ssh the battery life will be really epic.

I get 10-11 hours from my 2014 13" mbp, usually running safari, mail and atom.

It depends what model you have. I had a 2015 15" rMBP with discrete GPU, and I typically got 5-6 hours with my usage pattern (Chrome, Outlook, Terminal, Sublime Text, doing most of my development locally but running code on cloud servers in AWS).

At my new job, I only got a 2015 13" rMBP without discrete GPU, and I now get 8-10 hours with the same workload. It's because I don't have to power as big of a screen and a discrete GPU.

Workload matters, but discrete GPU and larger screen also matter, a lot.

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