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Comment by patryn20 | Hacker News Reader

Based on my (admittedly unusual) workloads, the effective charge time of the 2016 is awful. I already only get 4-5 hours out of a 2014 MBP. I bought a 2016 and only managed 3 1/2 hours. Maybe they've improved that with some software fixes, but it's still a non starter. So I returned it.

I know I'm not a typical user, but I get much better battery life (with lower productivity) out of my windows laptop. Which was not the case when I switched to Macs years back.

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Are you controlling for the screen having a higher maximum brightness?

I thought I was getting much worse battery life on my new MBP compared to my old one, but then I paid attention to screen brightness - when I level match the screens to the same level of brightness, I get the same battery life as my older one.

I'm used to just jamming the screen to 100% brightness, so I've had to get used to keep it around 70% or so.

To be honest no, I didn't. But I also don't generally change my screen brightness. So I'm not sure I ever even checked what it was at on the 2016.

The new display gets a lot brighter, and physics means it'll take power to do it. At full brightness most of the idle power usage is running the backlight.

Mac laptops these days are built with backlights strong enough to compete with daylight. In typical working conditions, 100% is way overkill.

For max long term comfort, your display should be no brighter than the ambient light levels. Otherwise--if the display is way brighter--your pupils will have to contract when you look at the screen, and dilate when you look away. Your pupils are controlled by muscles and like any muscles, they can get tired.

I have a 2012 MacBook Air and I rarely have the brightness over 50% indoors. And the new MacBook Pros have way brighter screens.

Sitting in my living room right now, my iPhone is at about 15% brightness.

In a dark room I find the minimum brightness much too bright. Weird feature to wish for, but I think they need to crank the minimum brightness down by at least 25%.

I've wanted a "lower minimum brightness" option on every apple product I've owned... with the exception of an iPod shuffle which has no screen.

That's surprising. I actually think it's too dark, and always find myself cranking up the brightness everytime I switch workplaces.

He means in a dark room at night. I have the same complaint. When all other lights are turned off at night, the MacBook Pro screen, at minimum brightness, is still way too bright for my taste.

Check out brightness control:

http://www.splasm.com/brightnesscontrol/index.html

It works as long as I disable flux.

You can hold option-shift while adjusting the brightness (or volume) to get quarter increments. However it looks like it doesn't have any effect below the 1st level for brightness.

If you open System Preferences, it has a handy little brightness slider. Just Option-<brightness> opens the right pane.

Flux should help in those dark situations :-)

Agreed. There is a setting that inverts colors, which darkens most text areas in websites and apps. It screws up pictures though, obviously.

Same here. It was weird at first, but now I almost always use ~70-80% screen brightness now. Going full brightness starts to hurt if you're in a dark room too.

I had the same experience. I bought a 2016 MacBook Pro and with my usual work load of a VM, IDE and browser with 20+ tabs open battery life was worse than my 2011 MBP with its original battery. So I returned it. First apple return in 23 years.

I get a pretty good runtime out of my 12" MB, and, I found that the tools Apple provides to diagnose power usage were pretty god. Every time I see a complaint like this I always wonder what the cause is...

My particular crime? Heavy VM use with multiple concurrent OSes and server processes.

Huh. I develop on a beefy server, and give everyone who works with me beefy servers, too.

I'm often highly mobile with unreliable connectivity (think back country Alaska/Washington/Missouri/etc). Remoting is not a reliable option while traveling. Now when I'm working from home, I have other workstations I can connect to. And if the connectivity on the road is decent, I do have equipment I can connect to.

However I generally find my most productive workflow is all local. Which is why I was doubly disappointed by the lack of upgrades to 7th gen i7 and 32GB of RAM. The battery life loss under load was just the straw that broke the camel's back.

Have you ever considered carrying a battery? You have the classic use-case for having one.

Actually I have been looking to buy one for extra on the road capacity. Really I'm just trying to decide what my work machine(s) will be moving forward. I think I'm going to limp by with my current MBPro and Dell Precision combo until the next MBPro refresh is out.

Not sure what OSes you are using... but in the past, running a windows VM would be the main power drain of any laptop I'm using.

When I run Windows in Parallels it DESTROYS battery life. I'm lucky to get 2 to 2 1/2 hours on my current MBP if I have my full toolchain and Windows running.

what brand/model is the windows laptop? they are usually worse than mbp in battery life so i'm curious.

You mean the battery life is less than for the previous generation, or that it takes longer to charge?

While Apple seems to improve idle power efficiency, not much is or can be done about high CPU workloads, but decreasing battery capacity doesn't help at all.

My 2012 MPBr shows ~94Wh capacity from System Report. I know they've changed battery sizes several times since then - down to ~75Wh, then more again.

That's actual life. I never manage more than five hours while working on my current 2014 MBP 15". The loss of additional time under load on the 2016 was a deal killer for me.

Are you using VMWare Fusion by chance? I've noticed lately in my 2 year old MacBook Pro that it just slays the battery when running, even when VMs are idle.

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