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Comment by SCdF | Hacker News Reader

To clarify, are you saying that your 3 year old 2015 laptop has, today, better battery life than your new 2018 laptop? That's mad...

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To those of you that complain about battery life. I noticed that using Safari as my browser gives me almost an hour extra compared to Firefox. To me it seems that newer CPU may be more efficient overall, but they seem to consume more power under medium to heavy load.

My front-end dev colleague used to tell me to use a "proper" browser (i.e. Chrome) because I favoured Safari and even with DevTools. I said it gives me more battery life on a MacBook!

The 2015 15" had a 100Wh battery, the 2018 has an 83Wh battery. The 2015 gets better battery life because it has 20% more battery capacity.

That would make sense if they had the same hardware. Different hardware absorbs different current. You cannot deduce anything from battery size.

I've had the pleasure of upgrading from a 2015 to a 2017. The battery life on the latter is definitely worse, no matter what the official specs say.

I concur.

It is, but I haven't found it to be significantly worse. About an hour less.

Many people would describe an hour's difference to be a "significant" change, especially when a scale of around 10 hours total battery life is being considered.

Sure, but considering the "fudge factor" that Apple often applies for their battery life estimates ("casual browsing", etc.) an hour isn't all that much.

Yeah I went from 2014 to 2017, and went from broadly not worrying about doing 6 hours of solid dev work without thinking about battery to essentially never feeling comfortable away from a plug.

I'd guesstimate I get at most 3 hours on the 2017 before the battery level gets low enough I have to start planning where I'll next plug in. Not ideal.

part of the issue is if you have anything other than textedit open, the discrete GPU is on hoovering up all your watt-hours.

I think decaying batteries might drive people to get new machines? Just a suspicion. They do it with iphones :p

It’s certainly an incentive to upgrade, but only if the newer model is a clear upgrade...

I suspect that Apple will be seeing a lot of 2015 MBPs brought in for battery replacements...

All batteries decay.

That's kinda the point... Instead of using more energy efficient new gen CPU to add ~3 hours of life, Apple used it to make the already perfect laptop insignificantly thinner and lighter by reducing the battery size.

> You cannot deduce anything from battery size.

physics might have a word with you :)

I wonder if the touchbar is also doing significant drains on the battery.

This isn't my experience at all, I have a 2015, a 2017 and 2018 MacBook pros. The 17 isn't all that tbh and I only have it because they replaced my 16 model. The battery isn't all that and the keyboard is a big dodgy. The 2018 though is absolutely fine, the battery is great and the keyboard has been fine the whole time. I have to use the 2015 for one of my contracts and Im always glad to get back to the 2018.

I just replaced the battery in my Early 2015 MacBook Pro Retina 13.

When it was new i would regularly get ~12 hours of light usage from it (safari, email, terminal, VPN, citrix, remote desktop). It has been providing around 8-9 hours steadily for the past year or so. I finally noticed when placed flat on a table it wasn't sitting flat, and the battery was swollen.

Now with a new battery we're back to 12+ hours of light usage.

i had a 2016 mbp, and it had (IIRC) ~7000mAh battery. My 2015 mbp had ~8800mAh. The battery itself was smaller in the 2016 model, presumably for thin/weight.

Those numbers can't be right. That's only double what an iphone has.

Different voltages

mAh is not a measure of energy; Apple says the Macbooks have about 54 watt-hours, whereas an iPhone has between 6 and 10.

My old 2015 MacBook Pro without a discrete GPU had amazing battery life. I'd get at least 8 hours, and over 10 if I wanted to sacrifice some of the brightness and turn bluetooth off. I got upgraded to the discrete GPU model and I could get at most 6 to 7 hours for the same workload.

Nowadays, you can't even get a 15 inch MacBook Pro without a discreet GPU.

You can stop the OS from switching to the discrete GPU using an app like gfxCardStatus

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