3

I have disabled Hibernation mode and Deep Sleep mode, I also keep the charger plugged in about a week before removing it if I want to go somewhere with the laptop.

I don't know if this is normal, but I realised that my battery started draining faster recently. I usually have 6-8 hours of time on battery for web-browsing, youtubing, a bit of programming and nothing really power intensive. GFX-status usually displays i for integrated GPU usage. However I recently started getting 4-5 hours maximum.

Why is this happening ? is it the lifetime of the battery starting to decrease ? I purchased this laptop over summer (one the first batches the retina macbooks were released). So it's not really that old. Can anyone provide a possible explanation to this phenomenon ?

Community
  • 1
Render
  • 7,157
  • I got my Retina MBP around the same time as you and the battery is working fine. How many cycles? What is the battery charge capacity / cycle count in System Information -> Power (about this mac - more info -> System Report -> Power) – glenstorey Mar 13 '13 at 04:51

4 Answers4

1

Reboot. Create a new user. Try.

If the battery life is still short after a couple of days under a new account and there's nothing weird. Take it back to an Apple store. They will run the hardware test and determine if there's a problem with the battery. Be nice to them. Explain them that you know what you're doing, that this is unusual, that you know how to take care of a battery, that it suddenly started happening and that you would like for a Genius to take a look at it.

I did that with my Macbook Air 11 (with a 8 month old battery that just died out of nowhere) and they kindly replaced it.

Better safe than sorry.

Martin Marconcini
  • 21,864
0

Keep an eye on the Activity Monitor for processes that are hanging on the CPU. For instance, yesterday I noticed that the battery was draining very fast, only to find out that Evernote was constantly consuming 35% of the CPU power while in full screen. I quit Evernote and my battery went back to normal.

Also, try disabling Flash - it has quite some impact on the battery time.

Lastly, don't forget to be frugal on the power hungry functions: Keep the brightness low, disable Bluetooth when not needed and do the same with the keyboard lights.

Emil
  • 151
0

Consider trying or buying the excellent utility Watts. I've been running it on my last few MBPs (no Retina models, yet) and have found its helped prolong my batteries' lifespans.

da4
  • 5,675
  • How exactly did it manage to prolong battery's lifespan ? – Render Feb 06 '13 at 17:53
  • It may be helping because Apple does not recommend keeping your battery plugged in for long periods of time, and this app encourages you to run it down. (Note that I have no experience with this app). See http://www.apple.com/batteries/notebooks.html for more info – jalynn2 Feb 06 '13 at 18:38
  • I don't think Watt's increases lifespan - it just helps calibrate the battery so the estimates of life left / time till flat are more accurate. – glenstorey Mar 13 '13 at 04:48
0

I'm not sure that having Deep Sleep or Hibernation mode would dramatically affect your battery life. My understanding of Hibernation is that it is a complete shut down, with the contents of memory written to hard disk. I think using anything other than the default sleep settings (particularly settings that you need Terminal to change) is asking for trouble.

I'd be interested to see what your current batter capacity / charge cycles are - if there is a physical fault with the battery you may be able to see it there. Have a look in About this mac - more info -> System Report -> Power.

Here are some things you can try before taking it in to your nearest service centre:

Because batteries are based on chemicals they can fault before they should, but there are often software based issues that are causing an otherwise healthy battery to drain more quickly then it should.

glenstorey
  • 2,846