MacBook Pro :: Maximizing Battery Life On Late 2011?
May 17, 2012
I know - or think I recall - that there was a user's tips article on maximizing battery life. When I'm outdoors with my MBP, I always have Photoshop CS6, InDesign CS6, Illustrator CS6, Acrobat Pro X, Parallels Desktop, MS Word and maybe a few 'little' apps running. I need these to get my projects done. I can usually get about 3 1/2 hours out of my battery but if I could get 5, I'd be happy.Â
Can anyone point me in the right direction for the most current (at least 2011) user tip on the topic?
I just bought a 13" MBP which I know has some clever battery technology built in. I also know that the overall life of some rechargeable batteries is lengthened by ensuring they are regularly fully discharged and recharged instead of keeping them charged to a maximum at all times. Does anyone know whether the overall life of the MCP's innovative battery is maximized by adopting the same policy?
I have a MacBook and my strategy is to keep it plugged in as much as possible to avoid using charge cycles. If I use it down to 50%, then get home, I'll plug it in so I've only used half a cycle. Then when I'm just using it around the house, I try to keep it plugged in.
My friend has a completely different strategy. At the Apple Store, one of the salesmen told him that he should use it down to almost nothing and then charge it back up again. He would never plug it in at 50%, but wait until it is 10% or less. He gave me this analogy: if you have a bottle of milk in the refrigerator and you have a cow outside, you refill the bottle when it is empty. If you keep refilling the bottle when it is only half empty, that milk is going to go bad. He really doesn't understand how it works himself, but said something about the battery's memory? I never imagined that a battery would have its own little memory or something, but now that he mentioned it, it does seem reasonable.
i just ordered a late 2008 macbook pro 15 with the dual GPUs (9400m and 9600m GT) and I'm a little worried about the battery life.
-What can I expect if just doing normal every day stuff (web surfing mostly?)
-does watching a movie off of the hard disk use less battery than watching it off a DVD? Is there a big difference?
I'm not a big gamer but would like to have the horsepower to play a game should one come out that I want. I'm also not a big traveler so battery times are only of average importance.
Basically, I'm asking if I made a good purchase considering I have only average concerns for both battery and game performance. They had the new 7 hour battery 15" macbook pro for the same price but it doesn't have the dual GPUs.
I'm running a late 2008 Macbook Pro with OS 10.6.4. The battery life is terrible. Like, in the hour and fifteen minute range on a full charge. I've tried turning everything off, wifi, bluetooth, screen brightness down and turned off the keyboard backlights. If I have no applications running, it will sometimes estimate a maximum of about two hours, but never actually give me more than about an hour and a half--if all I'm doing is surfing the net.
About three months ago I replaced the internal drive with a Hitatchi 500gb drive of the same RPM as the original (5400rpm). That's the only major modification to the machine I've made and the battery life was already a problem from starters. Does it sound like there's something wrong with the battery, or is it more likely there's something else causing problems?
Background: Air i7 Mid 2011 4gb RAM, 256 SSD, purchased in Aug 2011. Battery life is normally 5.5hours with wifi on, blue tooth off. I charge the battery until status says charged then I unplug until I get the reserve power message at 9%, most days I charge 2 times, sometimes 3 times. When I plug in an external monitor using my thunderbolt to dvi or thunderbolt to hdmi my battery life drops to 2.5-3.5hours (extra work, less battery, makes sense), back left is hot and fan is running. When I have apache web server, mysql, php, netbeans, firefox with over 30 tabs, safari with over 10 tabs, thunderbird, avast antivirus, adium, skype and other random pgms loaded my battery life stayed over 4.5 hours, activity monitor at about 80% idle. The back left corner of the keyboard stays cool during this time.Â
I have read the CPU power and cores are adjusted automatically based on usage, and this is what I have found to be true with great consistancy. About 1-2 months ago my battery life dropped to about 2.5 hours. I have been trying to figure the cause. At the same time my back left corner of the keyboard is getting hot like I have the external monitor plugged in. The fan is running all the time. I look at the activity monitor and it shows 80%-90% idle. I have been on the phone with support and we tried the SMC reset, but the fan is just doing it's job of cooling the cpu. Apple phone support seemed to feel this was normal, even though I told them the back left of the keyboard was not normally this way. I have narrowed it down to.... the cpu is being told to run harder than before, so where is the mixedup signal? I began this morning reading all the messages here in the disscussions this am (and there are many with the same description), many references to activity monitor.Â
[URL]- the activity monitor in this will show the process that is using the cpu the most. In my case I had installed HP scanner software 2 months ago, which is badly written and very misbehaved, see the following link. This process would go to 100% cpu every few seconds (not all the time, so I could not see it in the summary, ), shown when I sorted by cpu % usage.Â
[URL]I have removed my scanner drivers. My battery life is back to 5.5hr, back left of keyboard is cool to touch, and the fan is off. My findings, when the back left of the keyboard is hot, the CPU is running hard. External monitors heat up the cpu. Activity monitor can tell you what is using the cpu, by sorting by %cpu usage (don't trust the summary, look at the individual processes, as shown in the link TS1473) and watching for 10-30 seconds, a misbehaved app may not be at the top all the time.
I have a 13 month old macbook pro. Recently it has been operating VERY sluggishly. Its slow/jumpy when scrolling through internet pages, through documents, pictures, downloads etc. The little rainbow 'loading' icon (i'm sorry i'm not sure what it's called) seems to appear all the time, when doing most things.I've also noticed that my battery life has gone appaling. I charge it up and get a couple of hours tops now and the 'time remaining' icon jumps up and down massively now rather than remaining relatively constant.
I have a late 2009, white unibody MacBook which is 7 months old, and I have been noticing that the battery life is getting less and less, and am rather confused.I reset the SMC as per Apple instructions, and then followed the battery calibrating guide to the letter from apple.com, and tonight it seems to have lasted... 3.5 hrs! Hardly the quoted 7 hours that Apple spec, and I am simply doing light web browsing, nothing else.Am I doing something wrong? The machine sits connected to magsafe 90% of the time, but I cannot envisage that would cause any problem, as it knows when it is charged, so afaik no more current can get to the battery to damage it
I calibrated my MacBook Pro battery and then noticed that the battery life seemed slightly shorter after that. I calibrated it according to this: [URL]
Just wondering if I have done anything wrong... Â
One more question... What do they mean by "At this point, save your work. Continue to use your computer; when the battery gets very low, the computer will automatically go to sleep." Does it mean that I have to use the computer until it just shuts down or should I shut it down once the "Low Battery" warning pops up?
I have a 13" 2.4 GHZ white macbook that I bought in march of 2008. About 4 months ago I all of the sudden started having problems with battery life. It was very abrupt. I used to be able to take my macbook and sit through 3 classes or more with no trouble in regards to batter life. Then suddenly the battery would drain within a few hours. It has remained that way since.
I've spent the last month or so looking around forums and other places to try and find someone with a similar problem and possible solutions. As a result I've discovered that my situation seams to be somewhat unique.
Using cocoanut battery I tested my battery's capacity and it remains at a solid 98%. How can my battery still be at 98% capacity and have such a short battery life? I also seam to be losing charge while my macbook is closed. How and why does that happen? If I leave my macbook closed for a day or two it can lose up to 25% charge just sitting there!
I've tried loads of things including turning off unnecessary things such as sharing and bluetooth and calibrating my battery, all with no avail.
What is going on?? My battery is too old to be eligable for a recal and I'm not paying $30 just to have a phone conversation with a "Genius". If anyone has any idea what's going on and any possible advice, I would greatly appreciate it.
I am getting a very short battery life out of my "New" A1261 battery - we're talking 2.5 hours tops. I've recycled it a few times, but this is no where near the "7" hours that is quoted.
Info: MacBook Pro (15-inch Late 2008), Mac OS X (10.6.8)
I've had this MBP for just over 8 months now, I'd intially purchased one in november, but the audio out used to give a crackle sound so they replaced the laptop. Moving on to the point - in the last week or so, I've noticed the MBP suddenly seems to get very hot and the fans turn on and thus suddenly becomes very noisy. I was using it on the bed so could appreciate that I may have been blocking the vents, but I've had it on a stand the past couple of days and it still seems to do it for no particular reason. The charger usually always gets ridiculously hot, but the MBP used to stay relatively cool, now the MBP gets hot independently of whether its being charged or not. Moreover, my battery life has gone from what used to last 4 hours, to around 2.25.
Cocunut battery gave the following stats: Current Battery capacity: 4483mAh Load Cycles: 222 Age: 8 months
My 3 month old macbook pro yesterday failed to load up and I have been unable to get it working since. I have tried all the suggested routes however as I have no backups due to a failing drive I am unable to restore osx lion.   Â
Up until about two weeks ago my MBP was idling around 35-40 c. NOW all of a sudden is is idling areound 65 c!!! I can boot my machine after being off for hours and in a matter of minutes the temperature will rise. I do not play games, and the most video card strain I put on it is an occasional you tube video. I had smcfan control installed but deleted it because seeing the temperatures up there on the monitor started freaking me out. It wouldn't matter if I ran the fan at 5000+ rpm, it would not cool it down. Should I schedule an appt with the Apple store? It is less than 5 months old.
I have a late 2011 macbook pro running OSX Lion, and it wont update the firmware to 2.7, it downloads the update then says its installing it but when i go back to software update it keeps coming up saying it needs to be updated. Im wondering what can i do to stop this or get it to update.
Info: MacBook Pro (13-inch Late 2011), Mac OS X (10.7.3)
I am wondering how much memory I can upgrade with my MacBook Pro Late 2011. I went on Apple.com and they only offer up to 8GB of Ram for my model when I looked around and saw that on OWC ( MacSales.com) which is a very excellent reliable source for all your Apple Products. But, I was able to find a 16GB of Ram for my MacBook Pro Late 2011 and it said it can be used for my MacBook Pro.Basically Apple says its only up to 8GB of Ram while I see other people have 16GB of Ram for the same year as mine but the only difference is the the size of the computer. Anybody could give me a answer with this question as I dont want to buy the 16GB of Ram and it not working for my computer. url...
Info: MacBook Pro (13-inch Late 2011), Mac OS X (10.7.3)
In january 2012 i received MacBook Pro as gift from my brother. MacBook works fine, untill yesterday, when turned off automatically. When i tried to turn it on again, nothing happened. I tried with resetting SMC, PRAM, NVRAM, but that doesn't help at all. Â
I thought it was battery, so i opened it, disconnected battery, and when i plugged in MagSafe, MBP automatically switched on. When i shutdown MBP via shutdown button inside OSX, everything went fine, but when i pushed Power On button on MBP, it won't turn on again. So, i tried to replug again MagSafe, and MBP powered on again automatically. When i plugged back battery again, it won't power on, even with MagSafe "trick". Â
I live in Serbia, and in my country, there is no AppleStore :/ To make it worse, since my brother moved to another city, he lost warranty, so we don't have it What should i do? MBP is old only 6 months
Info: MacBook Pro, Mac OS X (10.7.4), MacBook Pro won't power on
I just bought a late 2011 17" MBP with 4GB RAM (standard).Having upgraded to Adobe CS6 I am finding the machine impossibly slow, so I figure I need more RAM. Apple says max = 8GB (2x4), but Crucial Memory recommend 16GB "guaranteed compatible". I'm now quite unsure: can I really put 16GB in? Are Apple wrong? If Crucial have sold loads of 16GB kits that can't be used, surely they'd have taken it off their website? Can anyone confirm whether I can put 16GB (i.e. you've actually done it successfully).I'm running Lion 10.7.4
Info: MacBook Pro (17-inch Late 2011), Mac OS X (10.7.4)
I'm an amateur photographer, and numerous blogs suggest it's necessary to calibrate computer monitors. My old macbook probably needs it - 2007 - but an art director friend of mine says recent macbooks no longer need it. Any thoughts on this board which is the case?
I have the 750 GB HD and am getting down to 300Gb I would like to ad the 750 hybrid to my mac book pro. But didn't know if there was a place to mount it because I havent taken it apart.
So i have a 13" late 2011 MPB with lion 10.7.4. I have been using a mini display port to dvi adapter connected to a dvi to hdmi cable into my tv. It worked fine for the first few months i connected, but out of nowhere, now absolutely nothing happens when i connect the adapter to my MBP. i have tried using all the different hdmi ports on the tv and am at a loss.
I have just bought a MacBook. I have downloaded the Battery Health Monitor and it says obviously that my current capacity is at 100%, with 5,791 mAh. I would like to know how many hours does this value correspond to, because it has certainly not been the highly announced 10 hours battery life
see the following video I have posted on youtube. The problem is happening on the late 2011 13"inch Macbook Pro with intel 3000 HD graphics. The problem is limited to iPhoto window. Is it a faulty GPU? or a Software problem? [URL]
I am trying to boot into the Apple Hardware Test by holding down the "D" key right before the gray startup screen appears. My mac will stay on the gray screen but will never boot into the hardware tests. If I let go of the "D" key the mac will boot as normal.Â
These instructions are per Apple's support article. My mac did not ship with any discs or recovery mediaÂ
[URL]
Info: MacBook (13-inch Late 2006), Mac OS X (10.6.8)
