Can the new MacBook Pro battery life issues be solved with a macOS update?
So I’m joining the club of people who are experiencing battery issues with their new MacBook Pro’s with Touch Bar. Yesterday, I eek’d out about 3.5-4 hours of battery life on my brand new MacBook Pro. The problem, is that, Apple claims battery life with regular usage should be around 10-hours. I wasn’t editing videos or doing anything super CPU or GPU intensive–in fact, I was doing a little coding, some emailing, web browsing, and had about 5-7 apps open at all times. This shouldn’t result in such poor battery life.
The specs of my MacBook Pro with Touch Bar are as follows: Intel i7 Quad Core 2.9GHz CPU, 16GB 2133 MHz LPDDR3 RAM, Intel HD Graphics 530 + Radeon PRO 460, and 1TB flash storage.
Anyway, I happened to be on the phone with my mom and was telling her about the battery life issues and she told me that she too, was experiencing battery life issues on her 13″ MacBook Pro. I started to tell her that it’s likely her issues are due to the fact her computer is a bit older, until she interjected and said, “No, it only started happening when I upgraded to the latest macOS.” “You mean when you upgraded to Sierra?” I asked. “Yes,” she replied.
Hmm.
She went on to tell me she used to be able to leave her 13″ MacBook Pro unplugged and unused for several hours during the day, eventually coming back to it to use it and found it didn’t lose much battery at all. Since the Sierra upgrade she told me that she would leave her computer unplugged and unused for several hours and when she returned to it the battery indicator would be red (obviously indicating she needed to charge it).
Clearly this is anecdotal evidence, but perhaps, the battery life problems are related to macOS Sierra more so than they are related to the new MacBook Pro’s. I’m really hopeful a software update will be able to resolve these battery life issues for all Mac owners.
Are you experiencing battery life issues on your new MacBook Pro or any Mac running macOS Sierra? Let us know in the comments.