You can see how drastic the battery situation gets depending on how hard you push it. I used the Torture Test Blended mode and manually recorded when the laptop died.īoth tasks emptied the battery in just over 80 minutes. This particular test is mostly a load on the GPU, but the CPU is working as well.Īfter recharging the laptop, I ran the test using Prime95, which is a pure CPU test. I then unplugged the MacBook Pro 15 and let it run down to zero. Once the benchmark is finished, it continues to loop a 3D scene. I set the game for 1680×1050 resolution on the medium setting and ran the game’s built-in benchmark. It is a “pro” laptop, right? One thing I don’t think people understand is just how much of a penalty you pay when you push the GPU or CPU very hard. When you’re looking at this category of laptop, however, you shouldn’t expect people to limit their chores to light duty. Battery life under hard use: This is the tricky part Netflix and YouTube streaming also yielded fairly good battery runtime on the new MacBook Pro 15. The YouTube video ran for just under nine hours, while the Netflix video was just short of eight hours. Audio was on for both, and I used a set of earbuds. I intentionally forced the video bit rate to the 4870 option. Rather than pick a video on Netflix and try to rewind it every few hours, or try to binge-watch a show (which can be unreliable, as the video will occasionally stop streaming), I decided to use Netflix’s internal test video called Example 8 hour 23.976. It’s also a 24-hour video, so there wasn’t a chance it would stop in the middle of the night and invalidate my test. I don’t get Nyan Cat, but apparently it’s a thing. For YouTube, I picked a 24-hour Nyan Cat video that’s pretty low-res. Using a brightness setting of 257 nits, I flipped on the Wi-Fi and measured how long it took to run down the MacBook Pro 15 on YouTube and Netflix. Most video today is watched online, not offline. If you refrain from doing that, then you’ll probably get slightly longer battery life. The upshot: If you run a USB device on your MacBook Pro, you’ll take a small hit.
The laptop itself did not log any power being consumed by the Thunderbolt port, but the results pretty much match the consumption I’ve seen on another couple of laptops, so I think there’s still a small cost in power. With our USB device in place, however, the Thunderbolt 3 chip appears to stay awake. With Thunderbolt 3, the chip appears to conserve power by switching off when not being used. The MacBook Pro, however, uses Thunderbolt 3 controllers. This device works because on older MacBook Pros and most other laptops, the USB Type A ports are run on chips that are usually powered on at all times. This lets us know when the laptop is on, and when it finally dies. For all the other tests, I used a self-powered device that logs the voltage of the USB port. There’s one more result on the chart to be aware of, and that’s the battery life when none of the laptop’s USB-C ports are being used. You can expect from 6 to 10 hours of battery life playing 4K video, depending on the brightness of the screen. Even more impressive to me is that at the blazing 500-nit setting, you can still get six hours of run time. Considering the 2880-by-1800 native resolution and brightness of the panel, that’s actually pretty nice. Set to 257 nits, we’re seeing just about eight hours of battery life. The MacBook Pro 15 has pretty stellar life playing video. I returned to the MacBook Pro 15 I’d tested before to put it through multiple run-down scenarios, charging and discharging the MacBook Pro 15 under different loads over the course of many days. The truth about the MacBook Pro’s battery life had to be somewhere in this mess of conflicting results. When I tested both a non-Touch Bar 13-inch MacBook Pro and the base 15-inch MacBook Pro some months ago, I was able to coax about nine hours of 4K video playback from each at 255 nits of brightness. I’m no fan of the MacBook Pro’s butterfly-switch keyboard, nor its lack of USB Type A ports, but one thing I do know is it has relatively good battery life. From Laptopmag to The Verge and, the vast majority of reviewers have lauded the MacBook Pros for good battery life.
Complaints about poor battery life on the new MacBook Pro lineup have been piling up-despite the laptops’ high marks for battery life from professional reviewers.Ĭontrast those writeups with Macworld’s review, which said: “Battery life is also solid, with both models lasting a full day of heavy use, with multiple apps open, dozens of Safari tabs, streaming music to Spotify, and occasionally indulging in some video viewing with Sierra’s picture-in-picture feature.”