Apple’s MacBook Pro with Touch Bar has some serious battery life problems

Apple MacBook Pro 13 and 15

Apple’s new MacBook Pro hasn’t had the smoothest debut. It’s more expensive than previous Mac systems, and it relies heavily on dongles or third-party add-ons to offer port compatibility. But the systems themselves have reviewed well. If you can live with the restrictions Apple puts on the MacBook Pro and don’t mind the price, most reviews have suggested these are solid follow-ups, with the Touch Bar offering some interesting capabilities and long-term potential. Now that laptops are shipping in volume, however, some readers are chiming in about massive battery life problems.

Apple’s support forums and reddit have both been churning with complaints, though there seem to be at least two different issues in-play based on what we’ve seen thus far. The first problem is a simple reporting issue. As 9To5Mac notes, in some cases, Apple dramatically reduces its estimated battery life if you’re using a battery-intensive application, but doesn’t correct the estimate once the application is closed. This can result in an estimated battery life that is simply wrong (in 9To5Mac’s case, the battery indicator reported just over three hours of life when the actual system run-time was over six hours).

MacBook Pro

The issue, however, isn’t just related to battery life reporting. Multiple users have reported straining to hit even six hours of battery life, with some reporting as little as three hours from full charge to complete rundown. At first, these issues seemed to be limited to 15-inch MacBook Pros, but some 13-inch owners have now reported problems as well. Macworld put these rumors to the test and found that they had no such problems in their own 15-inch hardware, but that turning automatic graphics switching off and relying solely on the AMD GPU did hit battery life substantially.

This could point to a problem with power management. But it’s not clear why only certain systems are affected, or if the problem is even limited to only models with AMD GPUs. The fact that some owners with 13-inch systems are reporting problems seems to indicate it isn’t, since those configurations don’t ship with discrete graphics. Other users have stated that shifting all of their workloads to the integrated GPU (and avoiding the AMD solution altogether) doesn’t solve the problem, either.

One MacBook Pro owner confirmed he’s getting between one and three hours of battery life. He even ran the system down at Apple’s Genius Bar, where a tech reported that the system was “fine,” even though the system died in just three hours. MacRumors reports that Apple software engineering chief Craig Federighi sent an email to another user claiming macOS 12.2.2 beta should resolve separate issues with graphical corruption that some MacBook Pro owners have reported (an entirely separate problem we haven’t even touched on), but there’s no word if the included fixes also address these battery life issues.

2016 seems to have been a year for battery problems at multiple companies, from Surface Pro 3 failures (two thus far), to the Galaxy Note 7, iPhone 6s, and now Apple’s laptops as well. Hopefully these problems will be addressed sooner rather than later. Six hours of runtime from a $2,000+ laptop isn’t necessarily awful, but six hours when Apple systems have a reputation for hitting the 10+ hours the company typically claims is more than a little underwhelming.

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