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After that, however, the wattage figure ramps up quickly. Up to about four notches, which is perhaps the acceptable lowest setting for a moderately-lit room, and there’s little difference. To create the measurements I started with a completely dark screen, then tapped the screen brightness button to increase the on-screen display ( OSD) by one notch for each measurement I made.Īs you can see on the graph, the lower brightness levels according to the OSD don’t vary much in terms of energy usage. My tests supported this statement, but it isn’t necessarily as straightforward as “less brightness = more battery life”. However, the screen is still believed the biggest consumer of power while you’re out and about.
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Even one or two watts more energy usage can burn through battery life more quickly.Īpple reduced the energy demands of portable displays by switching to LED backlighting a few years ago. In attempting to eke out the most battery life, I was looking to reduce this figure as much as possible.
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My MacBook Pro tended to have a “resting” figure of between 6-10 watts when nothing was happening on the system. Everything your Mac does involves the use of power, of course. The amount of electrical power used by a device is measured in watts. Nearly always the reading would stabilize for several seconds at this figure, or within 0.1 watt. The wattage figure fluctuated massively at all times because of OS X’s seemingly infinite number of background tasks, all of which drew power as they did things like access the storage or network, so I simply stared at the wattage readout for 20-30 seconds for each measurement and made a note of the lowest figure reported.
The MacBook Pro’s magsafe power lead was disconnected during testing so that the battery was discharging. I advise you to get the app and test yourself. Alas, we have no real way of knowing if this is accurate or representative (I contacted Hardware Monitor’s developer and even he doesn’t know), so the test results below are decidedly unscientific. Instead, I chose to use Hardware Monitor, an app that amongst many other things monitors the Mac’s internal sensors in order to report a wattage figure. This would’ve involved disconnecting the battery within my MacBook Pro in order to remove it from the power-usage equation – simply not an option. The first was to use a mains-power plug-in wattage meter. To measure power consumption in wattage I had two options. I used as a testbed a mid-2015 15in MacBook Pro (2.8GHz i7 CPU, 16GB RAM, 512GB storage). Indeed, my research has found some surprising factors can dramatically affect battery life. There’s a lot of received wisdom about battery life and, as with so much computing advice, much of it is bullhonkey.
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My MacBook Pro’s reached that time in its life when the battery is diminishing slightly in capacity, so I’ve been looking into how to get the most possible usage between charges. The bull***t-free guide to Mac battery life
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