Thanks for your reply. I'm not running third party services as I disconnected Box. I am not using much flash. I mainly read articles and have on-going corresp. for my business via email. There are minimal resources being used according to the activity monitor. Right now while typing this, it shows there is 54% battery left and 2:16 minutes (and I turned my monitor to about 65% brightness). On another note, the original computer was run through Apple diagnostics and it showed the battery was perfectly healthy. I assume the same to be true for this replacement machine. Therefore, my conclusion is that the battery life is not nearly close to what Apple claims.
My battery life is fine, reviewers I trust have showed the battery life is right where Apple said it should be, and Apple has been using the most realistic and honest battery life measuring in the industry so for your personal experience to become a blanket statement that Apple is lying just does not read as most likely.
Then what do you suggest as a solution? If the activity monitor shows as I've explained above, Apple Care support can't figure it out and on the first computer even recommended getting a replacement machine after extensive testing (one level 2 support rep at Apple even set up a remote thing so he could go on my screen while I was going through trouble shooting on a call over 1 hour), then what do you suggest? One of the main reasons I purchased this is for the battery life and it's about half of what they claim. I have a 3 year old MacBook Pro 15" in which the battery hasn't been changed in hundreds of charge cycles and it still gets 3 hours. Does anyone have any constructive ideas here on solving this issue?
Then what do you suggest as a solution? If the activity monitor shows as I've explained above, Apple Care support can't figure it out and on the first computer even recommended getting a replacement machine after extensive testing (one level 2 support rep at Apple even set up a remote thing so he could go on my screen while I was going through trouble shooting on a call over 1 hour), then what do you suggest? One of the main reasons I purchased this is for the battery life and it's about half of what they claim. I have a 3 year old MacBook Pro 15" in which the battery hasn't been changed in hundreds of charge cycles and it still gets 3 hours. Does anyone have any constructive ideas here on solving this issue?
You do know you haven't detailed anything that is helpful. You haven't listed all the processes that are running. You haven't said if Safari, or any other app, is an app that uses significant power per the Battery drop down in the Menu Bar. You haven't mentioned disabling the dGPU, if you have one.
Let's be clear, it's up to 8 hours, not you will get 8 hours regardless of the workload. This is why battery life tests are best done with multiple atypical usage tests so you can then gauge how it will affect you.
You even said you have Flash installed but oddly claim you aren't using it much. Unless you have Click2Flash installed, too, you really have no idea when Flash is running. It's not about playing a YouTube video it's about Flash running at all. Remember that ads still use Flash and that Apple's tests aren't using Flash.
Thanks for your feedback Akquies. Since you are the only one who is responding, and with each comment you seem to discount what I am saying, I am not sure what your motive is. My motive is simply to get a solution or understand that Apple has totally misrepresented the market (which is unlikely). Do you work for Apple in their PR department to quell anything that could be a potential negative? The bottom line is that Apple Care experts who are trained in trouble shooting this sent me on two diff. occasions to level 2 people. I then had diagnostics done at the Apple Store. The conclusion was that even though the battery showed it was healthy in the diagnostics, that something wasn't right so they replaced the computer. Then the same thing is happening with the new computer. There is nothing abnormal about what is going on in activity monitor in terms of CPU or energy use, which are the two areas the Apple tech support experts focused on. With that said, is there anyone else on this forum who can provide some insight as to if they also have this issue and/or ideas as to how to correct it.
Thanks for your feedback Akquies. Since you are the only one who is responding, and with each comment you seem to discount what I am saying, I am not sure what your motive is. My motive is simply to get a solution or understand that Apple has totally misrepresented the market (which is unlikely). Do you work for Apple in their PR department to quell anything that could be a potential negative? The bottom line is that Apple Care experts who are trained in trouble shooting this sent me on two diff. occasions to level 2 people. I then had diagnostics done at the Apple Store. The conclusion was that even though the battery showed it was healthy in the diagnostics, that something wasn't right so they replaced the computer. Then the same thing is happening with the new computer. There is nothing abnormal about what is going on in activity monitor in terms of CPU or energy use, which are the two areas the Apple tech support experts focused on. With that said, is there anyone else on this forum who can provide some insight as to if they also have this issue and/or ideas as to how to correct it.
Thanks everyone.
I haven't discounted that you believe every Mac you've received is faulty or the fact that Macs, just like all complex machinery, can have issues, but you've jumped to a conclusion based on your limited anecdotal experiences that makes Apple's claims an outright lie without making a valid argument that Apple is lying about there entire MBP line.
I asked you several questions that you have refused to answer. Questions that would help determine where the problem resides. It's possible that you could have 2 machines with the same problem just as it's possible to have a dozen machines with the same problem but with each new machine the odds get slimmer and slimmer. At some point you will need to look at this objectively.
Guess what, 2014 brings a bullet to Intel with the Excavator APU from AMD. The new Kaveri coming out stomps Haswell into the ground with GPGPU processing [OpenCL?] and the gap between Integer/FP has been closed. Excavator comes out Fall of 2014, at the latest and it stomps all over its own brethren, Kaveri at 20nm/16nm FinFET.
Sorry, but Intel has no answer to the APU world.
This just in: newer CPUs are faster than older ones. STOP THE PRESSES!!! Also, by the time that comes out Intel will already be onto Broadwell. Your post seems to have some inane assumption that Intel has not already been working on faster CPUs that will also launch in 2014. How about we compare CPUs that are currently available in products rather than between a shipping product and something with no actual launch date?
Question for the group, I have last years retina version, a programming machine, but like to play games a bit (starcraft). Does this newer generation have any better discrete graphics performance worth updating too? (Thinking the market value of the existing version minus the new version price would be less than building a windows machine)
Question for the group, I have last years retina version, a programming machine, but like to play games a bit (starcraft). Does this newer generation have any better discrete graphics performance worth updating too? (Thinking the market value of the existing version minus the new version price would be less than building a windows machine)
The 750M is a rebadge of the 650M, it's pretty much the exact same GPU except they increased the clock speed from 900MHz max to 967MHz (7% boost). In a lot of tests, the 750M actually comes out slower than the 650M.
Iris Pro is more suited to OpenCL. It is overall slower for gaming than the 650M and 750M but is close in a lot of games. Someone tested Iris Pro here:
The new machines are no upgrade at all vs one with a 650M and ones with the 750M shouldn't be any better on battery than the old one beyond what Mavericks does and Mavericks would offer the same benefits on the old one. The Iris Pro model should do better on battery because even doing GPU tasks, it has a lower TDP limit. A test of the Iris Pro model online got 8 hours. The old 650M tests tend to be around 5-6 hours and as I say, the 750M models should get around the same because it will kick in the dedicated GPU for graphics tasks.
Question for the group, I have last years retina version, a programming machine, but like to play games a bit (starcraft). Does this newer generation have any better discrete graphics performance worth updating too? (Thinking the market value of the existing version minus the new version price would be less than building a windows machine)
What Marvin points out in terms of performance could be an issue of drivers, but I wouldn't say an overclocked rebadge of what you own should be motivation to upgrade. The 750m is only available on the upper configuration. They did bump vram to 2GB, which can help with computation if you run a lot of GPGPU applications that are in fact memory bound. In that situation I would suggest the imac though, as the card used there gets 4GB, which is actually significant.
Yah…the MBP isn't a good iMac replacement if you really need more performance and only occasional mobility.
I just mentioned that because Marvin mentioned Iris pro benchmarks and the rmbp. If they are dependent on OpenCL or CUDA for that matter, the issue of framebuffer size is a big deal, because there is no virtual memory system available in gpu based computation. I don't know if that will change, but it is what it is for now. Going 2012 rmbp --> 2013 with discrete card seems like a fairly expensive proposition.
Since these new laptops have Thunderbolt 2, will they support daisy chaining of DisplayPort 1.2 monitors?
What version of HDMI does the HDMI connector use? Will it support 30 inch (2560x1600) monitors? 4K?
You can have up to 2 external 2560x1600 monitors going at the same time as the built-in laptop display, which is 2880x1800. I don't know whether they can be daisy chained, but there are two Thunderbolt 2 ports anyway.
The only 4K support Apple advertises is via the HDMI 1.4 port, which is @30hz. But people have found that with Windows 8.1 you can get 4K @ 60Hz on a Thunderbolt 2 port, so it's a driver issue in OS X not a hardware issue. The Mac Pro coming out in December supports 4K @ 60Hz under OS X so maybe there will be an update for the Macbook Pro at that time, but no way to know for sure.
You can have up to 2 external 2560x1600 monitors going at the same time as the built-in laptop display, which is 2880x1800. I don't know whether they can be daisy chained, but there are two Thunderbolt 2 ports anyway.
The only 4K support Apple advertises is via the HDMI 1.4 port, which is @30hz. But people have found that with Windows 8.1 you can get 4K @ 60Hz on a Thunderbolt 2 port, so it's a driver issue in OS X not a hardware issue. The Mac Pro coming out in December supports 4K @ 60Hz under OS X so maybe there will be an update for the Macbook Pro at that time, but no way to know for sure.
Interesting that Apple doesn't yet support 4K on their TB2 MBPs. I don't think they say they support 4K in their tech specs.
For the Mac Pro they state it will support up to 3x4K displays and yet there is only 1xHDMI 1.4 UltraHD port which means that the 4K support will have to comes from TB2. It also points to there being 3xTB2 controllers each controlling two TB2 ports.
ALERT: Battery life on brand new retina macbook pro not as stated. See below.
Here are some screenshots for you. Note that the battery life and percentage left in the first screenshot. In the additional two, you can see the activity monitor under the energy tabs and CPU tabs respectively. The brightness of the monitor was at approximately 70%. Does that look like an 8 hour battery charge?!
ALERT: Battery life on brand new retina macbook pro not as stated. See below.
Here are some screenshots for you. Note that the battery life and percentage left in the first screenshot. In the additional two, you can see the activity monitor under the energy tabs and CPU tabs respectively. The brightness of the monitor was at approximately 70%. Does that look like an 8 hour battery charge?!
First of all, that 71% is not your brightness but your remaining battery life. Why you choose to take a screenshot at 71% and then make an additional claim that your brightness is approx. 70% is suspicious.
Second, you do you see that Mail is using significant power and you have installed a lot of services (which you claim you didn't have running previously) that are using a lot of power. You even flat out said you aren't using Adobe Flash that much and there it is actively running. And GoToMeeting? Really? I have that but I make sure that and other services aren't active because they do use more power than I think they should when not in the foreground.
You're basically showing a moderate to heavy use case but want to claim it's a light workload. Based on what you've shown and described Apple is not the sinister liar you're trying to make them out to be, it's your perception that is completely wrong.
You're basically showing a moderate to heavy use case
You've got to be kidding. That's nowhere near a heavy use case, and would struggle to be described as moderate. MacBooks have been running flash and GotoMeeting for years without that kind of battery problem. And saying that a 71% battery life and a 70% brightness claim is suspicious is ridiculous. It's perfectly reasonable for two numbers to be close, and not indicative of anything.
Ruzzell, I don't doubt anything you've said, but your experience seems so far outside of the norm for an Apple laptop (especially their most recent, and claimed most power efficient one) with little evidence that it's part of a widespread problem, that I think you must have just been incredibly unlucky. It does happen, I had a friend who had three iPods die on him within the space of six months while mine and most other peoples kept on cranking out the tunes for years. He didn't treat them badly, he was just unlucky. I'd suggest (if you can) that you try an Apple Store and show them that battery percentage and time remaining and get a replacement set up then and there in the store so you can check the difference.
Plus Mail is having issues with Gmail. There's probably some reindexing churn if you're using that.
ALERT: When any process shows 1:45:17.20 CPU use in less than 4 hours of run time you left "light" use 2 hours ago. You're essentially running your one of your cores at 50%+ CPU load. That probably is messing with the energy saving code in Mavericks in a big way.
There's nothing wrong with your hardware. And you should plug that puppy in anyway.
Comments
My battery life is fine, reviewers I trust have showed the battery life is right where Apple said it should be, and Apple has been using the most realistic and honest battery life measuring in the industry so for your personal experience to become a blanket statement that Apple is lying just does not read as most likely.
Then what do you suggest as a solution? If the activity monitor shows as I've explained above, Apple Care support can't figure it out and on the first computer even recommended getting a replacement machine after extensive testing (one level 2 support rep at Apple even set up a remote thing so he could go on my screen while I was going through trouble shooting on a call over 1 hour), then what do you suggest? One of the main reasons I purchased this is for the battery life and it's about half of what they claim. I have a 3 year old MacBook Pro 15" in which the battery hasn't been changed in hundreds of charge cycles and it still gets 3 hours. Does anyone have any constructive ideas here on solving this issue?
You do know you haven't detailed anything that is helpful. You haven't listed all the processes that are running. You haven't said if Safari, or any other app, is an app that uses significant power per the Battery drop down in the Menu Bar. You haven't mentioned disabling the dGPU, if you have one.
Let's be clear, it's up to 8 hours, not you will get 8 hours regardless of the workload. This is why battery life tests are best done with multiple atypical usage tests so you can then gauge how it will affect you.
You even said you have Flash installed but oddly claim you aren't using it much. Unless you have Click2Flash installed, too, you really have no idea when Flash is running. It's not about playing a YouTube video it's about Flash running at all. Remember that ads still use Flash and that Apple's tests aren't using Flash.
Thanks for your feedback Akquies. Since you are the only one who is responding, and with each comment you seem to discount what I am saying, I am not sure what your motive is. My motive is simply to get a solution or understand that Apple has totally misrepresented the market (which is unlikely). Do you work for Apple in their PR department to quell anything that could be a potential negative? The bottom line is that Apple Care experts who are trained in trouble shooting this sent me on two diff. occasions to level 2 people. I then had diagnostics done at the Apple Store. The conclusion was that even though the battery showed it was healthy in the diagnostics, that something wasn't right so they replaced the computer. Then the same thing is happening with the new computer. There is nothing abnormal about what is going on in activity monitor in terms of CPU or energy use, which are the two areas the Apple tech support experts focused on. With that said, is there anyone else on this forum who can provide some insight as to if they also have this issue and/or ideas as to how to correct it.
Thanks everyone.
I haven't discounted that you believe every Mac you've received is faulty or the fact that Macs, just like all complex machinery, can have issues, but you've jumped to a conclusion based on your limited anecdotal experiences that makes Apple's claims an outright lie without making a valid argument that Apple is lying about there entire MBP line.
I asked you several questions that you have refused to answer. Questions that would help determine where the problem resides. It's possible that you could have 2 machines with the same problem just as it's possible to have a dozen machines with the same problem but with each new machine the odds get slimmer and slimmer. At some point you will need to look at this objectively.
It most certainly is a valid Con.
Guess what, 2014 brings a bullet to Intel with the Excavator APU from AMD. The new Kaveri coming out stomps Haswell into the ground with GPGPU processing [OpenCL?] and the gap between Integer/FP has been closed. Excavator comes out Fall of 2014, at the latest and it stomps all over its own brethren, Kaveri at 20nm/16nm FinFET.
Sorry, but Intel has no answer to the APU world.
This just in: newer CPUs are faster than older ones. STOP THE PRESSES!!! Also, by the time that comes out Intel will already be onto Broadwell. Your post seems to have some inane assumption that Intel has not already been working on faster CPUs that will also launch in 2014. How about we compare CPUs that are currently available in products rather than between a shipping product and something with no actual launch date?
Since these new laptops have Thunderbolt 2, will they support daisy chaining of DisplayPort 1.2 monitors?
What version of HDMI does the HDMI connector use? Will it support 30 inch (2560x1600) monitors? 4K?
The 750M is a rebadge of the 650M, it's pretty much the exact same GPU except they increased the clock speed from 900MHz max to 967MHz (7% boost). In a lot of tests, the 750M actually comes out slower than the 650M.
Iris Pro is more suited to OpenCL. It is overall slower for gaming than the 650M and 750M but is close in a lot of games. Someone tested Iris Pro here:
http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=1662978
Starcraft 2 was 23fps, just above 1080p on Ultra settings. The 650M is listed as 25FPS at 1080p Ultra:
http://www.notebookcheck.net/NVIDIA-GeForce-GT-650M.71887.0.html
This shows on the Iris Pro page too:
http://www.notebookcheck.net/Intel-Iris-Pro-Graphics-5200.90965.0.html
The new machines are no upgrade at all vs one with a 650M and ones with the 750M shouldn't be any better on battery than the old one beyond what Mavericks does and Mavericks would offer the same benefits on the old one. The Iris Pro model should do better on battery because even doing GPU tasks, it has a lower TDP limit. A test of the Iris Pro model online got 8 hours. The old 650M tests tend to be around 5-6 hours and as I say, the 750M models should get around the same because it will kick in the dedicated GPU for graphics tasks.
Question for the group, I have last years retina version, a programming machine, but like to play games a bit (starcraft). Does this newer generation have any better discrete graphics performance worth updating too? (Thinking the market value of the existing version minus the new version price would be less than building a windows machine)
What Marvin points out in terms of performance could be an issue of drivers, but I wouldn't say an overclocked rebadge of what you own should be motivation to upgrade. The 750m is only available on the upper configuration. They did bump vram to 2GB, which can help with computation if you run a lot of GPGPU applications that are in fact memory bound. In that situation I would suggest the imac though, as the card used there gets 4GB, which is actually significant.
In that situation I would suggest the imac though, as the card used there gets 4GB, which is actually significant.
Yah…the MBP isn't a good iMac replacement if you really need more performance and only occasional mobility.
Yah…the MBP isn't a good iMac replacement if you really need more performance and only occasional mobility.
I just mentioned that because Marvin mentioned Iris pro benchmarks and the rmbp. If they are dependent on OpenCL or CUDA for that matter, the issue of framebuffer size is a big deal, because there is no virtual memory system available in gpu based computation. I don't know if that will change, but it is what it is for now. Going 2012 rmbp --> 2013 with discrete card seems like a fairly expensive proposition.
Since these new laptops have Thunderbolt 2, will they support daisy chaining of DisplayPort 1.2 monitors?
What version of HDMI does the HDMI connector use? Will it support 30 inch (2560x1600) monitors? 4K?
You can have up to 2 external 2560x1600 monitors going at the same time as the built-in laptop display, which is 2880x1800. I don't know whether they can be daisy chained, but there are two Thunderbolt 2 ports anyway.
The only 4K support Apple advertises is via the HDMI 1.4 port, which is @30hz. But people have found that with Windows 8.1 you can get 4K @ 60Hz on a Thunderbolt 2 port, so it's a driver issue in OS X not a hardware issue. The Mac Pro coming out in December supports 4K @ 60Hz under OS X so maybe there will be an update for the Macbook Pro at that time, but no way to know for sure.
Interesting that Apple doesn't yet support 4K on their TB2 MBPs. I don't think they say they support 4K in their tech specs.
For the Mac Pro they state it will support up to 3x4K displays and yet there is only 1xHDMI 1.4 UltraHD port which means that the 4K support will have to comes from TB2. It also points to there being 3xTB2 controllers each controlling two TB2 ports.
It also points to there being 3xTB2 controllers each controlling two TB2 ports.
Pretty sure Apple already confirmed that themselves.
ALERT: Battery life on brand new retina macbook pro not as stated. See below.
Here are some screenshots for you. Note that the battery life and percentage left in the first screenshot. In the additional two, you can see the activity monitor under the energy tabs and CPU tabs respectively. The brightness of the monitor was at approximately 70%. Does that look like an 8 hour battery charge?!
First of all, that 71% is not your brightness but your remaining battery life. Why you choose to take a screenshot at 71% and then make an additional claim that your brightness is approx. 70% is suspicious.
Second, you do you see that Mail is using significant power and you have installed a lot of services (which you claim you didn't have running previously) that are using a lot of power. You even flat out said you aren't using Adobe Flash that much and there it is actively running. And GoToMeeting? Really? I have that but I make sure that and other services aren't active because they do use more power than I think they should when not in the foreground.
You're basically showing a moderate to heavy use case but want to claim it's a light workload. Based on what you've shown and described Apple is not the sinister liar you're trying to make them out to be, it's your perception that is completely wrong.
Ruzzell, I don't doubt anything you've said, but your experience seems so far outside of the norm for an Apple laptop (especially their most recent, and claimed most power efficient one) with little evidence that it's part of a widespread problem, that I think you must have just been incredibly unlucky. It does happen, I had a friend who had three iPods die on him within the space of six months while mine and most other peoples kept on cranking out the tunes for years. He didn't treat them badly, he was just unlucky. I'd suggest (if you can) that you try an Apple Store and show them that battery percentage and time remaining and get a replacement set up then and there in the store so you can check the difference.
People tend to exaggerate to much in the computer field I see and really they do not know what they are talking about period.It is a dam machine!
ALERT: Battery life on brand new retina macbook pro not as stated. See below.
ALERT: Mail is a power hog.
Disable spotlight from scanning Mail and Messages (System Prefs, Spotlight) and see if it gets better.
It also power hogs when the mail index is borked. If turning off spotlight doesn't help go to
Delete files and let mail reindex. Beware if you have an asston of email messages. Back up first. (read thread below...there can be complications)
http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=1563827
Plus Mail is having issues with Gmail. There's probably some reindexing churn if you're using that.
ALERT: When any process shows 1:45:17.20 CPU use in less than 4 hours of run time you left "light" use 2 hours ago. You're essentially running your one of your cores at 50%+ CPU load. That probably is messing with the energy saving code in Mavericks in a big way.
There's nothing wrong with your hardware. And you should plug that puppy in anyway.