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Comment by manmal | Hacker News Reader

Having a MacBook Pro Late 2016, I can only dream of 4h battery life with the workload you describe. It has a bigger screen though.

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Try ditching chrome/ff for safari for most of your workload, I find that consistently gives me a few extra hours of battery, and I always have IntelliJ and VScode open and in use.

Yup, switching from Chrome or Firefox to Safari is the number one thing I recommend to people to improve their battery life on Macs. The less Electron they can have as well, the better, but it's slightly less on an issue because it's not running JavaScript trying to sell you ads.

My work laptop is a mbp 2018 (i9, 32GB). The battery life is abysmal. I typically get a little bit over 2 hours. I'm not going to lie though: I'm always running Atom or VSCode and there's lots of opened tabs in Chrome.

Chrome used to half my battery life on a MacBook Pro. On a brand new machine with a full battery I could program all day in Xcode if I forgot my charger until one day it was empty halfway the day. Finally I figured out it was Chrome that killed it so fast.

> On a brand new machine with a full battery I could program all day in Xcode

I'm impressed; with Xcode and the simulator I'm lucky to get anything longer than 6 hours…

Objective-C really is a lot kinder for your battery I guess. Also it was brand new at the time and I guess I was using a phone for debugging.

Did they reduce the battery size on newer models? My 2015 i7 mbp can get about 3 hours of Civ 6 (in strategic view), or 6 hours of regular dev workload. I remember it lasting longer a few years ago too.

Yes. Can't remember how much it shrank in Wh though. I had a 2016 which I ultimately sold after 6 months, then bought a 2015 of eBay. I get roughly 25-33% better battery life on the 2015 than I did with the newer model.

Yes. The previous generation 15" MacBook Pro has a 99.5Wh battery. The 2016 & 2017 15" touchbar MacBook Pro has a 76Wh battery. The 2018 model was upgraded to 83.6Wh. Depending on which version you have, you get either 15% or 25% less battery than the older model.

I got the figures from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacBook_Pro#Technical_specific... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacBook_Pro#Technical_specific...

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