When plugged in and fully charged, I also ran the Geekbench 32-bit single- and multi-core benchmarks, and observed the power range drawn from the wall with a Kill A Watt. Before running the test, the battery’s cycle count was just 2. I ran this test at 50% brightness (with auto-adjustment disabled), no keyboard illumination, and sound muted until the battery ran out and it shut down. For the moderately heavy load, the cycle also includes a clean and full compile of Overcast’s iOS app using xcodebuild every few minutes.

I devised a simple battery-testing script to simulate light and moderately heavy loads on my brand new, mid-2014-generation, base-model 15-inch Retina MacBook Pro: it loads some popular websites in Safari over Wi-Fi, spending some time scrolling down each one, while playing music in iTunes, then appends the time and battery status to a file in Dropbox, which promptly gets synced. Turbo Boost Switcher can temporarily disable Turbo Boost, and I was curious to see if disabling it would meaningfully affect battery life. The advertised clock speed - 2.2 GHz for the base-model 15-inch - is only the guaranteed minimum. Modern Intel CPUs use Turbo Boost to dynamically increase CPU speed, depending on workload, up to their thermal limits. I used to eke more battery life out of my 2008 MacBook Air by underclocking and undervolting its CPU to a lower speed with CoolBook, but that’s no longer possible on modern Macs.

The best battery life in the 15-inch Retina MacBook Pro line is the base model (without the high-powered GPU), but Apple’s stated 8–9 hours of battery life is only achievable with very light use - if you’re using tools like Xcode, Logic, or Lightroom, you’re lucky to get more than 4 hours. A programmer, writer, podcaster, geek, and coffee enthusiast.Ībout Disabling Turbo Boost to get more MacBook Pro battery life

Increase mac pro battery life