With Thunderbolt 3, the chip appears to conserve power by switching off when not being used. The MacBook Pro, however, uses Thunderbolt 3 controllers. This device works because on older MacBook Pros and most other laptops, the USB Type A ports are run on chips that are usually powered on at all times. This lets us know when the laptop is on, and when it finally dies. For all the other tests, I used a self-powered device that logs the voltage of the USB port. There’s one more result on the chart to be aware of, and that’s the battery life when none of the laptop’s USB-C ports are being used. You can expect from 6 to 10 hours of battery life playing 4K video, depending on the brightness of the screen. Even more impressive to me is that at the blazing 500-nit setting, you can still get six hours of run time. Considering the 2880-by-1800 native resolution and brightness of the panel, that’s actually pretty nice. Set to 257 nits, we’re seeing just about eight hours of battery life.
#2016 MACBOOK PRO 13 BATTERY LIFE PRO#
The MacBook Pro 15 has pretty stellar life playing video. I returned to the MacBook Pro 15 I’d tested before to put it through multiple run-down scenarios, charging and discharging the MacBook Pro 15 under different loads over the course of many days. The truth about the MacBook Pro’s battery life had to be somewhere in this mess of conflicting results. When I tested both a non-Touch Bar 13-inch MacBook Pro and the base 15-inch MacBook Pro some months ago, I was able to coax about nine hours of 4K video playback from each at 255 nits of brightness. I’m no fan of the MacBook Pro’s butterfly-switch keyboard, nor its lack of USB Type A ports, but one thing I do know is it has relatively good battery life. From Laptopmag to The Verge and, the vast majority of reviewers have lauded the MacBook Pros for good battery life.
#2016 MACBOOK PRO 13 BATTERY LIFE FULL#
Complaints about poor battery life on the new MacBook Pro lineup have been piling up-despite the laptops’ high marks for battery life from professional reviewers.Ĭontrast those writeups with Macworld’s review, which said: “Battery life is also solid, with both models lasting a full day of heavy use, with multiple apps open, dozens of Safari tabs, streaming music to Spotify, and occasionally indulging in some video viewing with Sierra’s picture-in-picture feature.”