MacBook Pro battery life

[bernie1227]

Misleading is the advertisers bread and butter Daniel :P

[jhatter]

Learn to single-tasks.

Are you able to elaborate more on this point?
I usually work in Illustrator or Photoshop, in the background I'll have Mail running and also a YouTube playlist on the go in Safari! So do all applications use up the same energy or are some more demanding than others? Does it depend on what the task the application is doing?

[djr33]

Are you able to elaborate more on this point?
I usually work in Illustrator or Photoshop, in the background I'll have Mail running and also a YouTube playlist on the go in Safari! So do all applications use up the same energy or are some more demanding than others? Does it depend on what the task the application is doing?

Everything you do on the computer will use electricity from the battery. I believe the biggest drain is consistently using the monitor (related also to brightness). Obviously anything plugged in to the USB may also drain some power. After that, I imagine it's probably just running the whole computer or the hard drive.
The differences from different programs would come from two different sources, I'd guess: 1. working with large files would use more RAM, but I don't think that would require much extra power, but possibly some; 2. the big one would be the processor. So if you have several programs open and all are processing, that will add up quickly. There's nothing fundamentally wrong with having several things open at once, but usually when you do that you'll have processing running in each of them (for example, Javascript in your browser!).

The other issue is the fan, I think. Once any of the components make your computer hot (especially the processor), the fan will start running faster and that will drain your battery even more.



You can test all of this fairly easily: close all of your programs and turn the monitor brightness down. Wait a few minutes. The battery life will improve significantly (it should display a difference in the top right of the screen). Then open your web browser, photoshop and a few other applications and start asking it to process a lot. (And turn up the monitor brightness.) The battery time remaining will drop down quickly.

[getitfaster]

Photoshop is a big drain on my mac air's battery. I think because it's using the gpu. Anything using the gpu heavily tends to drain my battery life more than say using the cpu alone, like when working with safari or a music production program I use called ableton.