Tested: The Truth Macbook Pro's Behind The Terrible Battery Life

Many Benchmarks Later, the Answer Lies Somewhere Between a Smaller Battery and Heavier Workloads.

- Gordon Mah Ung

Read professional reviews of Apple’s new MacBook Pro lineup, and you’ll come away thinking the new laptops have great battery life.

Dive into a customer forum, though,and the upshot will be exactly the opposite:The new MacBook Pros have “pisspoor” battery life.

That characterization came from user yillbs on MacRumors.com (go.macworld.com/mr). “I don’t think anyone can convince me that this thing isn’t just flat out the worst battery life ever on a MacBook,” yillbs wrote, clearly frustrated. “I’ve been defending it like mad, but at this point… how can you? 4.42 hours is just bad.”

User Happypuppy was anything but. “Not happy with the battery either. I was editing my MacBook review video last night and at 6:28 p.m. it was at 100 percent,” Happypuppy wrote. “At 8:52 p.m. it was down to about 42 percent.”

Contrast those write-ups with Macworld’s review (go.macworld.com/ mwmbp), 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.”

Macworld isn’t alone. From Laptopmag to The Verge and Notebookcheck.net, the vast majority of reviewers have lauded the MacBook Pros for good battery life.

My own tests agreed. 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. 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.