The new Apple MacBook Pro offers much less battery life than claimed: Report

Apple’s new MacBook has earned more than its fair share of complaints since its launch. Apple’s “revolutionary” new device introduced the world to dongle hell and that alone has drawn more ire than any other issue with the device. Folks, including ourselves , have complained about everything, from its exorbitant price to the lack of an SD card slot, USB port and even the much-loved MagSafe connector. One more complaint to add to this growing list comes in the form of a report on 9to5Mac. Apple promises a “up to 10 hours iTunes movie playback” with the 13-inch MacBook Pro with Touch Bar and also specifies that the test was conducted on a “2.9GHz dual-core Intel Core i5-based 13-inch MacBook Pro with a 512GB SSD and 8GB of RAM.” As far as test systems go, that’s a bog-standard system to test on and a claim of 10 hours video playback is commendable. When put to the test, however, 9to5Mac discovered that in practice, the battery life rarely crossed the 8-hour mark. You can find the full details of the test setup on 9to5Mac, suffice to say that the test was run at 50 percent brightness and that the test MacBook Pro used a 3.3GHz Intel i7 (vs the i5 that Apple used) and 16GB of RAM. A more powerful CPU does equal less battery life, but  it must be noted that both the CPUs in 9to5Mac’s reports are essentially the same, offering a 28W TDP and Intel Iris Pro 550 graphics. The only notable difference between the two comes in terms of clock speeds. Given this information, one can expect the i7-based MacBook Pro to perform slightly worse than the i5-based MacBook Pro that Apple used, but only in light workload scenarios, like video playback on iTunes. If the results are to be believed, the 13-inch MacBook Pro offers significantly worse (20 percent) battery life than Apple claims. Yes, this is nit-picking at its finest. No manufacturer in our experience has ever precisely quoted battery life for their offerings and our regular workflows differ so wildly from laboratory tests that claimed battery life is nothing more than, well, a guideline. The bigger problem here is that Apple is officially claiming less battery life than their 2015 MacBook Pro (12 hours of video playback), which uses the same CPU architecture used in the current MacBook Pros. Here’s a Pro-tip, Apple: When it comes to battery life, less is never more.