In October, Apple launched refurbished MacBook Pros with nine hours of battery life thanks to the addition of the latest Intel Haswell chips compared to the previous generation’s 7 hours. MacBook Airs get even better battery life thanks to slightly slower internal components that require less power.
However, while nine hours is more than impressive for the MacBook Pro, there are times when we need to squeeze a little more juice out of the battery, especially when we’re not close to an outlet. However, there are things you can do and settings you can change to get an extra hour or two of battery life from your MacBook.
Dim Screen and LED Keyboard
Probably the easiest trick you can do to get more battery life is to dim your MacBook’s screen and LED-backlit keyboard. Perhaps even better is that the keyboard has dedicated keys for adjusting the screen brightness and the keyboard’s LED backlight brightness, so there’s no excuse for not dimming your screen.
You can easily add an hour or two of battery life to your MacBook by dimming the screen and not running it fully. As for the backlit keyboard, the LEDs don’t consume much battery life, but even a small change can make a difference, so usually the lowest brightness setting on a backlit keyboard is usually enough to see well while typing. dark.
Use Safari
Your preferred browser is most likely a third-party option like Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox, but compared to Apple’s built-in Safari web browser, these two options are a waste of resources. Just like with iOS devices, you can reduce power usage and increase battery life by switching to Safari to further reduce battery life before your MacBook gives way.
This test a few months ago It shows that Safari’s memory usage is better than other third-party browsers, thus saving system resources and saving battery life in the long run. Of course the difference may not be astronomical, but it can be the difference between your MacBook dying now or 30 minutes from now, giving you extra time for last-minute work.
Stay Away From Flash Content
One of the worst resource hogs for a MacBook (or any computer for that matter) is Flash content. Most of the videos you post on video sharing sites are played using Flash player which consumes a huge battery.
If you need to drain as much energy from your battery as possible, stay away from video streaming websites temporarily. If you absolutely need to watch these cat videos on YouTube, at least use the HTML5 player, which is still in beta, but you can do it easily. enable here for supporting videos.
Adjust Energy Saving Settings
If you open it and click on it, you’ll see several options you can adjust to help improve battery life. For example, you can have the screen turn off after a certain period of inactivity. I set it to 10 minutes, but you can set it to shorter if you want to extend the battery a bit.
There are also settings to turn off hard drives when they are not being accessed and to automatically dim the screen when running on battery power. You can also enable a new feature called Power Nap, which allows your MacBook to check for updates from various online services even when it’s in sleep mode. Disabling this feature can increase battery life.
Use Activity Monitor to Discover Resourceful Apps
There will come times when an app will mysteriously consume tons of resources, whether due to a bug in the app or being used without the user noticing. An app like this can have a serious impact on battery life, not to mention the overall performance of your MacBook at the time.
However, you can keep things under control and detect those resource-consuming apps using Activity Monitor, a built-in feature of MacBooks. It is enough to navigate to open it. Once it opens, select the tab.
If not already, rank apps by CPU percentage by highest percentage. This will tell you which app is a resource hog. Usually anything in the 60-70% and higher range is pretty resource-heavy. Click on the application and press the button in the upper right corner of the application (it looks like a stop sign with an X in the middle) or normally the application by right clicking and selecting in the dock.
