Last year, Apple launched refreshed MacBook Pros with nine hours of battery life thanks to the inclusion of the latest Intel Haswell chips compared to the previous generation’s seven hours, making a pretty big leap forward in battery life. 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 near an outlet where we can easily charge it. .
While there are numerous factors that determine how quickly your MacBook’s battery drains, it’s important to remember that some apps consume more resources than others, thus draining your battery faster, here’s how to identify which apps on your MacBook are draining. Find out the most battery and how you can stop these battery-draining apps from causing more damage.
The Simplest Way to Check
The easiest way to see which apps are using the most battery life on your MacBook is to click the battery icon in the menu bar in the upper-right corner of the screen. Clicking this will bring up a popup window to show you. In other words, these are applications that consume a lot of energy, and your MacBook has identified them as resource hogs and battery hunters.
As you can see from the screenshot above, Chrome is the only app on my MacBook that consumes a significant amount of energy; This isn’t really surprising as Chrome never really plays well with OS X, but Chrome is the only web browser I’ll ever use, so I keep it around even if it’s draining battery life.
However, Chrome was recently updated with 64-bit support on OS X, which indicates that the web browser will come with better overall performance and less battery consumption.
Of course, most newer Macs are 64-bit compatible, older Macs are 32-bit, and since Google has completely retired the 32-bit version of Chrome, this means that some older Macs cannot be updated. Latest version. This includes first-generation Intel Macs.
While Chrome for Mac has stuck OS X machines in a dead end for years, OS X Yosemite seems to be the biggest culprit. OS X Yosemite was critically acclaimed last month, and while many users were excited to install the new operating system and try out the new features, there were quite a few Mac users who had a less than perfect time with OS X Yosemite. , especially if you have Google Chrome in the picture.
Use Activity Monitor
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. Simply go to open it. Once it opens, select the tab.
Sort apps by CPU percentage with the highest percentages first, if not yet sorted that way. This will tell you which apps are resource hogs. Usually anything in the 60-70% and higher range is pretty resource-heavy. Click on the app and press the button in the top right corner of the app (it looks like a stop sign with an X in the middle) or normally the app is by right clicking in the dock and selecting .
If an app you trust a lot is a big culprit when it comes to battery life, there’s nothing you can do but try to find an alternative app with less battery life. For example, Safari is the best web browser when it comes to battery life, so if you don’t have a close relationship with Chrome, it might be best to switch to Safari to save battery life on your MacBook.
