New MacBooks last up to 12 hours on battery power. If you’re not getting anything like that from yours–old or new–these tips are guaranteed to get you closer.
1. Dim your screen.
This is the simplest change and it alone can save hours of battery life. Press the F1 key a few times to lower the brightness as much as you can.
You’ll also want to turn off the auto-dim feature. Click the Apple () icon in the upper-left corner of the screen and select System Preferences.
Click Displays and disable the Automatically adjust brightness checkbox.
2. Turn off the keyboard backlight.
Press F5 until the keyboard backlight turns off.
Additionally, in Keyboard preferences, deselect the Adjust keyboard brightness in low light checkbox.
3. Tweak your sleep settings.
For those times when you’re away from your computer, set it up to automatically turn off the screen and spin down the hard drive.
In the Energy Saver preferences, on the Battery tab, lower the Computer sleep and Display sleep sliders. (I usually go with 10 and 5 minutes, respectively.)
Additionally, Enable the Put hard disks to sleep and Slightly dim the display checkboxes.
4. Enable Automatic Graphic Switching.
If you’re on a MacBook Pro, you may see an option near the top of the Energy Saver preferences window for Automatic Graphic Switching. Turn this on.
5. Turn off Power Nap.
Also in the Energy Saver preferences, deselect the Enable Power Nap checkbox.
6. Turn off wi-fi.
Extreme? Yes. But when you won’t need to access the internet for some time switch it off. Click the wi-fi menubar icon and select Turn Wi-Fi Off.
7. Turn off Bluetooth.
Click the Bluetooth menubar icon and select Turn Bluetooth Off.
8. Disable Time Machine on battery power.
System processes related to Time Machine frequently consume up to 100% CPU and as a result run your battery down faster. So let’s turn off Time Machine when you’re on battery power.
In System Preferences, click Time Machine, then click the Options button in the bottom-right of the window:
Disable the Back up while on battery power checkbox.
9. Quit apps you aren’t using.
Idle apps still drain power. Close them if you won’t need them anytime soon.
10. Close browser tabs.
Many of us have a dozen or more tabs open at a time. Bookmark and close the ones you won’t get to today.
11. Use Safari instead of Chrome.
This is another biggie for Macs. Chrome uses much more power than the built-in browser. Switching to Safari can save you hours of battery life.
12. Uninstall Flash.
Remove flash if it’s installed. Chrome has its own version built-in, so you can use it for sites that still require flash.
13. Disconnect peripherals and eject media.
If you’re not actively using them, remove SD cards, flash drives, DVDs, external drives, printers–everything. (Headphones are fine.)
14. Download instead of streaming.
When watching a movie on battery power, download it first instead of streaming it. Ditto for music.
15. Quit runaway processes.
A runaway app or process can drain your battery in a very short period of time. When your Mac gets hot or starts running slowly, use Activity Monitor to check for a runaway process.
If you want to save more battery life…
Check out Coolant. It’s a menubar app that lets you know immediately when an app, system process, and even a browser tab starts gobbling up CPU and draining your battery.
Hope this article was helpful. Thank you for reading!
