MacBook is a powerful machine that does a great job. At least until your battery holds up. Here are some tips to help you get the most out of your battery life.
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10 Tips to Improve Your MacBook’s Battery Life
As long as your Mac’s battery is not in its last moments of life, there are several tips and tricks that can improve battery life. These tips will help you use your device’s battery for longer.
1. Turn off Bluetooth and Wi-Fi
Disabling your notebook’s Bluetooth and Wi-Fi is a surefire way to get more out of your battery. Although turning off Wi-Fi may not be practical in all situations – especially if you need to access on Internet frequently-it’s worth keeping it off when you’re performing a task that does not rely on Internet.
To turn off Wi-Fi:
- Click the Wi-Fi icon in the upper-right corner of the desktop.
- Select Turn off Wi-Fi. The icon should change from a number of concentric arcs to a contour that looks like a baseball diamond.
2. Adjust the brightness of the screen
The brightness of the screen is responsible for much of the power consumption on your MacBook, and reducing the brightness of the screen can save much of your battery.
To decrease screen brightness:
- Tap F1 repeatedly until the brightness is at a tolerable level, enough to display the information comfortably.
3. Power saving preferences
Changing these settings will cause your Mac to turn off power-consuming components, such as the screen and the hard drive, earlier during periods of inactivity.
- Click System Preferences.
- Open Energy Saving
- Select the Battery tab.
- Move the Computer Suspend sliders and Monitor Suspend slider to the left, as you see fit.
- Below, select the following check boxes:
- Insert the hard disk (s) to sleep when possible.
- Slightly dim the display when using this power supply.
- Automatically reduce the brightness before the screen goes to sleep.
4. Disable apps that spend a lot of power.
Occasionally, an application may consume an excessive amount of system resources, even when it is not in use. This not only affects the performance of MacBook, but also seriously damages the battery life.
- Open the Applications folder> Utility folder.
- Activity Monitor.
- Select the CPU tab.
- Select All Processes from the drop-down menu.
- Rate applications by CPU percentage.
- Look for any application that is consuming a large percentage, such as more than 70%.
- Select this application and press the Quit Process icon.
5. Turn off the backlit keyboard
While it’s a great feature, the backlit keyboard on Macs can save a lot on your battery.
To turn off the backlit keyboard:
- Press the F5 key repeatedly until the on-screen icon shows no bars lit.
6. Turn off Time Machine
Time Machine makes it very easy to back up all your Mac data, but copying that data to another drive consumes system resources. Fortunately, you can turn off Time Machine while your MacBook is running on battery power.
- Select System Preferences.
- Select Time Machine> Options.
- Uncheck “Back up with battery power”.
7. Enable private browsing
Believe it or not, private browsing will allow you to extract a bit more battery life because the browser is no longer accessing the hard drive to cache pages and images. Of course, Safari will not remember your search history or autocomplete forms, so you need to balance your convenience with possible battery saving.
- In Safari, tap the Safari tab and select Private Browsing.
8. Disable Spotlight Indexing
The Apple Spotlight, which instantly returns search results of everything on your hard drive, is very useful. But the way it works consumes CPU resources. You can prevent Spotlight from searching for your drive.
- Click System Preferences.
- Select Spotlight> Privacy.
- Press the + button and add your hard drive, or drag the hard drive to the list.
9. MacBook Pro Graphic Performance
MacBook Pros have discrete, integrated GPUs and can seamlessly switch between the two so you can get better battery life or increase performance depending on the task. However, discrete GPU can seriously reduce battery life.
To use the high-performance discrete graphics processor, select the Apple menu> System Preferences and click Power Saver. Then uncheck the checkbox for automatic chart switching.
If you can not see the automatic chart switching option, then your computer has only one graphics system. To confirm, select Apple menu> About this Mac, press the System Report button and select Graphics / Monitors on the left. The system or graphics systems are listed under Video Card.
10. Disconnect any unused peripherals
Even when not in use, whenever you have an optical disc in your MacBook, the system will occasionally rotate the drive (and the laser) to check the disc. While this is not a problem for MacBook Airs, which does not have optical drives, you can save battery power by unplugging all peripherals such as external hard drives and mice. Although these devices do not consume much energy, this will help the economy.
If you need help, have doubts or concerns, do not hesitate to leave a comment in the comment box below and we will try to help you as soon as possible!