I am not sure anyone has had same experience as I have. Recently bought a retina MacBook Pro and of course I was looking forward to enjoying the 10 hours of battery life that was promised.
2 months into the ownership I started paying more attention to the Energy Saver battery reading and to my shock discovered that the reading was fluctuating constantly.
No matter what I did I could not manage to get the 10 hours. For instance at one time it shows 8h 25 min battery power remaining, 30 minutes later it shows 5h 50 min power remaining. So I checked on the web and discovered had to shut down power hungry applications: bluetooth, WiFi, adjust brightness of the screen not to be too bright, I uninstalled Google Chrome and used Safari instead, turned-off keyboard lighting etc. This seemed not to have an effect on what I was experiencing.
Of course it would have been easier to go to the Genius bar but I first came across this Retina MacBook Pro battery life sucks? Here's how to fix it! web page.
However, before I could implement what is detailed there, I had temporarily had to move from my normal work desk to another room but same network. Then realised…my battery life improved enormously!! Then it hit me that the only difference was that in my normal place I connected to the internet via cable and in the new place was I using WiFi.
Surely WiFi should consume more battery than cable! Then I realised that in my usual place I used to connect via cable but through a Power Line Adapter (PLA).
So my questions are:
- How do these power line adapters work?
- Why should they affect battery of my laptop?
- Should I continue using a the power line adapter with the laptop?
There is no information of this from the manufacturer of the power line adapter and have yet to get Apple's opinion on this.