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I got my 13" retina MBP a few weeks ago, and used it quite a lot since then. However I noticed that battery drains incredibly quickly, I'm asked to recharge it after 2 1/2 hours of usage.

I'm using it for programming, and I have a lot of stuff running in the background (nothing takes a lot of CPU except Chrome; just playing music, mail, some chat programs). Is that why the battery drains so quickly?

The system report says that the battery is in good condition. According to the activity monitor the process "Google Chrome Renderer" needs ~100% CPU. I have no clue why it needs that much, can that be a reason for the low battery life?

Edit: I did a bit of research about Chrome's CPU usage, and it looks like a lot other people had the same problem. I followed some advice that those people gave, and now Chrome is back to less than 1% CPU usage. :) I now have 5+hrs battery life when I'm using my MBP intensively. I even had 7 1/2 when I wasn't connected over Wi-Fi and the screen didn't use a lot of light.

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  • Does the battery drain when Chrome is not running? What page(s) are you looking at in Chrome to cause the CPU ramp up, or does it not matter what you're doing & it always pegs at 100%? Have you deleted Chrome and reinstalled the latest version?
    – IconDaemon
    Feb 23, 2013 at 17:16
  • Yes, if Chrome is constantly running at 100%, that's what's draining your battery. And no, that shouldn't be happening. That usually happens to me when there's a rogue flash application or something like that slamming my processor.
    – octern
    Feb 23, 2013 at 18:59

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Open a support ticket with AppleCare if you'd like expert help in determining whether they can run diagnostics remotely to measure a few more data points than the overall summary.

It could be a high GPU / CPU / firmware thing that needs updating, but it also could be a battery that soon enough will show less life than designed and you'll be offered an exchange under warranty.

You can also open terminal and issue a few commands to look in more detail at power management.

 pmset -g rawlog

 pmset -g pslog

If you record the settings you have, correlate things with date; io_stat 300 you should get a good indication if the estimates are off and why. Of course, start with the machine 80% charged or more and let them run as your battery drains. AppleCare might not need all the logs, but you can send them / save them and run a check in 3 or 6 months to see if the battery is substantially worse / same / better than now.

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