fully charged battery -> 4h max ... (running mostly chrome and keynote) not really the "all day battery life" they promised (http://www.apple.com/macbook/design/)
Have you tried another browser? Chrome has notoriously TERRIBLE effects on battery life on Macs.
I'm not kidding. Try Safari for two days and be amazed.
There are probably things you can do to make it better, but for whatever reason Google doesn't seem to care and ships (what I would say is effectively) broken software.
Gee, maybe it's because you have a million tabs open, and all of them are websites with shitty, wasteful javascript begging the CPU for useless operations to update every single tracking pixel and cookie, with up-to-the-minute anaylitics, attached to sessions that are years old, on how your eyes move over their ad banners, so that a genetic machine learning algorithm can determine which ads are most likely to convert to clicks and then sales.
Hint: It's the ad for the top 7 ways you didn't know you could get bunions, and there's a 50% chance it will convince you to buy new shoes.
You are being downvoted, I assume for your "over the top" tone, but your overall message is very good. User behavior is the largest determinant of battery life.
I run Firefox with NoScript, and my battery usage is always very very good. An additional benefit is that I see few ads, since they invariably rely on third-party javascript.
but switch to safari? my thoughts
a) i'm a developer, i rather like new APIs, latest HTML 5 features
b) my whole company infrastructure relies on google services (and they work best in chrome, no surprise there)
c) my old macbook air (2013, maverick, killed one month ago by my son with self made kombucha) had about 7h battery-life
I'm not arguing you should switch to Safari (which I like) or arguing feature merits (I don't care much myself). But if you have a Mac you have Safari, so it's an easy test to run. And you will be AMAZED at the difference in battery life. It's pathetic.
To be fair that's not super useful information - I've never not seen Safari there when it's being used. Definitely agree that Chrome is way worse in practice though.
I don't know about the MB Retina, but I get more than the advertised 9 hours on my rMBP 15" running Word and Outlook.
Your problem is probably Chrome + screen brightness. Recommended monitor brightness in an office setting is 100-150 cd/m^2. The MB gets up to 375 cd/m^2 for outside use, but inside it should be at like a 35% setting. Also, Chrome guzzles juice like there is no tomorrow--use Safari.
It would be nice if they added a per app power usage tracking feature like they have on iOS to isolate such culprits. But yes, Chrome is the worst in battery and CPU usage.
That does seem rather short – most reviews of the 12" Macbook seemed to indicate that 8h was an achievable runtime.
I hear that Chrome sucks up battery like nothing else though; might be worth investigating whether Safari's improved power usage is worth the tradeoff in other aspects?
fully charged battery -> 4h max ... (running mostly chrome and keynote) not really the "all day battery life" they promised (http://www.apple.com/macbook/design/)