Extending Apple MacBook Pro Battery Life

Extending Apple MacBook Pro Battery Life
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The Importance of Batteries

Batteries power essentially every we use in this technological age, the most important of which are probably our laptops. We carry them everywhere, use them for business, pleasure, and everything in between, yet most of us don’t know a thing about extending Apple Macbook Pro battery life. We use our laptops without a thought as to how much energy we’re actually using, and when it finally gets down to red, we’re either left without a laptop or we scramble to find our charger and plug it in.

The day and age of scrambling is over. Here is a comprehensive guide on how to extend the battery life of your Macbook Pro.

#1. Screen Brightness

The first thing anyone should do when they get any sort of technological device is set the screen brightness to as low as they can possible stand to have it. Most phones should be able to be set on their lowest setting without any real affect on how much you can see on the screen, whereas laptops and computers can usually go down to about halfway before you begin to get annoyed at how dark it is.

Cutting brightness is a godsend as far as preserving battery life goes, because in many cases you can extend your usage time by 30% or 40%, sometimes even doubling the total life you get out of one charge.

#2. Using Headphone to Decrease Volume

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If you happen to be one of those people that loves music and loves listening to music on your laptop, then you’ll definitely need to invest in a good pair of headphones. Not only will this make your musical experience that much more enjoyable, it will also save battery. Why? Well, the reason is pretty simple. On most headphones, having your laptop volume at about one quarter of full volume is more than enough to hear everything. Contrarily, without headphones you’ll often need to have your volume up all the way to hear the music. The most noticeable consequence of this is (you guessed it!) a dip in battery life.

#3. The Internet

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Probably the biggest sucker of battery life these days is your wireless connection to the internet. Part of this is simply because your wireless card is running constantly in order to maintain your connection, and the other part is that the better half of people’s time on the internet is spent watching videos, listening to music, or viewing images. All of these activities suck up a lot of bandwidth, and subsequently a lot of your battery life.

The solution? Turn off your wireless card when you’re not using. Just as with turning off the TV when you leave the room, shutting off the wireless card on your Macbook Pro can save a good bit of energy by itself. Of course, if you’re going to be using the internet fairly often (once every 2-3 minutes), it’s almost pointless to do this, but if you just want to listen to music or type up a document, there’s nothing better you can do to save battery life than shutting off your wireless card.

References

1. Information Reference: All information came from prior author knowledge and experience.

2. Image Reference: All images are screenshots taken by the author.