MacBook – Battery life in Macbook Pro with Touchbar vs non-Touchbar model

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Has anyone measured battery life on both for comparison?
Does the non-Touchbar model have better battery life?

Best Answer

Apple states that both 13″ MacBook Pro 2017 models, with or without Touch Bar, have the same battery life.

  • Up to 10 hours wireless web

    The wireless web test measures battery life by wirelessly browsing 25 popular websites with display brightness set to 12 clicks from bottom or 75%.

  • Up to 10 hours iTunes film playback

    The iTunes film playback test measures battery life by playing back HD 1080p content with display brightness set to 12 clicks from bottom or 75%.

  • Up to 30 days of standby time

    The standby test measures battery life by allowing a system, connected to a wireless network and signed in to an iCloud account, to enter standby mode with Safari and Mail applications launched and all system settings left at default.

Testing conducted by Apple in May 2017 using pre-production 2.3GHz dual-core Intel Core i5-based 13-inch MacBook Pro systems with a 1TB SSD and 8GB of RAM; and pre-production 3.1GHz dual-core Intel Core i5-based 13-inch MacBook Pro systems with a 512GB SSD and 8GB of RAM.

Battery life varies by use and configuration. See https://www.apple.com/batteries for more information.

https://www.apple.com/macbook-pro/specs/, formatting changed and paragraphs rearranged

My experience is people get far superior run times on Macs with less powerful GPU and more economical CPU so the non touch bar Mac in practice won’t drain its battery nearly as fast as the touchbar model given an identical software setup and usage.

For the 2017 model year lineup and the 2018 model year lineup, the non-touch bar model has a more economical GPU, cache, and typically less SSD and certainly less wattage CPU both at idle and max frequency. For most people that don’t have software issues where they max 85% CPU the touch bar models seem to last 30 to 90 minutes less when working casually. For high workload, either will drain the battery in 3-4 hours with the maxed out models getting 30 to 90 minutes less run time.

The 2018 hardware changes seem to be about the same as 2017 on paper, but we don’t have good real-world data and usage to tell.

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