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.
Best Answer
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.
If you record the settings you have, correlate things with
date; io_stat 300you 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.