I have a late 2013 Macbook Pro Retina 15 inch with i7 2.3 GHz, 16GB Ram, nVidia 750m 2GB and 500GB PCIe SSD.
I've always been happy with the machine and battery life, except when I work in Android Studio (always updated to the latest version).
I can never get past 2,5 – 3 hours of battery life. Is this normal ?
I never run the emulator, as I always use a real device to test my apps.
I've tried SMC and PRAM reset with no impact.
Any ideas?
Best Answer
There was a long-standing problem with Oracle JDKs/JREs causing the discrete video card rather than the integrated one to be used on Retina displays, with a consequent hit on battery life. The problem became apparent when JetBrains started bundling Oracle's JRE with IntelliJ-based IDEs (see, for instance, IDEA-119858 in their bugtracker). Android Studio is based on the IntelliJ platform so would have suffered from the same problem.
That said, the problem has been fixed for quite some time in JetBrains IDEs like IntelliJ IDEA, and issue 80173 in the Android Studio tracker says it was fixed in Android Studio 2.2. So since you say you're using the latest version perhaps your problem has another cause, or perhaps the problem's not in fact fixed in all cases. gfxCardStatus (as linked from the JetBrains bug report) might be useful in checking which card is actually being used. I used the tool for a while on my own mid-2012 Retina MacBook Pro back in the days when IntelliJ IDEA was suffering from this problem.