MacBook Pro 16 inch 2019 Battery Life Solved

I'm posting this in case it helps anyone else struggling with battery life on the MacBook Pro 16 inch from 2019. There are countless posts on this issue all over the internet so I know I'm not the only one who was still frustrated about this.

For years I've hated this laptop because of its awful battery life. Even brand new right out of the box I was only getting 5.5 hours at best. I ran a YouTube test and it only lasted 4 hours. These number are obviously far lower than the 10-11 hour advertised. I've struggled with trying to squeeze out extra battery life from this thing for years, reading forum after forum, but to no avail until recently.

I checked Activity Monitor and nothing appeared to be using much power but Coconut battery was showing the battery discharging at 14w when idle. However, when I checked CPU in Activity Monitor I could see that MDS, MDS Stores, and MDS Sync had been running for 30 hours. A quick google search showed that these are related to Apple's Spotlight app and that users had complained about sluggish performance from their Macs when these functions were ramping up.

Basically these processes are when Spotlight is indexing your computer and searching for anything new or for any changes to the system (apps, documents etc). For some users it will just keep indexing and never stop, causing additional work for the CPU in the background. A consequence of this is additional power usage (even if it doesn't show up in Activity Monitor under the Energy tab.

Once I basically disabled Spotlight and then reset the SMC my "time remaining" shown in Activity Monitor went from 4.5 hours to 10.5 hours immediately. I'd literally never seen it above 5.5 hours since I bought it so this just blew my mind. I can't believe that I've been struggling with this for years and now it's finally solved and it was all because of some buggy Apple software. Hopefully this helps others who come across this post looking for answers.

Notes.

• I've "disabled spotlight" by going to settings> Siri & Spotlight > Spotlight Privacy. Hit the "+" button and select your hard drive and any other hard drives that are connected to your Mac. Then press Done. Shutdown. Clear the SMC (do a google search n how to do this) then download Coconut Battery (its a free app) and check the "discharging with" row. It should be about 4-5 watts at idle, 7-9 watts at light loads. Before this my laptop was discharging at 14w even at idle and then would spike to 25-30 watts whenever I watch a YouTube video.

• I use gSwitch 1.9.7 created by Cody Schrank to just switch off the GPU and just use integrated graphics whenever I'm not doing work.
• I use low power mode whenever I'm on batter.
• I use Turbo Boost Switch Pro to disable turbo boost. It's a paid for app but it's well worth it.

As I'm typing this my battery is at 70% and time remaining reads 8 hours. That's probably too optimistic but at 70% I'd previously have been half looking for a plug socket with about 2.5 hours left so getting anywhere near 6 hours with 70% battery left feels incredible now.

Hoping this helps someone because it's driven me mad for years.