I've been working on an 80,000 page book in MS Word and using a browser for research. I've been working during the day but the display isn't even on full and I'm getting less than 8 hours of battery life. Is something wrong?
[Re-Titled by Moderator]
MacBook Pro 16″, macOS 14.4
I have a new MacBook Pro (purchased a month ago) and at the start it had incredible battery life. Now I’m getting around 2.5 hours per full charge. And I’m not running any design programs or watching video. The Activity Monitor shows nothing that’s hogging that much energy. It’s wild.
I have a new MacBook Pro (purchased a month ago) and at the start it had incredible battery life. Now I’m getting around 2.5 hours per full charge. And I’m not running any design programs or watching video. The Activity Monitor shows nothing that’s hogging that much energy. It’s wild.
I've been working on an 80,000 page book in MS Word and using a browser for research.
I also use Word for books and articles, and must often have a browser open for my research. I've found that what you see is most likely due to your browser or the web pages you have open.
I can run Word alone for a long time on battery, even on a geriatric Macbook Pro I use for travel. It has an 11 year old battery. Once I open certain web pages to fact-check, I can hear the single fan spool up in reaction to internal heating and see the charge level icon start to drop. I close the web page and all is normal again..
Chrome is probably the most resource-greedy of all the browsers:
but I can see demand go up on a site-by-site basis even in Safari. If you cannot live without Chrome, it's time to plug in.
I just did a test. With only your question open in Safari, discussions.apple.com was using about 5% energy per Activity Monitor. Then I opened the OWC site (eshop.macsales.com) where I shop a lot. When I reached an individual OWC product page, look what happened:
Impressive, and my CPU temps rose by 10°C within minutes of opening that page
I ran into similar situations when looking at election night result pages. All in Safari.
So before worrying about your Mac's battery, do what has already been wisely recommended: let Activity Monitor reveal any guilty parties.
View energy consumption in Activity Monitor on Mac - Apple Support
Maybe, maybe not. Apple's "up to 24 hour" claim is predicated on specific conditions, none of which involve using Microsoft's bloatware, or any browser other than Safari. Literally every other browser will consume more energy.
If you want suggestions post a picture of Activity Monitor.
If your Mac battery runs out of charge quickly - Apple Support but that document is very cursory. Activity Monitor gets into detail.
To get the attention you deserve, PLEASE start a NEW discussion.
This discussion is already way too crowded with different problems posted by different users with different hardware, different versions of MacOS, and different displays. If you did not immediately find your solution by reading through the existing postings, you likely do not have "exactly the same problem" and need to explain from the beginning.
That will allow Readers to think hard about your exact situation and address the exact circumstances you are facing.
https://discussions.apple.com/post/question
Have you divided that 80,000 words into multiple chapters? If not, moving 80,00 words in an out of memory to change a single word is VERY hard work for any computer.
MS Word has essentially always been able to work on chapters of a coherent larger work (including maintaining flat page numbers and index entries.)
Also what is the date of your most recent backup, and by what method?
A very large document as one file will cause Word to bring the ENTIRE document into RAM memory, which quickly fills and then splits out onto Virtual Memory on the disk. This I/O involved is not well indicated as taxing in the Energy pane, but MAY show in the memory pane as a large over-commitment of existing real RAM and a buildup of SWAP space used.
It is great that you are doing frequent backups -- we have heard sad stores of writers who worked for years on a eject, only to have it disappear in an instant due to hardware malfunction.I strongly suggest you look in the manual or help for tips on breaking your document into chapters.
You should look at Word documentation on chapter-books. You get MUCH speedier daily editing, and do not give up anything. You can have coherent page numbers staring at page one, and a renumber operation will simply read through the linked files, render each and computer the appropriate page numbers again. Forward and backward references (see page 56) continue to work fine. index and table of contents entries continue to work fine.
As a chapter book, your daily edits are quick and easy, and the longer time is only when you re-number or re-index instead of every change you make.
Playing compressed video not already on your Mac is EXTEMELY taxing.
It stresses every subsystem to the extreme. The data are buffered on disk, the compressed data are read back from the same disk at the same time as more data are coming in, de-compressed using the graphics processors and the compute processors. That really fast, rapidly changing data stream is sent out to your display and refreshed 60 or more times a second.
You should NOT be doing that on battery alone. Plug it in!
That computer is a battery-CAPABLE device. It is not optimized as a battery-operated device. (It is NOT an iPhone.)
Your computer performs best when connected to AC power, such as the power adapter. It can use the full output of the Power Adapter AND when doing especially challenging work will also freely "borrow" power from the battery. In some cases, even with the power adapter connected, the charged state may decline during very stressful work.
When used only on battery, your computer has no extra cushion of power, and may perform more slowly. However, for ordinary non-stressful tasks this may not be objectionable (possibly not even noticeable.)
In general, you should ALWAYS connect a power source when it is possible to do so, and only run on batteries (which could be somewhat slower) when no power sources are at hand. Your Mac maintains its battery charge levels under program control, and will NEVER over-charge.
I was curious about this so I asked AI. Here is it's response:
Points That Need Clarification
1. “EXTREMELY taxing”:
• While playing compressed video can be taxing, it is not universally “extremely taxing.” The impact depends on the video’s complexity (e.g., 4K HEVC or HDR content vs. lower-resolution H.264 video) and the hardware capabilities. Modern Macs, especially those with Apple Silicon (M1/M2), are optimized for such tasks and can handle video playback efficiently using hardware-accelerated decoding.
2. Disk Activity:
• The claim about intensive disk activity may not always hold true. Many video players pre-buffer video data into memory to reduce constant disk reads, especially for streaming content. Solid-state drives (SSDs) in modern Macs are also highly efficient at handling such tasks.
3. “Should NOT be doing that on battery alone”:
• While it’s true that running on AC power ensures peak performance, this advice may be overly cautious. Apple Silicon-based Macs (M1/M2) are highly energy-efficient, and playing video on battery is a common use case that these systems handle comfortably for many hours.
4. “Not optimized as a battery-operated device”:
• This statement is outdated for Apple Silicon-based Macs. These systems are designed for excellent battery performance and efficiency. Unlike older Intel-based Macs, they do not see significant slowdowns on battery during most tasks, including video playback.
5. “Always connect a power source”:
• It is not necessary to always use a Mac while plugged in. Modern batteries are designed to handle charge cycles well, and Apple’s battery health management system minimizes wear from frequent charging. Running on battery for regular use is fine and does not inherently harm the device.
This is a MacBook (my 10th, I might add, over the years) that is not even a month old. And the responses above are about large Word documents or video streaming - neither is applicable to me. I have yet to install any of the actual programs which would drain this battery and I’m getting less battery life than the MB Pro I had last. It has exactly the same set up as when the battery was functioning perfectly at the start.
And for the record, in the battery life monitor it is showing there aren’t any programs draining a unusual battery life either. The software is not answering why the hardware appears to not be functioning correctly. If it had, I wouldn’t be asking for ideas.
[Edited by Moderator]
Thanks for the Safari tip.
I did look over Activity Monitor and interestingly windowserver was the big process hog, not Word itself.
Thanks for the reply. I am unsure why the battery life declined so much as it lasted close to 20 hours 2 months ago and is now at 2-3 house doing similar tasks.
Actually, it's been the whole document at once. I didn't know breaking it up into chapters was a good idea, but that makes perfect sense. There are images in the document as well, so I'm not sure if maybe it's memory swapping to disk or something energy-intensive.
My latest backup is Time Machine, every night, of the whole disk.
Great advice, thanks!
I did look at Activity monitor and nothing too crazy came up. But I guess I'll need to sample more often.
I'm using AI a lot, but not locally obviously, just through websites. But I'm not sure if there's processing intensive javascript weirdness going on, say, or whether the AI webpages are light HTML/CSS.
"You should look at Word documentation on chapter-books. You get MUCH speedier daily editing, and do not give up anything. You can have coherent page numbers staring at page one, and a renumber operation will simply read through the linked files, render each and computer the appropriate page numbers again. Forward and backward references (see page 56) continue to work fine. index and table of contents entries continue to work fine."
That's fantastic. I wasn't aware of that functionality.
Obviously I would have tried any suggestions that actually apply to me before commenting. Outside of using Chrome vs Safari (which I was doing while I was getting the long battery life) nothing else suggested applies to me.
Why is my MacBook Pro battery draining so fast?
