Early MacBook Pro Battery Life Reports Suggest Apple Might Be Stretching the Truth About Performance

No sooner did the first batch of Apple’s hot new MacBook Pro with OLED Touch Bar begin shipping to customers, than did many of those same customers hit the airwaves griping about the notebook’s battery life, which, according to one notable pundit at Business Insider, is “way worse than Apple claimed.”

Apple, for its part, has historically maintained a certain degree of exclusivity when it comes to divulging details about its product performance; however, much in the same fashion of other latter year Macs, Apple provides a quote of about 10 hours battery life on the 13-inch MacBook Pro with OLED Touch Bar.

As Steve Kovach of Business Insider reports, however, citing his own testing with the machine, “in my tests with the 13-inch model with Touch Bar, I only got about eight hours if I kept the screen brightness at a lower level. I got a little over six hours with the brightness all the way up, my preferred setting.”

These sentiments were shared with a litany of other early reviewers around the web, including The Verge’s Jacob Kastrenakes, who noted in his review that he was only able to get about 5 hours of use from a fully charged battery.

Whether the MacBook Pro’s apparent battery performance blues represent an issue the company will one day have to address on a larger scale remains to be seen. However, it’s important to note that battery performance, on the whole, will vary from person to person depending largely on individual usage patterns. In addition, there exists a laundry list of other variables that could factor in to explain why Apple’s 2016 MacBook isn’t performing as well as other, previous generation MacBooks in the battery department.

Chiefly among them would be the machine’s raw performance upgrade. While Apple slimmed down the MacBook Pro’s chassis this year by a few millimeters, the company also stuffed some uber-powerful internals inside the machine to help run the show, including Intel’s latest processors, faster RAM and super-fast SSD Storage, faster connections and ports, a considerably brighter Retina display, and even louder speakers to bring your multimedia experience on Mac to a whole new level.

Of course, while Apple has previously surprised users — by somewhat understating the battery performance of its products, the company’s 2016 MacBook Pro doesn’t appear to have made the short list of products geared towards people who love to live life unplugged.

Have you been experiencing poor battery performance on your new MacBook Pro? Let us know in the comments!