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MCOD – 6.6.10 – Macbook Pro Core i5/Core i7 Battery Fix


If you purchased a new Macbook Pro with a Core i5 or Core i7 (The 15″ or 17″ ones for now) you probably expected the nice battery life they talk about on their site, when I bought this one it said 8-10 hours, but currently it says 8-9 hours for the 15″. Imagine my surprise when I routinely get 3 hours of battery life. Doing a quick Google search finds lots of people with the same complaints. If you dig into this a bit you will learn that these Macbook Pros have two graphics cards, one from NVIDIA that is fast, but power hungry, and one from Intel, that is slow but saves your battery.

The nice thing about this is your computer automatically handles which card to use, giving you the performance you need, and saving battery when it can.

In theory, this is great. In reality it’s a total joke, an EPIC FAIL on Apple’s part. You see, they switch based on which applications are running, guessing they need the graphics based on the libraries they load, it seems. This would be great if it was things like World of Warcraft or Photoshop, but Skype? Evernote? Give me a break!

You can go to power settings and disable automatic switching, however this sets it to ALWAYS use the Nvidia chipset, and gives you permanent short battery life.

In comes donation-ware graphics management tool gfxCardStatus written by Cody Kreiger.

  1. Download the zip file
  2. Unzip and move gfxCardStatus to Applications folder
  3. Run gfxCardStatus, you will see an icon on your menu bar with either an ‘n’ or ‘i’ to indicate when you’re running in Nvidia or Intel graphics mode. Intel will give good battery life (5-6 hours for my core i5 15″), and Nvidia will give 1990′s battery life (3-4 hours on the same core i5 15″).
  4. Click the icon, change to Intel only. Enjoy better battery life!
  5. Set calendar appointment for 1-2 weeks in the future to go back to Cody’s site and donate a dollar or two for his work.

I plan to leave this on Intel only and see how both my battery life and performance is. I don’t play any games on my laptop, so I expect I won’t notice the difference.

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This entry was posted on June 6, 2010, 10:48 am and is filed under Mac Command of the Day, Macintosh. You can follow any responses to this entry through RSS 2.0. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

  • http://www.renthawaiian.com Rob

    You rock! I have this exact problem with my 17″ macbook pro.

  • Dome

    I have a i5 15″ and short battery life, so I’ll test it for some time and post my experience.

  • http://www.acima.asn.au/ Andrew Buckeridge

    This is really dumb. It should disable the Nvida when using battery.
    It would also be good if it went that way when Nvidia dies.
    This will need to disable transition effects and other things that won’t complete. It may have disable some apps. I.e. throw.

    You should be able to lock it the other way – Intel HD only.
    Should not use power hungry display solutions in laptops.

    Looking at i5 because Intel HD is a non-Nvida option Apple now have. They should use it.

    90s battery life? It would be bad if you still have a 90s battery.
    Wirth’s law is is what drives heat output of these incendiary devices.
    Power consumption goes up geometrically as a function of time.

    I had a dead MacBook Pro with no graphics that was just out of warranty. This was common problem a while ago. My old 00s 12″ iBook with ATI is still going and won’t die. I hope its fixed as OS X 10.3 on a G3 with full disc and no DVD is limiting.

  • http://jonzobrist.com/ Jon Zobrist

    Be aware, if you use video out, or want to, this app may interfere with it if you’re not in dynamic mode.
    So, switch to dynamic switching mode when you need to connect an external display to your Macbook pro!

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