I bought a 13" MBP with the Touch Bar too, and I am also getting bad battery life, on the order of 3-5 hours depending on the workload. I've ordered a 13" without the Touch Bar in hopes that the lower wattage CPU, lack of the Touch Bar, and bigger batter will result in much more battery life.
I also returned my 13" MBP with Touch Bar. I also experienced issues with WiFi after wake (would not reconnect to my network), but my chief reason for returning it was the abysmal 4-5 hour battery life under light browsing usage.
In its place, I purchased a 2016 13" MBP with the 15W CPU and no Touch Bar. Oddly, its battery has about 11% more capacity than the Touch Bar model [1]. In their battery tests, Ars Technica reported that it lasts about 3 hours longer than the Touch Bar model with 28W CPU [2][3]. Here's hoping I see similar results.
I wonder if all reports of poor battery life are from users of MBP with touch bar. It is interesting that the non-touch bar MBP has a ~10% bigger battery, half the TDP under sustained load and doesn't need to drive the ARM processor + touch bar. Thus better battery life than MBP with touch bar.
Interesting fact: the 13" macbook without the touch bar has a 10% larger battery; however they don't describe it as having a 10% better battery life: they're both rated at 10 hours.
I've also noticed the battery life is quite bad. My first one might have been defective as it only gave about 3 hours of battery life (from the in computer estimate), which is the same as my 4 year old 2012 macbook pro.
Second 13" touch bar machine now reports about 5 hours, which is still not great.
It sucks they didn't use the opportunity to make battery life better, but at least on the 13" non-touchbar it seems like they didn't make it worse: http://www.laptopmag.com/reviews/laptops/macbook-pro-13-inch. 12 hours is the same as the 2015 13" rMBP on that test.
I got a non-touch bar 13" MBP and the tests back up what I've experienced over the past couple weeks. Normal usage the battery is stellar, do something high CPU bound for a long time and you'll suffer.
Coding I've been doing in my spare time (Euler problems) the battery life has been 10 - 12 hours with medium brightness. Stellar compared to anything I've had before,
Using the coconut battery app though I can see when my CPU is taxed (churning out truncated harsahd numbers or w/e) I see the estimated battery life go down to about half that.
I think that's pretty fair for the machine, and I doubt any other small notebooks would fair much better under intensive tasks.
Looks like what really ate them was the 15" model could get the discrete GPU stuck on without cause, which kills the battery.
I noticed a big regression in battery life (25-35%) between my 2013 and 2017 MacBook Pro. I don't know how much the Touch Bar had to do with it, but the 2017 was definitely worse.
"Consumer Reports went on to share their new results for the tested systems. On the 13-inch MacBook Pro with Touch Bar they saw 15.75 hours of battery-life, for the 13-inch MacBook Pro without Touch Bar they saw 18.75 hours, and for the 15-inch MacBook Pro they saw 17.25 hours."
Work handed me a 13 inch touchbar in Jan and I’m still shocked at how poor the battery life is.
Really like everything else but it’s light years behind the experience I had with an old “white” MacBook. No charging indicator, no sleep mode indicator, can’t switch ram, no remote (yes I used it!), no battery led indicator (remember the button underneath the Mac that lit up a battery level?)
Just my tidbit, as a salty owner: The battery life on the 13' MBP is poor, and does not come close to what is advertised with any sort of moderate use (email, chat, couple browser tabs).
I suspect MBP battery life didn’t look so great considering the thinness, new hungrier M1 processors, dramatically increased number of pixels on the main display, and possibly the extra ports to small degree. Perhaps dropping the second display is what helped them soften the hit a little. Rarely use touch bar myself other than for adjusting volume and brightness, but in those regards it’s been incredibly convenient.
The reviewer complains about battery life but is using Chrome which is a known battery hog. I use Safari instead of Chrome for precisely this reason.
Regarding battery life, there are comments in macrumors forums from real users.
He also complains about dongles. I use my laptop with iPhone (sometimes) and with USB drives. Hardly an issue.
I'm a current 15" rMBP 2015 owner.
I tried the different models in the store. For those "on the go" the 13" is a nice "Air" replacement. I'm not certain I'd go with the touch bar version.
It is reasonable to keep up-to-date with Mac hardware if you use computers a lot. If things go wrong, it is far easier to take the laptop to the Genius Bar than options for other laptops.
Obviously no to the Macbook Pro 2017(13inch without touch bar), indeed having a poor battery life, hardly getting 6 hours, Sametime my MacBook pro Early 2015 is still getting 9hours of backup. Overall the quality of Apple products seems to be degrading.
If it’s any consolation (probably the opposite) my 2017 MBP, without Touch Bar, has gotten about 2h battery when running a now-typical corporate “pro” stack (docker, slack, Outlook, etc) sind day one. If only running UNIx stuff plus maybe a browser I can push it to 6.
Every time I get out my 2013 MBP (not for the day job) I remember what a computer could be.
The 2016 13" non-Touch Bar Pro has a 54.5-watt-hour battery.
The 2016 13" Touch Bar Pro has a 49.2-watt-hour-battery!
The components in the 2016 models are more power efficient. But at some point you'll run into physics.
Apple may claim the battery life is the same as before when watching a movie (probably entirely HW accelerator offloaded by now), but if you're compiling code all day I wouldn't expect the new laptop to match the previous battery life based on the raw numbers alone.
I have a new 15" MacBook Pro with touch bar and can confirm that this OS X update (10.12.3) made a very noticeable improvement on my battery life. It went from 4 hours on moderate usage to at least 8... This relieves the majority of my anxiety with the new MBP and I'm now really happy with my purchase.
> Now, if you spring for the base model you get a worse battery
Except you don't get a worse battery, that's the crazy part. The base/cheaper model gets the better battery than the expensive model.
The lower-end 13-inch base MacBook Pro gets a 54.5w/hr battery, and only drives one screen. The higher-end 13-inch touchbar MacBook Pro only gets a 49.2w/hr battery, and has to drive two screens. - https://www.apple.com/macbook-pro/specs/ Presumably the TouchBar takes up enough space that they had to reduce the battery size to compensate.
So, not only do you have a touch bar you (probably) don't want, wasting battery life you'd rather keep, you also have smaller total battery capacity too. The lineup goes out of it's way to double-punish the more expensive product.
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