Battery life not as advertised

[Rechell Mruk]

Even with the most conservative of settings, my Book 2 gives me 6 hours at best; could this be a defect?

 

[spicypadthai]

6 sounds low but depends what you're doing with it. Any video editing/gaming or basic stuff like web browsing/email/watching videos?

 

[rdubmu]

I am curious as well. Battery life is one of the most important things I am considering as well. It advertises as 15 hours... 6 hours isn't even 1/2 of what is advertised. What are others getting?

 

[Mattemt294]

I get great battery life on recommended power slider setting. unless I start using the GeForce GPU. any sort of image video editing really starts to mess with the battery life as expected.

 

[Al Sacco]

I generally get about 8 to 10 hours of medium-to-heavy use on battery on my i7 15-inch Surface Book 2. I just worked constantly on a train for more than four hours, streaming audio via Wi-Fi and writing in Word, web surfing, etc, and I had more than 50 percent battery when I got off the train. Overall, I'm happy with the battery life so far.

 

[anon(5327127)]

Even with the most conservative of settings, my Book 2 gives me 6 hours at best; could this be a defect?

Read the small print. The max battery is probably with everything off, wireless, BT etc, low brightness playing a video from the video app. Are you using Chrome? What do you have installed running in the background? So many questions.

Anything other than that and it will be less.

How about the iPad mini 4, "

• Up to 9 hours of surfing the web using mobile data network"

Play a game and it's far, far less.

 

[SonofNun]

I have the 15" i7 model. I used it on recommended power settings, with brightness around 60%.
Here's how yesterday worked out for me:
9-10 am: Used it to create a mock-up in Adobe XD. Also had Adobe Illustrator open, along with several Edge tabs and a beta of software my company develops (was constantly using the GPU to render a graph with hundreds of data points)
Throughout the rest of the work day, I used it on and off to take notes in OneNote.
7-10:30pm: Used it to program with multiple instances of visual studio.
Ended the day at 39% battery.

 

[phishfi]

I don't really let my battery get too low, but I have had days where I used it almost the entire day, usually to stream music over Bluetooth while taking the occasional note in OneNote and Wunderlist. Battery easily lasts me 8+ hours. It's so good that I rarely check the battery levels.

From everything I'v seen online, I'd highly recommend avoiding Chrome. It looks like that's a huge culprit for battery drain. I'm on Opera and Edge exclusively, now.

 

[rdubmu]

I don't really let my battery get too low, but I have had days where I used it almost the entire day, usually to stream music over Bluetooth while taking the occasional note in OneNote and Wunderlist. Battery easily lasts me 8+ hours. It's so good that I rarely check the battery levels.

From everything I'v seen online, I'd highly recommend avoiding Chrome. It looks like that's a huge culprit for battery drain. I'm on Opera and Edge exclusively, now.

The issue with Chrome is that many websites do not work with edge... So many bugs and display issues. Ctuit radar just doesn't work with edge, a couple of websites I have come across says that edge isn't supported. I think iCloud uses to be one of them.

 

[terrokkinit]

My Surface Book 2 i7 and 512GB runs at about 9-10 hours of battery life doing mild to moderate tasks. I use it for everything from Word documents, Excel and email to video browsing and tablet functions to high-motion 3D animation, development, and gaming (I tend to use laptops to everything they can use).

In most cases, it runs in the 10-hour range, while it can go less if I'm running Adobe Creative Cloud. I've found that turning down the brightness and ensuring a small amount of background tasks keeps the battery running at max efficiency.

But then again, I prefer to keep it plugged in because of faster performance. My food for thought.

 

[podsnap]

It inevitably is very dependent on the task you're doing. I've not done a full battery run down test but if I'm using just the screen (detached) and doing some drawing in Sketchable, I get just over 2 hours (as opposed to the advertised over 5). Certain apps and tasks do seem to really munch the battery.

If I stream YouTube videos however, (I think MS get their battery life figures from continuous streaming video), the battery is barely hit.

 

[Leon Hament]

On my Surface Book 2 i7 13,5" model I can work all day without problems. Mostly office work and running the occassional VM in the background.
Using the detached tablet the battery life is the same as previously mentioned. 2 hours of notetaking in OneNote runs down the battery to 30%

 

[phishfi]

The issue with Chrome is that many websites do not work with edge... So many bugs and display issues. Ctuit radar just doesn't work with edge, a couple of websites I have come across says that edge isn't supported. I think iCloud uses to be one of them.

I'm not saying it's a perfect solution, it's just that Chrome causes much more battery drain that some other browsers.

I've been using Opera for a couple weeks now, and it's doing great for battery. It's able to run Chrome extensions (although, I stick to Opera's extension store instead), so the only thing it can't do that Chrome does is Cast to Chromecast... (for me, anyway. I think you still need Chrome for YouTube TV and probably a couple of Google's other services where they feel like arbitrarily enforcing a ban on non-Chrome browsers.)

 

[phishfi]

It inevitably is very dependent on the task you're doing. I've not done a full battery run down test but if I'm using just the screen (detached) and doing some drawing in Sketchable, I get just over 2 hours (as opposed to the advertised over 5). Certain apps and tasks do seem to really munch the battery.

If I stream YouTube videos however, (I think MS get their battery life figures from continuous streaming video), the battery is barely hit.

Actually, they straight up say "Up to 17 hours of video playback". With the way these Intel processors handle video decoding, that might be the most efficient process for the CPU, but their estimates pretty clearly don't include other tasks, like word processing, web browsing, etc.

As for the clipboard on its own, I've been able to get around 4 hours before needing to charge (down to about 5-10%), but that was with nothing but OneNote and Edge open, and Edge was used very little (just to check a reference or something). It's still pretty admirable battery life in that configuration, considering I always use the pen for note-writing, etc. I would give it a try watching videos or something, but it's so much easier to switch to Studio Mode and leave it on my lap/desk instead.

 

[jnjroach]

9-14 hours doing normal work related stuff (Office 365) Inking in OneNote, Edge for browsing, this will drop to 5-7 hours if I'm doing Skype for Business Conference calls.

 

[covfefe]

Don't use chrome.

 

[ThisNoName]

Even with the most conservative of settings, my Book 2 gives me 6 hours at best; could this be a defect?

That's about right. 5-6 hours of light to moderate office productivity work over wifi :unhappy:

 

[Aaron Romine]

That's about right. 5-6 hours of light to moderate office productivity work over wifi :unhappy:

Ugh - yeah that's my reality as well. Some people are get crazy good battery life, and the rest of us just seem to drain 15% an hour. Love to understand the difference.

 

[jessbruffett]

Not sure if this thread is still alive at all but i have the same issue. Well actually worse, i get 4-5 hours at best with the screen at a fixed 50%, battery slider on "Recommended", BT off, no videos, Outlook, Word, Onenote, simplenote, Sublime, PowerShell, Teams and Chrome with 2-3 windows and 3-5 tabs each, with occasional putty and RDP sessions. This is my first jump back into PC since Apple went Intel and over the past 3 months since i've had this machine the battery life has been so disappointing I'm considering buying another MacBook and iPad and just doing that. Has anyone solved the battery issues? i have a 13.5 i5, 8gb, 256gb model.

 

[jnjroach]

Not sure if this thread is still alive at all but i have the same issue. Well actually worse, i get 4-5 hours at best with the screen at a fixed 50%, battery slider on "Recommended", BT off, no videos, Outlook, Word, Onenote, simplenote, Sublime, PowerShell, Teams and Chrome with 2-3 windows and 3-5 tabs each, with occasional putty and RDP sessions. This is my first jump back into PC since Apple went Intel and over the past 3 months since i've had this machine the battery life has been so disappointing I'm considering buying another MacBook and iPad and just doing that. Has anyone solved the battery issues? i have a 13.5 i5, 8gb, 256gb model.

Teams and Chrome would be the biggest battery killers I see in your setup...Teams depends on how many you belong to and how much activity is happening within each team. Chrome keeps itself active at all times (each tab and each windows has it own process that keeps the CPU from idling).