How to Get Better MacBook Battery Life

Back in October, Apple launched refreshed MacBook Pros that boast nine hours of battery life thanks to the inclusion of the latest Intel Haswell chips, compared to 7 hours of the previous generation. MacBook Airs get even better battery life thanks to the slight-slower internals that require less power.
However, while nine hours for the MacBook Pro is more than impressive, there are times where we need to squeeze out just a bit more juice out of the battery, especially during situations where we’re not near an outlet. However, there are things that you can do and settings you can change in order to squeeze another hour or two of battery life out of your MacBook..

Dim the Screen and LED Keyboard

Probably the easiest trick you can do in order to get more battery life is to dim your MacBook’s display and its LED backlit keyboard. What’s perhaps better is that the keyboard has dedicated keys for adjusting the screen brightness and the LED backlight brightness of the keyboard itself, so there’s no excuse to not dim your display.

You can easily add an hour or two of battery life to  your MacBook by dimming the display and not having it on full blast. As for the backlit keyboard, the LEDs don’t eat up a lot of battery life, but even a small change can make a difference, which usually why the lowest brightness setting on the backlit keyboard is usually enough to see just fine while typing in the dark.

Use Safari

Your browser of choice is most likely a third-party option, like Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox, but compared to Apple’s on-board Safari web browser, these two options are resource hoggers. Just like on iOS devices, you can cut down on power use and increase battery life by switching to Safari, however temporary, in order to squeeze out a bit more battery life before your MacBook gives way.

Adjust Energy Saver Settings

If you open up System Preferences and click on Energy Saver, you’ll get a few options that you can adjust to help increase battery life. For instance, you can have the display turn off after a certain amount of time of inactivity. I have it set at 10 minutes, but you can set it for shorter if you want to stretch the battery a bit.