If you’re constantly on the go because of running around with kids tethered to you or maybe you do a lot of traveling, you will find yourself highly dependent on your MBP’s battery life and sometimes you find yourself in a location where you can’t plug into a power outlet to charge up. Maximizing your MBP’s battery life is essential to this lifestyle and fortunately, the MacBook’s Energy Saver features give us some effective options to preserve battery power.
Here are the things you can do which can buy you extra time of battery usage while unplugged:
- Tweak your Energy Saver settings for Battery: Select to Put hard disks to sleep when possible and to Slightly dim the display while on battery. Leave Enable Power Nap while battery power unchecked.
- Brightness: dimming your screen even more, while still remaining comfortable to read, can help.
- Wi-Fi: turning off your Wi-Fi if you don’t need to access you the internet can help a lot.
- Bluetooth: If you’re not using it, turn it off. Every little bit helps.
- Backlit Keyboard: Turn it off if you really don’t need it. System Preferences > Keyboard and uncheck Adjust keyboard brightness in low light. Then turn off by tapping fn + F5 until it’s completely off. If you need it, turn it back on to your liking using fn + F6. Keep tapping it that combo until you get the brightness you want.
- Applications and peripherals: Quitting out of applications and disconnecting additional peripherals that you aren’t using will also preserve battery life.
But what if I need Wi-Fi?
Here’s something very cool regarding Wi-Fi, if you’re on the go but need internet connection you can do so sparingly. There’s this neat app called TripMode. It’s an app that basically allows you to choose which apps have internet access at any given time. You can activate and deactivate it on the fly, set up profiles depending on which network you’re connected to, and on top of the potential battery usage savings (which isn’t advertised this way), you also save on data usage which could potentially save you money depending on your set up. In addition to those features, you can also set up data limit caps and block connectivity when those caps have been met. It’s a must have for those that do a lot of traveling and/or wish to save money on data usage. It currently costs $7.99.