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Battery draining incredibly fast


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I was on the airplane a few days ago (12 hours flight) and wanted to get some work done with Affinity Publisher. I have a MacBook Pro 2018 13 inch with battery cycle count 166 condition normal.

Battery went from 100 % full to empty in less than 2 hours, with Wifi turned off and screen brightness at 4 dots (maybe 20 %). All other apps closed (apart from Apple Pages and Finder).  I was quite disappointed since I could not get much work done.

I tried that again at home and battery drained equally fast. You can almost watch the battery indicator count down. Simple text editing in AP, nothing fancy.

Is this an issue? How is it even possible to drain the battery that fast? I think not even FCPX can drain the battery that fast. Will this be addressed in a future update? Are there some preferences I could change to slow down the fast drain?

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  • 2 weeks later...

There may be an issue with the video card being kept active. Perhaps this thread is related:

That is the kind of thing that that Serif would fix, but as you asked what you can do, you could try turning off hardware acceleration or try experimenting with the display method, both of which affect the GPU. You might find a solution that works better (or maybe not, but worth a try).

If you do find something that works, I encourage you to report back, because that could be useful information in identifying a potential bug.

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Affinity is hungry indeed but should not cause your experience. A preference of a particular processor or graphic card does not cause the issue.

I wonder which application / which processes cause your battery drain that fast. Using Affinity with this fast drain doesn't mean necessarily it's caused by Affinity only or mainly.

Unfortunately macbooks can show fast battery drain for various, often unspecified reasons, e.g. reported in this Apple forums thread "Macbook pro 2018 battery drain fast"    https://discussions.apple.com/thread/8504963

866346159_macbookbatterydrain.jpg.5f164c51fcf42955b7bdc8406e393e48.jpg
 

A quick solution can be to reset the SMC of your macbook.  ...  https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT201295

If the SMC reset does not help, you might keep an eye on the energy consumption of your Macbook under "Activity Monitor.app" > "Energy" at various moments and for a period of hours.  https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201464

For further information about the app this article might be useful: "What does the OS X Activity Monitor’s “Energy Impact” actually measure?"  ... https://blog.mozilla.org/nnethercote/2015/08/26/what-does-the-os-x-activity-monitors-energy-impact-actually-measure/

Note: In the "Activity Monitor", the energy impact value has no unit and is a relative value, but not a percentage of 100, and it is a mixture that currently appears to be an unspecified mixture. – When I open the APub app with a multi-page, image-intensive document, the value is shown between 100 and 400 for a few seconds, when working with text between 10 and 100, on idle (= app nap) around 0–1.

macOS 10.14.6 | MacBookPro Retina 15" | Eizo 27" | Affinity V1

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  • 4 years later...

Hi,

I'm taking up this subject again in 2024, because I'm still using photoshop for certain actions. I much prefer Affinity Publisher( bundle: designer and photo) because I find it better organised and just as effective in many areas, but Photoshop uses two to three times less energy. I have the latest version of each software

Even when the software is on but not in use!

I'm referring to the same MacBook mentioned above (but in 15inch)
I did read the recommendation to reset the SMC but I wonder if it's simply a case of poor management of Intel chips and the use of AMD Radeon (pro 560x) resources?
I assume Affinity handles Apple's M1, M2 and M3 GPUs better? But I think there are more Intel users than Apple users even today.

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