jon zobrist (dot) com

If you purchased a new Macbook Pro with a Core i5 or Core i7 (The 15″ or 17″ ones for now) you probably expected the nice battery life they talk about on their site, when I bought this one it said 8-10 hours, but currently it says 8-9 hours for the 15″. Imagine my surprise when I routinely get 3 hours of battery life. Doing a quick Google search finds lots of people with the same complaints. If you dig into this a bit you will learn that these Macbook Pros have two graphics cards, one from NVIDIA that is fast, but power hungry, and one from Intel, that is slow but saves your battery.

The nice thing about this is your computer automatically handles which card to use, giving you the performance you need, and saving battery when it can.

In theory, this is great. In reality it’s a total joke, an EPIC FAIL on Apple’s part. You see, they switch based on which applications are running, guessing they need the graphics based on the libraries they load, it seems. This would be great if it was things like World of Warcraft or Photoshop, but Skype? Evernote? Give me a break!

You can go to power settings and disable automatic switching, however this sets it to ALWAYS use the Nvidia chipset, and gives you permanent short battery life.

In comes donation-ware graphics management tool gfxCardStatus written by Cody Kreiger.

1. Download the zip file
2. Unzip and move gfxCardStatus to Applications folder
3. Run gfxCardStatus, you will see an icon on your menu bar with either an ‘n’ or ‘i’ to indicate when you’re running in Nvidia or Intel graphics mode. Intel will give good battery life (5-6 hours for my core i5 15″), and Nvidia will give 1990′s battery life (3-4 hours on the same core i5 15″).
4. Click the icon, change to Intel only. Enjoy better battery life!
5. Set calendar appointment for 1-2 weeks in the future to go back to Cody’s site and donate a dollar or two for his work.

I plan to leave this on Intel only and see how both my battery life and performance is. I don’t play any games on my laptop, so I expect I won’t notice the difference.