Maximizing battery life with gfxCardStatus
Despite the larger battery, though, we were a little disappointed in the battery life we experienced while reviewing it, which was a half hour or more shy of Apple’s promised 7 hours. But we’ve been using the Retina MacBook Pro a little more since our review published a couple of weeks ago, and have discovered that the massive 95Whr battery is actually capable of lasting at least 8 hours or more. To achieve this, we overrode Apple’s automatic graphics switching using the donation-ware app gfxCardStatus to force OS X to rely solely on Intel’s integrated HD4000 GPU.
gfxCardStatus is a great, and free, utility for any MacBook Pro with dual graphics.
