OS X Yosemite was set to elevate the experience of using Mac, and it actually did with its new greater capabilities and by putting need-to-know information at your fingertips resulting in a fresh look of your Mac. Many of the Mac users noticed and complained about the high battery drainage rate of their MacBook Air and MacBook Pro equipped with OS X Yosemite. There isn’t any special feature in this OS that may be causing higher battery drainage, but it is because of usage and personal settings forcing OS to work at its full functionality. By changing and keeping an eye on few options or settings, battery life can be improved.
Usually the battery life is worst right after the reboot or connecting an external hard drive. This cannot be resolved other than waiting and letting Spotlight run its course, or you can kill the time by watching how it is processing in the Activity Monitor. A good way to keep track of your battery performance, you can simple enable the battery indicator in OS X for a better watch on remaining battery on your Mac.
Switching Off Eye Candy
OS X Yosemite is loaded with transparent visual effects that require system resources for rendering and increasing resource usage to impact battery life. It is not much notable on many Macs so it’s preferred to be adjusted. Simply follow these steps:
- From the Apple Menu, go to System Preferences and choose Accessibility
- In the Display section, check Reduce Transparency (or increase contrast)
Users also have option to go for only Reduce Transparency that will turn off all the translucencies to make the display easier for an eye to catch. Or to go for Increase Contrast which will increase the distinction between on-screen elements while disabling the transparent effects of menu, sidebar, and windows.
Preventing Automatic Updates
Although it is strongly recommended to keep the automatic updates turned on, but this can be handled manually as well avoiding Mac to put its energy in looking for and downloading updates. This is a two way process that is updating the OS X and updating the apps. Updates can be turned off by following below mentioned simple steps:
- In System Preferences, go to App Store
- Uncheck Download newly available updates in the background
- Uncheck Install app updates
- Uncheck Install OS X Updates
This will save you some battery but you got to be more vigilantes looking for updates on App Store so your Mac don’t run out of latest updates and fixes as aired by Apple.
Turning Off Unused Location Feature
GPS is a good addition, but it suck up a lot of battery power if you let it being used by apps. Apps use your location for many reasons including providing you better suggestions, filtering your choices and options, updating your friends etc. You can turn that off if you want to, it will result in greater battery life and perhaps more privacy. Follow these steps:
- From System Preferences, go to Security and Privacy
- Select the Privacy tab
- From left, select Location Services
- Take away location rights from apps you don’t want them to have
- For better results, click on Details next to System Services and review location options there as well
Lowering Brightness
Whether it is iOS or any other OS, screen brightness is always the biggest factor in draining battery. Adjusting it to meet your need is always a smart choice. So you can keep your eyes at peace plus saving battery life as well. In OS X you can handle this by using F1 and F2 buttons from your keyboard (or as mentioned by symbols).
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