Simple Tips to Improve Battery Life for Macs with OS X Yosemite Part 1

Some Mac users have noted that MacBook Air and MacBook Pro battery life has taken a downturn with their Macs running OS X Yosemite. While this doesn’t impact all users, and much of the perception of diminished battery is likely due to usage and various features, there are some easy settings changes that users can make to potentially increase how long their portable Macs battery lasts with the latest versions of OS X.

First and foremost, if the battery life is bad every once in a while, particularly right after a system reboot or connecting an external hard drive, the solution is probably as simple as letting Spotlight run its course. There’s nothing to do with that other than wait, though if you want to you can watch the Spotlight processes in Activity Monitor. Also, simply enabling the battery indicator in OS X is a good way to keep an eye on how much remaining battery life is on your Mac, and if it’s actually being impacted or not.

Finally, you’ll find that some of these tips may also speed up Yosemite a bit, which can make these simple adjustments particularly helpful for Mac users on older portable hardware.


Turn Off the Eye Candy

The various transparent visual effects in OS X Yosemite require system resources to render, and increased resource usage can impact battery life. This will be less notable on some Macs, but it can make a difference and it’s an easy settings adjustment one way or another:
From the  Apple menu, go to “System Preferences” and choose “Accessibility”
In the “Display” section, check “Reduce transparency” (or Increase contrast)





You can either opt to only “Reduce transparency” to just turn off the translucencies, or for an experience that’s generally easier on the eyes, use “Increase contrast”, which notably increases visual distinction between on screen elemnts while also disable the transparent effects seen in menus, windows, and sidebars.

Stop Automatic Updates

While most users should keep Automatic Updates turned on (unless you’re really good at remembering to manually update OS X and your apps), disabling these features can lead to an increase in battery life by reducing background activity.

There are multiple parts of Automatic Updates, but the two you should focus on for battery purposes are automatic OS X System Updates and automatic App Updates – it is strongly not recommended to disable the automatic data and security updates feature, which can push critical security fixes to a Mac.
In System Preferences, go to “App Store”
Uncheck “Download newly available updates in the background”
Uncheck “Install app updates”
Uncheck “Install OS X updates”





Remember, by doing this you will need to manually check the App Store for new versions of OS X and for updates to your apps.