I spent some time last week in Cupertino, CA for meetings at Apple’s headquarters with fellow service managers and senior managers at AppleCare. There is a lot of exciting progress being made in diagnostic tools, technician guides, and the online system we use to order parts for repairs.
Of course, California is about 3,000 miles and two airports from Vermont. I set a goal for the trip: I would keep my computer on and get work done the entire time I was airborne.
I used an old-style 17-inch MacBook Pro for a while, and had no trouble at all working through transcontinental flights, because I would simply take three batteries with me. With the latest MacBooks, batteries are not removable; they are, however, a vast improvement over the older batteries. I did manage to work the entire time I was airborne.
By charging the battery for 90 minutes during the layover, I had enough juice to get me from Chicago to San Francisco with time to spare. But during the first flight to Chicago from Burlington, I almost ran out of juice. It turns out that Adobe’s Flash plugin, which powers sites like YouTube and advertisements on The New York Times’s website, had been consuming nearly all of my processor’s capacity. This, of course, caused the battery to become depleted sooner than it should have; it also made the laptop quite warm.
It’s no secret that Apple is moving away from Flash. I fully support that move towards HTML 5, as Flash is a nearly constant source of frustration for me. I find that the plugin crashes at least daily, forcing me to use Activity Monitor to kill the process.
If your computer ever seems warmer than usual, or you’re noticing that battery life is less than it should be, fire up Activity Monitor from the Utilities folder. Sort the list by %CPU and note which process(es) take up the most processor capacity. You can force quit the Flash process from within Activity Monitor. When I did this somewhere over western New York, my estimated battery life went from about an hour to over 5 hours.