While efficient hardware and software can help preserve energy, the greatest drain on your laptop’s battery will largely be the programs that you use. For instance, if you decide to encode a lengthy high-quality movie file, then you will ramp up all cores of your processor to their maximum, and even on a full charge will be left with a short amount of battery life available. To help preserve battery life, in OS X Mavericks Apple has implemented features like App Nap to pause unused programs, and CPU timer coalescing to allow processors to maintain a lower average energy usage. In addition to these automatic features, you can use common power-saving methods such as dimming your system’s screen, and disabling unused hardware like Bluetooth and Wi-Fi controllers. However, the benefit of these steps will be nullified if you have a program that is computationally demanding.