We are always keen to get more from our laptop battery, allowing us to work that little bit longer on the road without needing to find a power socket.

Aside from the simple and well-known tip of turning your screen brightness down to save power, there are plenty of other tricks to get some extra time before you need to charge though.

With that in mind, here are Pocket-lint's and Apple's best tips and tricks to keep your MacBook or MacBook Pro going longer on a single charge.

A quick fix: Turn down the screen brightness

One of the biggest instant gains is turning the screen brightness down, especially on the latest MacBook Pro models.

Those keen to push this to the extreme but without making your screen completely dark should disable auto brightness and set the screen brightness to 75 per cent (that's four of those small blocks in the display brightness meter).

To disable the "automatically adjust brightness" setting, go to Preferences > Display and untick the box.

Turn off keyboard backlight

If you aren't working in a dark environment and keen to save battery life, turn off the backlit keyboard feature.

You can do this by pressing the dedicated keyboard blacklit button found on the F5 key or within the TouchBar settings.

Turn off Bluetooth and Wi-Fi

If you're not using Bluetooth or Wi-Fi connections, turn them off. Although Bluetooth isn't as demanding as it once was, turning it off could still give you back some valuable minutes.

To turn it off, go to the Bluetooth symbol in the upper right-hand corner of the menu bar at the top of the screen and opt to turn it off. Don't forget to turn it back on if you need to connect a device to it again, such as headphones or a mouse.

Tweak your Energy Saver settings

You can make your MacBook and MacBook Pro act differently when using a power adapter compared to when running on battery.

To access the settings, click on the battery icon in the upper right-hand corner of the menu bar on the desktop and adjust accordingly.

Although it will reduce the capabilities of your laptop, a good way to save power is to turn off Power Nap. This feature checks for new emails, calendar, and other iCloud updates while your laptop is sleeping.

Check how power hungry certain apps are

The same battery icon on the menu bar mentioned above will also detail if any apps are using significant energy. It could be they are demanding lots of resources because you are using them, or it could be they've got carried away with a task you don't need them to perform.

If you want more indepth information about the energy usage of your apps, you can see their performance in the Activity Monitor app found in your application utilities folder. Twitter for example, is notoriously bad at using up your battery life.

Quit unused apps

If you're really on a battery saving drive, quit all apps that you aren't using. If they aren't open, they can't suck your battery.

To quit an app quickly, either go to the app and press Command+Q or right click on the icon in the dock and quit from there.

Update your software and apps

Developers are constantly making improvements to their apps, or at least you hope they should be, and many of those improvements include making things more efficient, especially when it comes to performance and battery usage.

By making sure you're up to date, you'll ensure any improvements they have added you'll get. Normally for Apple, those improvements come in the yearly software update.

Play your movies full screen

If you're using your Mac to watch movies, make sure you play them full screen. It's only a small saving, but if the top menu isn't displayed, the operating system doesn't have to account for it and therefore doesn't have to update it.

The same trick works if you are working in a full screen app.

Download movies rather than stream them

If you are keen to save battery while on the go and enjoy a movie or TV show, it's better to download them first and then watch, rather than make your Wi-Fi connection do all the hard work.

It might mean you get to the end of that long movie you are watching rather than running out of juice just as you find out "whodunnit".

Check your battery condition

If after trying all the above tips you still feel you aren't getting any performance improvements, it might be your battery is on the out.

To check the "status" of your battery, hold down the Option key and click on the battery icon at the top of the menu bar. It should say "Normal". If it says "Replace soon" you'll need to talk to Apple about getting a new battery.