15" MBP "8-9 Hour Battery Life"???

There are numerous threads about battery life.

http://www.google.com/cse?cx=011016...te:forums.macrumors.com&hl=en&as_qdr=m3&meta=

Apple on notebook batteries
Apple Portable: Calibrating your computer's battery for best performance
Laptop Battery Guide

It also took me a while to understand how to get the most out of the battery.
Get iStat (it works for 14 days as trial that is enough to figure stuff out) it shows you an estimate of you power usage.

The thing you have to understand is there is a huge difference between 2% CPU usage and none. Just run µtorrent in the background and battery life is 30-40% worse. Check with the Activity Monitor your processes. One process that uses 2-3% CPU kills battery if it does this continuously.

Also if you scroll with your touchpad battery life is much worse. If you simply read stuff on the web. Move your hand away from the touchpad and use cursor keys to scroll or FN+ cursor. This way the CPU is for a longer time completely idle and can enter the deepest sleep states. Typing also uses significantly more energy than reading.

OSX saves battery very well but the deep sleep states of the CPU only work if it has nothing to do for some time and just a little work all the time is enough to reduce battery life quite a bit.


When I got my MBP I thought it is bad on the battery although I already have the newer K0 Stepping CPU. It looked like 5-6 hours if I don't tax it too much. Now I can get about 7h typing and even more just surfing non flash websites. Just reading PDFs or non Flash Websites is probably how Apple achieves there battery life numbers. Display brightness has a big influence too of course. But I can still get about 5h outside at max brightness.

10h is about the highest my estimates go up on idle. In some reviews they write about 11h+. That is a little of a lottery I guess what CPU you get and how cool it runs.

Idle??

The claim is 8 to 9 hours of Wireless productivity. We don't even come close.

My 13 inch lasts for probably 6 while under constant internet use, a few days at idle.

I seem to be getting less than 2 hours on Windows 7 lol. Worse than late-2008 13"

I'm on 15" Core i7, doing constant wireless productivity, browsing and instant messaging at half the screen brightness, backlit keyboard always enabled at 2/3 level. Some light Excel work which triggers the GT330 card. Already 4 hours non-stop, battery is still around 40%.

robotmonkey said:

My 13 inch lasts for probably 6 while under constant internet use, a few days at idle.

Click to expand...

yeh my 13 last 5-6 hours constant internet use and few other things. Fine with me, better than most any other laptop except the netbooks (gf's and even friends 12" gateway last 9-10 hours on use).