How long does your Macbook Pro's battery last?

I'm getting about 5 hours on my 2011 MBP 15" with i7. This is with the brightness set to one notch less than 50%.

I get around 6.5 hours on my 17 inch, BT off, Brightness @ 50%, normal browsing, email, iTunes, etc.

For Apple notebooks with removable batteries — such as previous generation MacBook and MacBook Pro computers — a properly maintained battery is designed to retain up to 80% of its original capacity at 300 full charge and discharge cycles. You may choose to replace your battery when it no longer holds sufficient charge to meet your needs.

Guess I am somewhat lucky, still at 98% after 513 charge cycles on a 2009 uMB 2.4 I think I bought roughly 2-15-2009 also getting in the area of 4-5 hours depending on what I am doing.

i've got a 2011 15" 2.2 mbp and i get about 6-7 hours of usage. screen @ 50%, bt on, word processing, light web browsing, some itunes.

about 6-7hrs with brightness the last notch before it shuts off, internet, email, pages (school) and backup my external HD at least once a day before bed.

screen about 75% bt off, web, email, iTunes, iWork, and light apps. i get about 5-6hrs which I'm very happy with

Browsing the web with the keyboard brightness at max and the screen brightness at 75% I get four hours.

17" 2011, ~7 hours w/wifi, documents, brightness low, integrated graphics, bluetooth off.

Is it best to keep your MBP plugged in ONLY to charge up, and then let the battery take over? Or does it not matter?

I almost always have my MBP plugged in to an outlet.

aCondor said:

Is it best to keep your MBP plugged in ONLY to charge up, and then let the battery take over? Or does it not matter?

I almost always have my MBP plugged in to an outlet.

Click to expand...

Apparently its not good to do that... But I can't be screwed doing it 'properly'. Don't worry about it.

On my 15inch 2.2GHz Macbook Pro (Brightness 50%, Backlit keyboard 60%) with gfxcardstatus turned on to force use the integrated graphic card, I only get about 4-5 hours of browsing the web and watching some streaming video.

Without gfxcardstatus I don't think i would even get past 3 hours.

Usually until it says about 2%.. Sometimes a bit more..

13" 2011 MBP.

Normal business work requires I have Chrome, Safari, Skype, Hipchat all running. I'm usually remote connected to various workstations and servers too. Typical battery life; 5.5-6 hours

If I can kill the IM programs above I get 6.5-7.5

If in my bootcamp Windows 7 partition, 4.5 hours or so. 2 hours if running a game.

Just a std browser sitting around for a lazy day doing paperwork or just home off from work, I would say typically 7.5 hours. But one time I hit 9 as I was doing my sorta monthly battery drain cycle.

All of the above is running about half brightness if on battery. I really wish they had one that could do a true 10 hours when under my normal business work load.

13" 2011 MBP, about 6 hours at 60% brightness, surfing the net with WiFi.

I usually get something around 4h but running full brightness. I prefer killing of non essential programs to lowering brightness as I usually use my MBP on battery in rather bright environments.
Capacity is down to 90% after 15 months and about 200 cycles.
2010 15" MBP.

MBP 2006,


20-30mins with fully charged 1 bar of brightness and no internet, just textedit..

I usually get about 6.5-7.5 hours on my 2011 13" MBP. Screen brightness is about 50% most of the time and I usually only have 1 or 2 programs running at a time. Coming from a Windows laptop the time I am getting with the battery on the Mac is an eternity since the Windows laptop usually died out at 2.5 hours max.

I just ran my MBP from 100% to 22%. Took me 4.5 hours and this is what I did.
- 2 Hours of heavy surfing
- 2.5 hours worth of movies wirelessly streamed from my NAS
- Forced the integrated Intel 3000 to run using gfxcardstatus
- Disabled Flash using ClickToPlugin

All while keeping Adium and TimeMachine running in the background. Pretty good I must say. This MacBook should die at about 5.5-6 hours I reckon.

Oh and I'm running on the 2011 MBP 15" 2.2GHz with the ATI 6750

mrsir2009 said:

Apparently its not good to do that... But I can't be screwed doing it 'properly'. Don't worry about it.

Click to expand...

aCondor said:

Is it best to keep your MBP plugged in ONLY to charge up, and then let the battery take over? Or does it not matter?

I almost always have my MBP plugged in to an outlet.

Click to expand...

it's fine to do that, as long as you unplug it and run the battery down eventually...

BizzyLeo said:

I've basically used mine for internet and email. Mostly everything I do is on the internet browser. So I'm wondering whether is should go back to Apple and have my computer checked. I notice that a lot of you guys getting about 6 hours have a 15 and 17" MBP. Do 13" MBP owners have less than 6 hours battery?

Click to expand...

Flash kills battery life, if you use youtube or other streaming videos services your battery life will suffer.

Has anyone got a genuine fix for this?
My Macbook Pro was shipped with Lion, (even though i requested Snow Leopard)
and so far the battery life on this thing is HORRID.
It's nearly flat and I'm going up to like 3 hours.
I will test it today by fully charging and using it till its flat.
But my friends exact same computer (2011 MBP 2.0GHZ I7) which is running Snow Leopard is getting 6 hours of battery, 2 clicks under full brightness and he's on youtube and all that type of stuff whilst I'm stuck here on a NON flash website with 50% brightness and the keyboard on 1 click, and i get 3 hours?
apple need to sort its **** out otherwise they will be receiving this computer back.

not to mention my brothers 13 inch 2010 model gets like 7 hours with Full brightness and keyboard.....

I'm starting to think its all Lions fault .
the only option i can think of is reinstalling it with Snow Leopard.

I've got the 13" base model MBP, running Lion, 22 weeks old, 97 % battery health.

At home I get around 5-7 hours (playing music in iTunes with the library being on an external drive connected to the Airport Extreme, surfing webpages with the occasional Flash, watching films, using iPhoto, uTorrent and so on). In school I basically only do light surfing, reading and text editing, and I have never run out of battery during an eight hour shift (the computer is always on, never plugged in, screen brightness about a third, no backlit keyboard).

Right now I'm two hours in to my day in school, and the battery claims I've got 7 hours and 11 minutes left.

Mine now, just stand in 83% it shows 6:10, with just only wifi on and chrome. By the way is a 2011 low-end 15' forced to integrated graphics.