What is the typical battery life of the 2013 13" MacBook Air in Windows 8?

Bumping threads is against MR rules.

The fact no one replied tells you no one knows. Why buy an MBA to run Win8 all the time? Common sense would indicate the battery life will be about the same.

With Win 7 I get 6-7hours of decent use, which is about 1 to 2 above what the 2011 Macbook Air got doing the same. I would expect Win 8 to be as good or a little better in terms of run time.

Brandon263 said:

Thanks for responding. What kind of tasks do you get 6 to 7 hours of use with?

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Office 2013 with Spreadsheets, Microsoft Visio, Family Tree Maker 2012 (This is very disk intensive, and even though it is an SSD, it still uses it heaps), Photoshop CS5 doing moderate editing of images. Although I will say I am finding I am using the Mac version rather than the windows version as it seems quicker and a little more responsive.

Some facebook and general browsing, as well as using a Windows based program to catalog and enter death notices for the Ryerson Index, but these are occasional and low power uses, as is watching video's, but we do that on occasion as well.

I am trying to use OSX programs more often as it does last substantially longer on a charge, but I still need windows for some programs. I'm just not as comfortable in OSX as Windows, so it takes me longer to even open a program... After 2 years of OSX use you would think I'd be quicker, but the old 2011 Macbook Air booted to Windows as default, but I'm trying to only use Windows when I NEED to now.

Edit: Oh and mine is also an i7, 8GB of Ram and 512GB SSD, so it's likely to be a little more power hungry than a standard 13" i5 setup, especially in CPU intensive programs like Photoshop.

I'm interested in this too.

Does anyone have links to reviews of MBA 2013 that include objective tests of battery life whilst running Windows?
Here is one I am aware of: http://www.notebookcheck.net/Review-Apple-MacBook-Air-13-Mid-2013-MD760D-A-Subnotebook.96311.0.html

However, I'm struggling to find any others

ozaz said:

I'm interested in this too.

Does anyone have links to reviews of MBA 2013 that include objective tests of battery life whilst running Windows?
Here is one I am aware of: http://www.notebookcheck.net/Review-Apple-MacBook-Air-13-Mid-2013-MD760D-A-Subnotebook.96311.0.html

However, I'm struggling to find any others

Click to expand...

Another one slightly less compresive than NotebookCheck: http://www.digitalversus.com/laptop/apple-13-macbook-air-2013-running-windows-8-p16624/test.html

I don't mean to come off sounding hostile, but these threads are pointless. "Typical battery life" - there is no such thing. Unless you do a controlled test like Apple does, comparing YOUR typical use to MY typical use is a complete waste of time. What is the brightness set to? What exactly are you doing? For how long? To give you an idea, this is how Apple claims their battery life times:

"Testing conducted by Apple in May 2013 using preproduction 1.3GHz dual-core Intel Core i5-based 13-inch MacBook Air units and preproduction 1.3GHz dual-core Intel Core i5-based 11-inch MacBook Air units. The wireless web test measures battery life by wirelessly browsing 25 popular websites with display brightness set to 12 clicks from bottom or 75%. The HD movie playback test measures battery life by playing back HD 720p content with display brightness set to 12 clicks from bottom or 75%. The standby test measures battery life by allowing a system, connected to a wireless network, to enter standby mode with Safari and Mail applications launched and all system settings left at default. Battery life varies by use and configuration. See http://www.apple.com/batteries for more information."

So unless you can compare somewhat standardized tests in Windows 7, then "typical" use is impossible to compare.

OS X is likely to be better optimized to extend the life of the battery in an MBA than Windows. That to me is just common sense. So I would expect (read GUESS) that these same tests conducted in Windows instead of OS X would yield less than 12 hours. Any other number would be an even wilder guess.

So I guess it's less than 12 hours.