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Is the battery life on my late 2012 MBA unusually poor?

C

coldjeanzzz

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Nov 4, 2012
655
17
7 month old 13" i5 8 GB RAM MBA and 58 cycles

When I open up Safari and browse through webpages (not heavy) it shows my battery life as 5:42 left. I am on a little less than 50% brightness and only have 3 tabs open. As for other apps I have mail, twitter, skype, last.fm open but not being used. Watching youtube videos will drop that time to like 3-3.5 hours after only 20 minutes of use :confused:

This seems very poor considering the low usage. When I check activity monitor nothing has high CPU usage though. I used to get around 7.5-8 hours a few months ago so what could be causing this? It seems like the battery life that Apple advertises is based on you not using the machine at all and just let it sit on the desktop. If I do that then it shows closer to 7-7.5 hrs.
 
filmbuff

filmbuff

macrumors 6502a
Jan 5, 2011
967
364
Have you actually let the battery run dead to see how long it lasts or are you just basing this on the estimated time left? Get the app Battery Health and see what it says. The "battery health" section should be around 90%, and real-time power usage should be between 7 and 14 watts depending on what you're doing.
 
C

coldjeanzzz

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Nov 4, 2012
655
17
I haven't sat down and used it to depletion to see how long it actually lasts. I mean I have used my battery to near depletion but I didn't time how long it lasted

The battery health app seems to vary. If I watch a youtube video and don't do anything else the "Current Usage" will tell me there is 6+ hours remaining. If I open up a couple of tabs (no videos playing) and browse a few pages the Current usage will plummet to 4-5 hours. But the "Internet Browsing" time will give around 6.5 hours.

I feel like something is draining the battery that I'm not aware of. Do mail or twitter take more energy than I thought? I do have growl notifications set up for twitter...

Also my battery health is also 95.3% and the watts are right in the area you described.
 
M

maxosx

macrumors 68020
Dec 13, 2012
2,385
1
Southern California
coldjeanzzz said:
7 month old 13" i5 8 GB RAM MBA and 58 cycles

When I open up Safari and browse through webpages (not heavy) it shows my battery life as 5:42 left. I am on a little less than 50% brightness and only have 3 tabs open. As for other apps I have mail, twitter, skype, last.fm open but not being used. Watching youtube videos will drop that time to like 3-3.5 hours after only 20 minutes of use :confused:

This seems very poor considering the low usage. When I check activity monitor nothing has high CPU usage though. I used to get around 7.5-8 hours a few months ago so what could be causing this? It seems like the battery life that Apple advertises is based on you not using the machine at all and just let it sit on the desktop. If I do that then it shows closer to 7-7.5 hrs.
Click to expand...

Why not call Apple?
 
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