Improve MacBook Air battery life?

What do you do with your MacBook? One thing you can do is avoid Flash videos (or animations like in ads) at all cost on websites. These pieces of crap must have been coded by 3 year olds: not optimized in the least, gulping down battery juice like no other.

On Safari, Flash isn't installed so don't install it.
On Chrome, Flash is built-in, but you can enable Click-to-Play.

Nowadays, the only relevant use of Flash is to play videos. Quality websites provide alternative players, the best one being the browser's built-in (via the HTML5 <video> tag). In Safari, H.264 decoding is even hardware accelerated: very little CPU usage, improving battery life greatly.

YouTube still promotes their Flash player by default, unfortunately. To "force" it to the HTML5 alternative, use the YouTube5 extension (for Safari, for Chrome, for Firefox).

LRJordan said:

I use it for gaming at the moment - it was a present, I wouldn't spend my own money on the Air for gaming but due to the fact that I didn't pay for it then I don't mind so much.

The only trouble is, we're on an electric metre and I don't really like leaving my stuff plugged in all of the time.

Click to expand...

Leaving it plugged it means that once the battery is charged it only then uses power when you are actually using the machine. Taking it off power and using it on battery means that you have to then use more power to charge your battery up = end result means you are saving NOTHING by not leaving it plugged in.


As for saving battery, you are doing the one thing that would consume the most power. Gaming. The only way you would be able to save power / battery would be to reduce brightness and turn off services like wifi if you are not using them. That being said difference would be marginal. No matter what you do gaming is going to hammer the battery.

Roman2K~. ... thanks for the tip on click to play.

LRJordan said:

I often like to play the campaigns of games whilst I am on public transport (I have a 4 hour each way train journey each day) so this is another big factor towards the fast drainage of the battery.

I know that gaming is the fastest way to drain it - but just to confirm, none of you have heard of a case that can improve the battery life?

Thanks

Click to expand...

You could get the Hypermac/Hyperjuice battery pack but its around £147. Not the best idea, I know, but thats like one of few options out there. You could always return the MBA for the 13 inch i5 model though. I'm not sure how big the tradeoff would be in terms of processor power when it comes to gaming.

I have to laugh when I read about you guys complaining of the 11 battery life, when the first Gen MBA battery lasted only 90 mins! really! And it was only a 64GB too.

preacher said:

I have to laugh when I read about you guys complaining of the 11 battery life, when the first Gen MBA battery lasted only 90 mins! really! And it was only a 64GB too.

Click to expand...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xe1a1wHxTyo

CincinattiJohn said:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xe1a1wHxTyo

Click to expand...

Thank you for that link, needed that today

Oh and preacher: "- Luxury..."