12"PB Battery only 3 hours?

petercw2

petercw2

macrumors regular
When talking to all Apple sales people they were all very insistant that "about 5 hours" was the life of the battery in the 12" PB...

Well I have done as the instruction tell me, let it go all the way down and then fully recharged once... and I am only getting just past three hours..

will this improve? Get worse?
 
Re: 12"PB Battery only 3 hours?

it won't improve, that's for sure.

it probably will take awhile to get worse, as long as you treat the battery right.

i consistently get about 3 hours with my 15 inch GHz Tibook, which was also advertised at 5 hours. this is a fairly unrealistic figure, i think. i am not sure just what they do to get that, but i can almost guarantee you that if you found out what it is, you wouldn't want to.

my advice: expect 3 hours :). it's a pretty good lifespan, if you ask me.
 
I've heard that you can get pretty close to the 5 hours if you do a few things.. like lower the screen brightness, and don't do anything that drains power. like accessing the hard drive, optical drive, or giving the G4 processor plenty to do :)
 
Originally posted by losfp
I've heard that you can get pretty close to the 5 hours if you do a few things.. like lower the screen brightness, and don't do anything that drains power. like accessing the hard drive, optical drive, or giving the G4 processor plenty to do :)
Click to expand...

I only get ~ 3 hours with my brightness three pins under the max, which i keep it at all the time to make the thing last.

other measures, such as minimizing the hard drive usage, are helpful, but gosh, who even cares? you have to open stuff at some point. of course there is no sense in randomly opening files, but i wouldn't do that anyways.

you might could get close to 3.5 hours, i bet, but if you want the big 5, i think you'll have to turn the backlight off altogether:rolleyes:
 
If you can get your backlight to be all the way down to the second to last sensor (second and third to last are acceptable too) and still be able to see the screen, you will get more than four hours of battery life, I'd assume.

This is actually what I do with my iBook and it's more than legible.
 
Originally posted by bwawn
If you can get your backlight to be all the way down to the second to last sensor (second and third to last are acceptable too) and still be able to see the screen, you will get more than four hours of battery life, I'd assume.

This is actually what I do with my iBook and it's more than legible.
Click to expand...

this works on special occasions, but it can't be good for your eyes. i wouldn't recommend doing it regularly.
 
Using the computer non-stop you are not going to get 5 hours. My battery will last 4-5 hours if, when I will not be using it for about 10-15 minutes, I close it and put it to sleep.

Macs do a very good job going to sleep and waking...unlike other machines.
 
Originally posted by SBG88
Using the computer non-stop you are not going to get 5 hours. My battery will last 4-5 hours if, when I will not be using it for about 10-15 minutes, I close it and put it to sleep.

Macs do a very good job going to sleep and waking...unlike other machines.
Click to expand...

when the thing is closed, that doesn't count as time onto how long it runs off battery. the act of sleeping it and waking it several times probably shortens the total ON time you actually have in one session, too.
 
Well, not in my experience. The screen saver uses much more of the cpu than going to sleep. Actually the screen saver is pretty cpu intensive.
 
with my ibook, advertized at about 5 hours too, I was able to get about 4:30 out of it when it was new. OS X reduces this a little bit because it's energy saver still has a couple things missing.

Turning the screen all the way down then up just one is enough to read in dimly lit areas, such as my house, many of my college classrooms, and more than enough when i am in bed about to go to sleep.

Turning down the processor speed is another battery saver when i am away from the adapter. It ads about 20-30 minutes to my total time.

Turning off network ports that you dont need can also save around 10 minutes. Turn off modem, ethernet adapter, or airport card, which ever you are not using. Even when these things are not being used, they are still actively taking power.
 
They are probably testing the machines with the screens turned off, with a bare os running, processor turned down, and everything set to low.

It would be nice if they advertized normal usage time too.
 
Originally posted by SBG88
Well, not in my experience. The screen saver uses much more of the cpu than going to sleep. Actually the screen saver is pretty cpu intensive.
Click to expand...

my point was that sleeping is just like turning it off. you can't use it over a period of 6 hours, with, say, 5 times that you left it alone for 15-20 minutes putting it asleep for those times, and say you got six hours of battery life. sleep consumes less than like 2% of the battery in a day--like i said, it's like turning it off. you're certainly right that it's smarter to sleep it when you leave for 20 minutes--this is "less" intensive on the processor than literally anything else you could do to it, as it's actually turning it off.

when i said that sleeping/waking/sleeping/waking/sleeping it a bunch was more intensive on the CPU than just straight running it, i was saying that if you compared the ~3 hours of straight work you get out of the battery in a single stretch of work with the total "on" (as opposed to sleeping) time you would get over the said ~6 hour or more period in which you leave and come back, sleeping it when you leave, the former would be longer. that act of freezing the system for sleep and then waking back up probably does use at least a little power, which is that much more power that is going to something other than your actual work. this is of course negligible, irrelevant, and so on, but it's still true. i never implied that leaving it on while you weren't doing anything was a good idea. i said that sleeping doesn't count as part of your "battery life"--if that were the case, apple would be able to advertise some REALLY long battery life:D
 
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