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13-Inch 2013 MacBook Air Gets Up to 15 Hours of Battery Life With Mavericks

Wow... 15 hours almost covers a typical work day for me... I'm thinking I should go battery only all day to limit how long I can work... Battery dies and I plug it in and go to bed, wake up in the morning, unplug and start coding again...

Honesty the battery test I'm most interested in right now is the brand new late 2013 rMBP with and without dGPU... Also looking for real world based performance comparisons that would be affected by the dGPU (not geek bench)
 
newdeal said:
Actually you can't even say it improves by an hour because the new retina comes with Mavericks and the old one didn't so it could be that the 15" model is not seeing almost any increase in battery life
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I was thinking the same thing - all of the stated rMBP improvements announced yesterday can be attributed to the Mavericks bump. Nothing for the Haswell shift?

And I wonder if they waited for Mavericks to be ready before releasing these in order to be able to claim some battery life improvement?
 
Small White Car said:
No, and no one's really sure why...

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2013/10/why-does-windows-have-terrible-battery-life.html
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I would guess it comes down to compatibility. Apple has a business model where they can pick and choose what their OS will be compatible with. MS has to have compatibility with a nearly infinite amount of hardware. Not to mention software dating back to Windows 95.

I remember back when Windows 7 was coming out, and MS was talking about Windows 8, there was some conversation about starting from scratch. Windows 8 would be a whole new Kernel and compatibility would most likely be taken care of using virtualization. This isn't unlike Apple moving to x86, it was not only a great move money-wise, but also a great excuse to redesign the OS from the ground up with no backwards compatibility strings attached.

But at the end of the day Apple can do that, they live in a different world than MS. They each have their upsides and drawbacks and we should be happy they BOTH exist :D
 
koruki said:
Before : 8 hours
Now : 9 Hours
= it's got worse :rolleyes::rolleyes::rolleyes:
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Maybe re-reading his comment will help.


He stated that he used his mavericks updated macbook air for 2hrs and has 72% battery life remaining.

That would predict an overall battery life of (give or take) 7 hours.

Previous battery life of 8hours
Current battery life of 7hours
 
Klae17 said:
This is where Apple kills the competition.
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There's really no contest when it comes to battery life. I really prefer Windows as an OS, and I prefer the added functionality that other laptops bring (extra ports, expandability), but having *10* more hours of battery life is a huge advantage.
 
Wow. A computer that I bought earlier this year is improved by this "update". If they would have charged the normal price, it would have been worth it. Free makes it better.
 
ghettochris said:
i've always been a macbook pro person myself, but damn, the airs are getting sweet enough I'm temped to downgrade and lighten the load. iMac or Mac pro at the house, air for the go might be my new combo.
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I had a rMBP 15" and it was honestly more computer than I really needed. Meanwhile my wife was still running an old Celeron laptop. I sold the rMBP and bought two new 2013 Airs. For what I do (streaming music, email and browsing), it doesn't even feel like a downgrade + my wife loves me again. Win/win.
 
People posting their stats should know that the OS is doing a bunch of post-install stuff after the update, and your first cycle isn't indicative of real performance. For example, spotlight re-indexed everything I think after install, it was using CPU quite a bit after install.

So... give it a few days.
 
tjleonard said:
I just repaired it and restarted. I've had my laptop up for about 6 hours so far. It should be done rebuilding spotlight, ect.

I also plugged it up about 4 hours ago and charged to 100%.

After the reboot a second ago, I went from 78% battery to 74% battery...it just seems like it's dropping in a hurry. I don't have anything that says it's consuming a lot of battery and the ETA right now (from ONLY web browsing and mid way screen brightness) is about 3:12 remaining.
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I had the first GM and my battery life was amazing. I installed the patch when Mavericks was released yesterday and since then my battery life has been awful.

Any suggestions?
 
applemotor said:
It is time to replace my 2007 Black MacBook. If I had spent more money back then on the MBP I would be able to get this update.

So should I get the Air or a rMBP? I have had nothing go wrong with this laptop and I would keep it a couple more years if it had been more 'future proof' and able to work with todays software.

Is a i7 Haswell Air as 'future proof' as a rMBP? Or will the Intel HD5000 be obsolete a couple years before the Iris graphics on the rMBP?

Helping me spend my money today could keep me from whining 7years from now.
Click to expand...

Well if you lasted that long with that model, the new 13 rMBP 16GB RAM 256GB SSD will hold you over quite a while I expect. The Air is great in so many aspects but like the poster before said retina is the way to go!
 
Small White Car said:
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2013/10/why-does-windows-have-terrible-battery-life.html[/url]
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One of the best things about the standard 2013 MacBook Air 13" is that it has record-breaking battery life of 14 hrs 25 min. Under Windows 8 the results are more mixed in the same conditions it lasts only 7 hrs 40 min. That's still very high—but it's only half the astronomical 14 hours + that the 13" MacBook Air is capable of.
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HA HA. I didn't know the operating system made that big of difference in battery life. Running Windows 8, the MBA only gets half the battery life as opposed to running Mountain Lion...
 
X-Ravin said:
I would guess it comes down to compatibility. Apple has a business model where they can pick and choose what their OS will be compatible with. MS has to have compatibility with a nearly infinite amount of hardware. Not to mention software dating back to Windows 95.
Click to expand...

I don't think it's a matter of low level hardware integration as much as it is the software has been programmed to use the hardware more efficiently. I think you could throw Mavericks on any computer you want, and you'd still see a big boost in battery life compared to Windows.

The reason for this is, I believe, because MS is still stuck in the old power before all else mindset, whereas Apple has moved towards the modern trend of balancing power with efficiency. Apple's done a ton of work optimizing everything in the OS to only use as much power as it needs and no more, and it shows in situations like this.
 
khoyme said:
I was thinking the same thing - all of the stated rMBP improvements announced yesterday can be attributed to the Mavericks bump. Nothing for the Haswell shift?

And I wonder if they waited for Mavericks to be ready before releasing these in order to be able to claim some battery life improvement?
Click to expand...

not for the 13" because they increased the battery life by more and simultaneously made the battery smaller. The 15" on the other hand doesn't seem to have the same benefit. I guess it makes sense as that 15" display is likely a real hog on the battery. 1 hour improvement on the 15" likely is half from Mavericks and they likely didn't want to market a 30 minute increase in battery life as they always round to the nearest hour
 
So how is it that the new Crystalwell rMBP 15 with Iris pro (base model) & OS Mavericks only gained 1 hour compared to the prevous 2013 Ivy Bridge refresh?

It would appear that for the previous refeshed Ivy Bridge, it would gain close to an hour anyway simply by going from Moutain Lion to Mavericks.

So essentially, the battery life is barely increased for the Crystalwell rMBP. Battery size hasn't changed. No dGPU for the base-model - shouldn' that mean less engery consumption compared to the Ivy Bridge 15 with dGPU?
 
Renzatic said:
I don't think it's a matter of low level hardware integration as much as it is the software has been programmed to use the hardware more efficiently. I think you could throw Mavericks on any computer you want, and you'd still see a big boost in battery life compared to Windows.

The reason for this is, I believe, because MS is still stuck in the old power before all else mindset, whereas Apple has moved towards the modern trend of balancing power with efficiency. Apple's done a ton of work optimizing everything in the OS to only use as much power as it needs and no more, and it shows in situations like this.
Click to expand...

Microsoft can't get energy management correct because they can't even get sleep mode to work reliably. I think it has to do with Microsoft needing to make Windows generic enough that it will work regardless of the hundreds of third party manufacturers writing drivers that are compatible with windows

----------
GP20 said:
So how is it that the new Crystalwell rMBP 15 with Iris pro (base model) & OS Mavericks only gained 1 hour compared to the prevous 2013 Ivy Bridge refresh?

It would appear that for the previous refeshed Ivy Bridge, it would gain close to an hour anyway simply by going from Moutain Lion to Mavericks.

So essentially, the battery life is barely increased for the Crystalwell rMBP. Battery size hasn't changed. No dGPU for the base-model - shouldn' that mean less engery consumption compared to the Ivy Bridge 15 with dGPU?
Click to expand...

No because they don't do their battery life tests with the dGPU on anyway. Turn on the dGPU and battery life is cut in half
 
khoyme said:
I was thinking the same thing - all of the stated rMBP improvements announced yesterday can be attributed to the Mavericks bump. Nothing for the Haswell shift?

And I wonder if they waited for Mavericks to be ready before releasing these in order to be able to claim some battery life improvement?
Click to expand...

I think so. The Airs used less aggressive Haswells and their battery lives improved even with Mountain Lion. It's becoming more clear that Apple was focusing more on power and speed improvements with the rMBP's and needed Mavericks to fit their increased battery life message. Usually Apple doesn't hold off on releasing hardware until software is ready but in this case I think they did.
 
10.6.8 v 10.9?

Maybe Ars can do a comparo of the older machine running 10.6.8 :), the last worthwhile OS release. Comparing the bloat of the Lions to Mavericks isn't much of a challenge...;)
 
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