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2010 MBP 13": 10hr Battery must be a bad joke

T

thorbenh

macrumors member
Original poster
Mar 23, 2008
61
0
Hi

I just got my 13" MBP two days ago. In fact I upgraded from 2009 13" MBP due to the improved battery.

When I am lucky I might be able to make more than 4 hours with half brightness. But 10 hours? Seems to be much more unreasonable than 7 hrs for the 2009 model....

T
 
thorbenh said:
Hi

I just got my 13" MBP two days ago. In fact I upgraded from 2009 13" MBP due to the improved battery.

When I am lucky I might be able to make more than 4 hours with half brightness. But 10 hours? Seems to be much more unreasonable than 7 hrs for the 2009 model....

T
Click to expand...

Have you calibrated your battery?
Are you using flash in those 4 hours?
Are bluetooth and wifi on?
Are you doing graphic intensive tasks (1080p movies, etc)?
Have you actually timed the battery length, or are you going by the computer's stats?

Those are the questions you need to ask yourself before you start judging.
 
Well what are you doing on the computer? Everything you do uses battery differently. Knowing what you do can help us give you a better suggestion/answer.

As for me, I can get 8 hours out of my MBP (Specs in sig) doing forums and basic browsing.
 
I only judged by the battery stat in the tasklist and I am referring to light browsing w/o flash.

I will calibrate again (let it run out of battery, wait a couple of hours and charge to 100%) and then see how much it goes. Anyway I dont believ it will run double the time as the stat shows.

Wifi is on, BT is off. No big tasks are running.
 
I have 4 Safari windows open on my mid-2009 13" MBP. The battery displays 41% and 43 minutes left. The fan is running at over 5000rpm. My '7 hours' battery never lasted more than 3, with BT off.
 
Its no joke, my 2009 7 hour model gets 6.5 easily (half screen no BT). If your 2010 is getting LESS than that I'd bring it in for a swap or repair.
 
kernkraft said:
I have 4 Safari windows open on my mid-2009 13" MBP. The battery displays 41% and 43 minutes left. The fan is running at over 5000rpm. My '7 hours' battery never lasted more than 3, with BT off.
Click to expand...

Your fan is at 5000rpm? Something is making your fans run fast, so there must be something using your CPU more than minimal. That's what's using your battery up. Look into Activity Monitor and see what's using the CPU.
 
kernkraft said:
I have 4 Safari windows open on my mid-2009 13" MBP. The battery displays 41% and 43 minutes left. The fan is running at over 5000rpm. My '7 hours' battery never lasted more than 3, with BT off.
Click to expand...

Well there's obviously something in those four Safari windows making your processor go crazy...
 
When Apple says "up to 10 hours", they mean "up to a likely maximum of 10 hours, under the right conditions"; they don't mean "at least 10 hours, regardless how you use your computer".

I've been able to get exactly 7 hours of battery life with my new 17" i7 MacBook Pro, when using it for just stuff like surfing the 'net, email, etc. If mine can achieve 7 hours, then I'd bet the 13" can get 10. Moreover, some people have posted to this forum, about getting more than 10 hours of battery life out of the 13".

Screen brightness is a factor (half brightness or less helps); which chip you use is a factor (integrated chip helps get longer battery life); and so on.

Open up your Activity Monitor, and see if there's anything running which you didn't realize, eating up a lot of battery life. (In my case, there was some old Palm software running, which I hadn't realized, which was making my computer select the discrete chip, which was using up battery life).
 
WiFi, turn Airport off and watch your battery go for hours and hours and hours.
I thought the 10 hours was a joke until I was on a train using xcode with all the wireless comms off.
The first time i checked how much battery life I had left it was on 7+ hours.
 
I don't know what's up with your computer, I can get about 3.5-4 hours with mine, and my battery is only supposed to be 5 hours. There is probably something sucking up some processor, using the battery pretty fast.
 
I'm able to get 7+ hours on my MacBook Pro 15". There must be something you're doing/the computer is doing that is causing this.
 
I can EASILY get 9 hrs out of mine if I turn the brightness down and use my machine lightly. I don't though, I have everything maxed out, so the battery lasts about 5 hrs. Lol who uses their MBP for more than 5 hrs anyway ;-)
 
This is easily the #1 or #2 most-discussed topic on this board. A bit of searching, and you'll find more threads than you can read in a week. Bottom line is the MBP *are* capable of advertised battery life claims provided you setup and browse appropriately.
 
even more than 10 hours!

with only light surfing and ICQ i easily get the ten hours. With only reading an ebook, the monitored prediction even goes beyond 14 hours
 
lol, i still get 3.5 hours out off my early 08 mbp and thats watching videos. 4.5 is quite easy with only web browsing and backlight set about 50%. Since the battery in my mbp is rubbish compared to yours i really question your usage.
 
I'm pretty sure it also depends on what you have plugged into the MBP too.

Even with brightness off, but with my external hard drive, mouse, keyboard, printer, speakers, and external monitor plugged in, I'll get 5-5.5 hours of surfing + music + word.

The estimated time left reflect this also. However, if I unplug all that and have brightness on half I get ~7.5 hours.
 
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