2011 13" Battery Life Rundown

Seems reasonable to me.

 

That seems low. It would be good to know what the CPU temp was during the test.

 

This doesn't sound out of line to me. I just upgraded to this same model myself from a 2010 13' Ultimate MBA.

Keep in mind these things:
* Flash shreds batteries on these machines. Even a little bit here and there cuts down battery life significantly.
* 720p video sucks a lot of battery.
* Chrome uses up more battery than Safari.

If you were using enough juice to keep the fans running the whole time, you were using it at a rate that would deplete the battery in less than 3 hours.

Try this:
* Turn off bluetooth
* Turn the brightness down to 40%
* Close chrome and keep a few tabs open in Safari with a flash blocker enabled.

Under these circumstances you should easily be able to surf the web casually for 6-7 hours or more. I was once able to get 9.5 hours like this on my old MBA, and this one feels similar. My battery is showing 6:44 right now with 88% remaining.

 

11-inch would likely get closer to 1:45 doing that.

Sounds about right I guess.

Though battery life is somewhat of a disappointment. I think. It's alright but Apple really does advertise the absolute maximum on their "up to". It would be better of they were a tad bit more realistic. I could only get the "up to" rated amount if I turned off wifi, turned off bluetooth, turned screen to lowest brightness, turned backlit off, turned off sound, and only did word processing.

On my 11-inch I'm getting something like 3 hours with Wi-Fi on browsing the web. I have flash blocker too. That's with about 50% brightness and backlit off.

 

I wonder what the difference would be if you re-ran the test exactly as you did the first time, but this time run the same 720p Loop with Flash Disabled and using YouTube's HTML5 feed instead.

 

Not being faceitious:

Take the manufacturer's claimed battery life and multiply it by 0.6 or 0.7

That's the real world life that you're going to get. That's been my formula and it helps to set expectations. Doing what the OP said, I fully would expect to get his apallingly low battery life. I find that under load, apple's laptops have identical battery life to any run of the mill windows pc. Apple is really good at saving juice when the computer is idle only. When you're under load, you are governed by Intel's power draw designs. So I have concluded that if you are a heavy multitasker and do cpu-intensive things, there's really no point in looking at battery life when laptop shopping because laptops won't differentiate themselves as much under those situations. They will all disappoint you. The only way you can get long run times doing stuff under heavy load is by throwing more battery watt-hours at it (increase the supply end of things). So you have to get an extended battery. Or just plug in. Plus when you throw in the fact that battery run times degrade drastically over time anyway, perhaps battery life is overrated. I will still conclude that Apple has the best runtimes currently available per watt-hour. So it's not like Apple's runtimes are wrong, it's just that there is no tech right now to address using a laptop under load and give you the 6-7 hours.

 

few hours for me online and I have 6:10 left....

 

Did you expect differently? I just assumed it was fairly obvious that higher load = more power = shorter time on the battery.

 

try reallyrefreshing.com for your light browsing battery test. the old macbook air 13" maxed out got 7 hours and 21 with 53% brightness using chrome.

 

Thanks for the web link. I just test my 13" i7 shortly. Here comes the result:

• Google Chrome v13.0.782.99 beta + Flash & Ad block + 50% Brightness + {Mail, Little Snitch, iStat, Moom, Cookies, Caffeine} in background + App Tamer
10% battery life = 48 mins
20% battery life = 1hr 36m

 

Screen auto dim/sleep?

 

Nope, I use Caffeine to keep screen alive.
And the CPU temp is around 4x~50°C

For all MBA users, try a software, App Tamer v1.1d1 to see if you can save more battery life.

http://www.stclairsoft.com/download/AppTamer-1.1d1.zip

 

Doesn't sound too bad to me. Would you mind rerunning the test (only draining 10% is okay) without Spotify in the background?

 

I keep my MBA 13 on full brightness and can surf the web for about 4.5 hours before it gets down to below 10%.

I think I'd only use it for web surfing when on battery if I wanted a long use of it.

Powered for long use for anything else.

But I always want full brightness.

Very happy with the battery.

 

Am I the only one that can't use the Air without at least 70% brightness setting? I'm really comfortable at 80%.

 

Wow that's bright. I'm usually at 50% or below. But I do keep auto-brightness on.


@fitshaced - Great name, and like your rig. I have the same lenses as you but went with the 60D.

 

Second that, I can't stand super bright screen; too much eye strain. I keep it at 50% or below unless I'm outside.

 

This seems awfully good to me. I have the new i5 13" and ran essentially the same test. 50% key and screen brightness, Spotify running with speakers @3 bars, *Flash enabled, and it died in < 4.5 hours. I'll run a few more tests with and without Flash and post back.

I'd be interested to see others' results as well.