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2013 11" Battery Life Thread (real world)

gatika80 said:
And considering that it's gonna be my main laptop (only one) and that my other desk computer is a mac pro from 2007 without any wifi do you still advice me to take the airport time capsule instead of 512ssd?
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I assume your Mac Pro is connected via ethernet and it is going to be using the Time Capsule too, for my own personal use the 512 on the 11" on a secondary computer is too much, I have all my music on iTunes match and download/stream albums as needed, I have 542 photo albums that I need to slim down and that is only 60gb, a 10gb Dropbox folder, 20gb VM machine and all the apps and I still have about 100gb left and this is not my main machine.

I'll save the $300 and get a nice TC for myself. :p
 
curtoise said:
More information to share about the i7/8gb/512

I went on battery last night at 8PM and did normal work for 4 hours, opened Photoshop twice to export a couple of jpgs, imported 60 photos in iPhoto (the fan got crazy with Faces detection and it was hot as a volcano), installed Vmware fusion and Win7 from a shared Mac mini dvd, and then safari browsing and a lot of email replying to customers.

This morning I opened the lid at 8am and now is 8:30am and I have a red battery indicator with 1:30 hrs left and I'm just doing very light safari browsing (no flash installed on this machine).

A little disappointed about this test on the i7 and I'll do the same on the i5 today.
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You're the only case I've read about with heat issues with the i7. I wonder if you got a bad unit.
 
Diversion said:
I want to think the i7 likes to get into Turboboost speeds a lot more often than the i5 causing the TDP on the cpu to shoot up more often than not.. You just need to weigh whats more important - battery life or 20-30% more CPU performance.. For someone like myself that has a crazy fast 17" laptop, I just do the heavy lifting on that and have the Air for the lightweight, long battery life.

I actually never understood the i7 market for Macbook Air.. The i7 model isn't enough to make the difference from a power user machine and a non-power user.. I'd be worried to try and encode a 1080p video on my MBA using Handbrake thinking the heat may just destroy the unit.. I always freak out when the fans kick in because its such a small/thin device.
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Handbrake bluray mkv encoding of the Hobbit was 4 hours on both i5 and i7.

2 minutes iMovie export was 8+ minutes on i7 and 10 minutes on i5.

So far the battery on the i5 is much much better than on the i7 but today I'll know better.

And if you think that the i5 is the base model with 4gb of ram I'm smiling at what I'll experience with 8gb.

Also I've been working since Monday with the i5 attached to a Thunderbolt 27' and no fans kicked in at all and all the heavy works is done beautifully.

I'm a power user, I'm not disciplined when it comes to close programs, tabs, etc my desktop is a mess and the i5 is handling this like a champ, no lag, no beachball at all.

I want to have the best ultimate power machine but if that means almost near noticeable speed, worse battery life and heat issues, the i5 is the winner so far.
 
curtoise said:
Handbrake bluray mkv encoding of the Hobbit was 4 hours on both i5 and i7.

2 minutes iMovie export was 8+ minutes on i7 and 10 minutes on i5.

So far the battery on the i5 is much much better than on the i7 but today I'll know better.

And if you think that the i5 is the base model with 4gb of ram I'm smiling at what I'll experience with 8gb.

Also I've been working since Monday with the i5 attached to a Thunderbolt 27' and no fans kicked in at all and all the heavy works is done beautifully.

I'm a power user, I'm not disciplined when it comes to close programs, tabs, etc my desktop is a mess and the i5 is handling this like a champ, no lag, no beachball at all.

I want to have the best ultimate power machine but if that means almost near noticeable speed, worse battery life and heat issues, the i5 is the winner so far.
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i5 has plenty of power for me as well, you just confirmed that the i7 is pretty much a wash in performance and giving less battery life. I only wish that I got perhaps 8gb and 256gb ssd for Bootcamp/Parallels. Oh well, I rock the base model knowing it's just my on the go machine.
 
gatika80 said:
And considering that it's gonna be my main laptop (only one) and that my other desk computer is a mac pro from 2007 without any wifi do you still advice me to take the airport time capsule instead of 512ssd?
Click to expand...

Thanks for this post - now I am thinking of putting 300$ in capsule as well rather than 512GB sSd - I have external mobile 1TB as well & a Mac Pro (wifey 500gB sata)

So far I-7 is loosing the battle - getting hotter- lesser battery life & fans kicking in etc !

I am going to get the I-5 I think now !!
 
My i7/8/256 is out for delivery this morning. I'll be able to mess around with it soon.

If it gives me trouble, I'll bring it to the Apple Store and pick up a base model.
 
defomicron said:
You're the only case I've read about with heat issues with the i7. I wonder if you got a bad unit.
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There are not heat "issues". The heat and fan will come up just like it did in previous models with the same tasks. That will kill your battery in half hour.

I'll report on the i5 soon.
 
johnjey said:
Thanks for this post - now I am thinking of putting 300$ in capsule as well rather than 512GB sSd - I have external mobile 1TB as well & a Mac Pro (wifey 500gB sata)

So far I-7 is loosing the battle - getting hotter- lesser battery life & fans kicking in etc !

I am going to get the I-5 I think now !!
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I m not sure if i will get the time capsule yet I still confuse like always :)

tell me if I'm wrong the time capsule without specifiq configuration doesn't allow you to copy paste file in order to get free space in your macbook right?

If we want to this we need to split and configure the time capsule to have a partition dedicated to external hardware ?? :confused:

----------
curtoise said:
There are not heat "issues". The heat and fan will come up just like it did in previous models with the same tasks. That will kill your battery in half hour.

I'll report on the i5 soon.
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I m wondering if you have heat issue and fan because the version 11 is very small so it doesn't allow enough space to let the processor cool down.
 
gatika80 said:
I m wondering if you have heat issue and fan because the version 11 is very small so it doesn't allow enough space to let the processor cool down.
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That's why I think the i5 is a better option on the smaller machine but I'll know soon.
 
Ok battery at 3% now and I'll plug the computer to power now, total real world usage for my own purposes on installing apps, browsing, VMs, iPhoto, etc

i7/8gb/512 = 5:48 hours on battery

Next I'll test the i5 on same conditions.
 
gatika80 said:
Not really it doesn't compare the i5 to the i7
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Really?

We also ran the tests on “ultimate” configure-to-order (CTO) MacBook Air models from this year and from last year. There wasn’t too much of a battery life hit on the new CTO model compared to the standard configuration; the standard configuration model lasted just 11 minutes longer than the CTO unit that has a faster processor, more RAM, and twice the hard drive capacity. Comparing this year’s CTO “ultimate” to last year’s, we saw that the new model lasted 65 percent longer.
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curtoise said:
There are not heat "issues". The heat and fan will come up just like it did in previous models with the same tasks. That will kill your battery in half hour.

I'll report on the i5 soon.
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But you're the only one reporting the machine getting really hot and the fans spinning way up. I installed Mavericks on my machine and the fans never went above idle and the machine remained cool.
 
defomicron said:
But you're the only one reporting the machine getting really hot and the fans spinning way up. I installed Mavericks on my machine and the fans never went above idle and the machine remained cool.
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This was not Mavericks from the App Store. It is Mountain Lion.

I've installed Mavericks too from the app store and it will just install on top of your ML setup.

The Fan goes crazy when installing Mountain Lion from an USB recovery disk, after one hour of copying to the hard drive and downloading the packages when the installation is actually expanding and installing the packages it will go nuts.

Try it out.
 
mayuka said:
Seems a bit odd to me... Or did you encode all the way? Then the number is impressive...
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What do you mean by "encode all the way?"

I did normal work that I do while on my desktop machine. Lots of safari, Mamp, Coda 2, lots of emails, VM Fusion with Win7 opened and closed a couple of times, imported 60 photos in iPhoto and more safari and mail (mailplane).

That is how I'll use the computer everyday and 5:45 hours do not impress me at all.

I wonder what the i5 will do today. I'm reinstalling a fresh ML copy and do the same test.
 
curtoise said:
What do you mean by "encode all the way?"

I did normal work that I do while on my desktop machine. Lots of safari, Mamp, Coda 2, lots of emails, VM Fusion with Win7 opened and closed a couple of times, imported 60 photos in iPhoto and more safari and mail (mailplane).

That is how I'll use the computer everyday and 5:45 hours do not impress me at all.

I wonder what the i5 will do today. I'm reinstalling a fresh ML copy and do the same test.
Click to expand...

Let us know :)
 
curtoise said:
What do you mean by "encode all the way?"

I did normal work that I do while on my desktop machine. Lots of safari, Mamp, Coda 2, lots of emails, VM Fusion with Win7 opened and closed a couple of times, imported 60 photos in iPhoto and more safari and mail (mailplane).

That is how I'll use the computer everyday and 5:45 hours do not impress me at all.

I wonder what the i5 will do today. I'm reinstalling a fresh ML copy and do the same test.
Click to expand...

I wonder if there might be something wrong with your particular machine? Everyone else seems to be reporting negligible differences between the i5/i7 when it comes to battery life... Pretty big disparity between what you're getting for battery life and what others are.
 
I placed the i7 in clamshell mode attached to the Thunderbolt and unplugged the i5 to start the tests.

Now I have the i7 with Coda, Safari, iMessage and Screen sharing to a Mac mini on and then fan is going like crazy :confused:
 
musika said:
How's your battery doing?
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While I have not been able to run it all the way down, I am impressed with what I've seen.

On Monday I ran it down to 40% in 5 hours of heavy use. I charged it up overnight.

Yesterday I had even less time to play with it. I ran it down to 78% in 3 hours. I closed the lid and this morning it had drained down to 74%. I left it closed again today while I'm at work, and hopefully this evening I'll be able to test it a little more.

curtoise said:
I placed the i7 in clamshell mode attached to the Thunderbolt and unplugged the i5 to start the tests.

Now I have the i7 with Coda, Safari, iMessage and Screen sharing to a Mac mini on and then fan is going like crazy :confused:
Click to expand...

Sounds more and more like you got a bad unit.
 
defomicron said:
While I have not been able to run it all the way down, I am impressed with what I've seen.

On Monday I ran it down to 40% in 5 hours of heavy use. I charged it up overnight.

Yesterday I had even less time to play with it. I ran it down to 78% in 3 hours. I closed the lid and this morning it had drained down to 74%. I left it closed again today while I'm at work, and hopefully this evening I'll be able to test it a little more.



Sounds more and more like you got a bad unit.
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So before we go deep into scenarios of a bad unit:

What are the battery/heat/fan issues reported so far for an i-7 in 11' ?

I have heard ONLY PRAISES and PRAISES so far for I-5 whereas I-7 is full of confused numbers, issues, heat etc....so far.... :(
 
May I ask a question to you because you put me time capsule in mind ;-)

Is that possible to:

Run time capsule via ethernet with my old mac pro without wifi as the same time run time capsule with my macbook air

To couple my external hardware disk to time capsule and use this hardware to put file into in order to give some space to macbook air and macro?

Answer would help me a lot!
 
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