2014 11" Air, battlery life around 6 hours. Normal?

[iamsen47]

It's something I've been wondering about for a while. I've never managed to get the magical 10 hour life. It's usually between 5~8 hours. I use this for development for Chrome, Brackets, Slack and Sourcetree are always on. Vagrant is up sometimes. At least one copy of gulp and sbt/activator are up at all times too.

Bluetooth is always off. Wifi is always on. Brightness is at 4 bars in standard lighting.

According to activity monitor, chrome seems to soak up the most battery life. It hangs around 25% avg energy consumption whereas everything else is usually below 10.

Is this 'normal'?

 

[Sekelani]

Yep. Seems pretty normal. My MacBook Pro 15 inch gets about that's battery life.

 

[cruisin]

If I just use Word and Safari (without flash) and use a lower brightness setting, I can squeeze out 10 hours instead of the promised 8 hours on my 15 inch. Chrome is a power drain since it has no idle mode, and every tab is actually a separate Chrome window that is constantly running. Safari is much more efficient, and it stops itself if it detects it is covered up by another window (except audio/video playback).

If you have multiple apps running then you will have less battery life, this is normal. The 10 hours is quoted for web browsing in Safari, so basically a light task, and you are putting a higher load on it. As an analogy, compare jogging 10 km with and without a backpack.

 

[SSD-GUY]

It's something I've been wondering about for a while. I've never managed to get the magical 10 hour life. It's usually between 5~8 hours. I use this for development for Chrome, Brackets, Slack and Sourcetree are always on. Vagrant is up sometimes. At least one copy of gulp and sbt/activator are up at all times too.

Bluetooth is always off. Wifi is always on. Brightness is at 4 bars in standard lighting.

According to activity monitor, chrome seems to soak up the most battery life. It hangs around 25% avg energy consumption whereas everything else is usually below 10.

Is this 'normal'?

Chrome is a battery killer.

I can get 9/10 hours of video on my 2013 11' Air. If I do mixed browsing, office, pdfs, evernote, music etc, I can squeeze out around 6/7 hours.

I would move to Safari.

Also, have a look at Anand's review of the 2013 Air.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/7180/apple-macbook-air-11-2013-review/2

The 2013 11' Air is able to get 6.5 hours of medium usage and 4 hours of heavy usage. I presume the 2014 Air will be about the same, if not slightly better, as there isn't that much of a difference between Haswell and Broadwell.

 

[Meister]

Depends on how you use it exactly.

If you browse a lot/load new webpages frequently and even multitask with other apps, then 6 hours is a lot!!

I get about the same time on my rmbp from webbrowsing only.