Bad battery. Or is this normal? Will AppleCare replace it for free?

[bollweevil]

I have a brand new MacBook Pro (early 2011 model), 15" high resolution anti-glare display, 2.2 GHz Intel Core i7 processor, 8 GB RAM, OS X 10.7 Lion. The battery life is abominable.

Battery life: 120 minutes or less
Test conditions: Full screen brightness (that might sink it), very low processor load (Gmail in Firefox, text editor, and Python interpreter), Bluetooth is off, Wifi is on. Hard disk rarely spins up, very little hard disk I/O.

Is that normal battery life? This is even worse than the battery life on my 2008 MacBook Pro 15", and that one at least had a user-swappable battery.

My father says his MacBook Pro 15" (2009 or 2010 model) gets up to 7 hours of battery life, and I can't see how my newer MBP could be doing so much worse than his.

My questions:

1. How do your MBPs stack up?

2. Under what circumstances will the Genius Bar replace my battery? (I still have AppleCare, the computer is brand new.)

3. Should I do the test under different conditions? (This is a hassle, because the current "test" data is just from recording what happens after my normal use.)

Thank you all.

 

[cfII]

I have the same computer as you I get around 3 hrs. I have been meaning to post and ask about this as well.

3hrs is just web browsing. If I'm playing x-plane forget it.
Maybe I have a bad battery too?

 

[saberahul]

Doesn't sound normal. Contact Apple for sure. Battery is still pretty new if its early 2011 so I doubt it could have died already. I have the 2011 model as well (diff specs, see sig) and get about 8 hours of only browsing, about 4 hours of videos and about 2-3 hours of hardcore processing (AutoCAD, video chat, MatLAB, xCode, Mail, Safari, SolidWorks, etc.) all running at the same time (fan won't shut up).

 

[416049]

I would contact apple care I have a MBP 2011 as well and get at least 5h

 

[m85476585]

Check CoconutBattery. If the capacity is less than 80% and the cycle count is less than 1000, Apple should replace it if you still have a warranty.