Battery life 7 hrs...NOT!

[Benbikeman]

The fact that Apple does not mention sleep times on their website isn't a proof either way.

I have a vague memory of a MBP consuming 1% battery-life per hour when hibernated, so around 4 days.

 

[snaky69]

I was under the impression that the contents of the RAM were written to the HDD when the computer went into standby. It may be possible that the MBA, being that it has a SSD standard, just powers down everything once it writes the contents of the RAM to the SSD and goes into standby, thus prolonging battery life.

In my very non-scientific study I found that my mid-2009 MBP took a LONG time to wake from sleep after upgrading to OSX 10.8. Once I upgraded my 250GB HDD to a 256GB SSD, this delay was shortened. After seeing this I came to the conclusion that Apple had slightly changed the sleep behaviour of their computers.

That is true whether you have an SSD or HDD. Ram content is dumped to the hard drive, SSD or not, then everything but the RAM is powered down, in both cases.

The reason the Ram contents are plopped into the hd is called safe sleep. Should your battery die completely, you will not lose any of your work, as it was written to the hard drive prior to sleeping.

As far as your waking from sleep times, filling the RAM back up from a SSD is leaps and bounds faster than from an HDD, the speed of the SSD is the very reason people buy them, it's no surprise that it woke from sleep faster.

 

[bill-p]

Thanks for all the input. I enjoy seeing what others views are on this topic.
To answer a few setup questions.
I am on 10.8.2. I set my display to 8 clicks which is 50% I guess. I turned off screen saver and closed all apps. Then I used Safari (Flash turned off) and made a point not to enable any flash images. I got 4:36 mins. before she died.
I guess ya-get-what-ya-get.
I was concerned that I may have a faulty system but many of have reported simular results. I am still very pleased with my Macbook.

That doesn't sound right to me. Are you switching from website to website every 30 seconds?

Because with the same usage, I can easily hit 6 - 8 hours.

In fact, I'd only hit 4 hours of actual usage on my rMBP when I'm out doing presentation for clients with the screen at 100%... and that's usually with Flash blazing, hi-res video, running XCode, Simulators, and all that jazz.