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Got mine yesterday and after I fully charged it and unplugged it it showed 13:46 while running nothing. After that I ran some youtube, surfed forum sites, downloaded torrents and files with VPN log in( huge CPU hog! ) and checked my mail. Lasted 5 hours and a half which is very impressive for the tasks I was doing. Well, I thought so anyways.
 
Sadly I've gotten much less than 10 hours for my usage. I just unplugged it and the battery meter reports 4:37 left. Granted, I'm torrenting on wifi and charging my iPhone, but it's still far, far short of 10 hours. Next week, when I get some time, I'll perform a more accurate test, but I've been pretty disappointed at the supposed "10 hour" battery life.

"torrenting on wifi" and "charging my iPhone" (lol...) is not what you call "wireless productivity. you can't be serious about your expectations!? :rolleyes:
 
I keep my backlit off, brightness at 40 - 50 %, bluetooth off and wireless on.. and must have been on YT for like 10-30 mins. Had 3-5 apps open...

It lasted about 7 - 8 hours. I've let it completely drain only twice... and since then.. I try to use it plugged in. Guess it saves the battery life.

But one annoying thing is, the battery life(hours remaining) keeps changing very often. And one really can't tell unless you hit the battery meter button on the left of the MBP. Maybe, it'll take a while to get used to it.

If the backlight would be off, brightness would be at 0%, meaning you have pressed the brightness key F1 until no more bars would be visible, and anything else, unless you have a lamp behind the screen.

The battery capacity can also be shown as percent, which is as accurate as you can get, as the time shown to be left is estimated on the current CPU use, which fluctuates, thus the time is fluctuating.

battery.tiff.converted.jpg



It ended up lasting 7 hours 45 minutes. Apart from disabling a core or popping out a DIMM I don't know how you can get 10 hours of "wireless productivity" (which I assume means "wifi" and not "on battery"). It's moderately disappointing, but it's still better than the previous generation and most of the competition.

"wireless productivity" means running on battery.

The wireless productivity test measures battery life by wirelessly browsing various websites and editing text in a word processing document with display brightness set to 50%.
read under footnote 7 on the official technical specifications page Appel put out for us to read. Ah, linky.
 
Wow! i got one and its amazing! i'm typing on it right now :)
a few minutes ago, i had 9:36 with 93% left. after fluctuating a bit, it's now at 9:19 with 92% left. this is my first charge (got it last night, charged it all night, left it off the charger for a few hours (like 6), and when i got home it was at 96%). I'll post back with what i get.
 
Got mine yesterday and after I fully charged it and unplugged it it showed 13:46 while running nothing. After that I ran some youtube, surfed forum sites, downloaded torrents and files with VPN log in( huge CPU hog! ) and checked my mail. Lasted 5 hours and a half which is very impressive for the tasks I was doing. Well, I thought so anyways.

I would consider that normal usage. ;)
 
I would consider that normal usage. ;)

I wouldn't, to download the torrents I have to be logged into my Uni's network by VPN and that takes around 20-25% CPU, then transmission takes another 5-10%. So CPU use was ranging from 25-35% operating at 55 degrees C. I Doubt this is what apple considered normal under ' wife browsing and document editing ' when they got up to 10 hours.
 
Sadly I've gotten much less than 10 hours for my usage. I just unplugged it and the battery meter reports 4:37 left. Granted, I'm torrenting on wifi and charging my iPhone, but it's still far, far short of 10 hours. Next week, when I get some time, I'll perform a more accurate test, but I've been pretty disappointed at the supposed "10 hour" battery life.

You're charging your iPhone? Look, the MacBook Pro has a 60 Wh battery. 60 Watt hours. 10 hours if you use 6 Watt continuously. Charging your iPhone on the USB port will use at least 2.5 Watt. So what do you expect? Next think you connect a USB coffee warmer and complain that you don't get 10 hours of battery life.

It ended up lasting 7 hours 45 minutes. Apart from disabling a core or popping out a DIMM I don't know how you can get 10 hours of "wireless productivity" (which I assume means "wifi" and not "on battery"). It's moderately disappointing, but it's still better than the previous generation and most of the competition.

Set the screen brightness to 50%. As I said before, 10 hours battery life means 6 Watt power consumption. Now if you consider that a not very bright light bulb uses 40 Watt, that means your MBP must run on 1/7th of that light bulb. You can't afford very much screen brightness to use that little power.
 
Also the battery life is only good if you it can save power which is where apple is pretty good. But if the wire less lan module is constantly doing someting it cannot enter low power states, same is with the hard drive. It is not just the CPU.
The 10h are probably when you enter a website and then stay there for a while reading content or reading through downloaded pdfs. If you do a timemachine backup in the background it won't work.
Also simple Text processeing. Editing a document or scripting a little will get you good battery life because the Notebook has Idle time and can shut some stuff off or swtich it into a low idle state.
This is the very reason Windows still sucks in battery life. There is always something doing unnecessary things like writing to hard disc some log data. It is nice for crashes but it is not really necessary as the important data like a word doc is only saved every 5 min.
 
I just unplugged power and have a quote of 9:15 at 100%

I should mention that the backlight is on minimum, I only have open Chrome and 3 tabs, and in the few moments of light use since I disconnected the cable it's fluctuated down to about 8hrs at 97%

If I do a bit of expose or spaces it drops to 6h.

In practice I've got a good 5h of substantial high-brightness multitasking (dozens of tabs open, iTunes, Picasa; the works). I'm impressed with that in and of itself, since I took the 10hr quote with a handful of salt. I've found OS X to be more battery efficient than Windows 7.
 
"torrenting on wifi" and "charging my iPhone" (lol...) is not what you call "wireless productivity. you can't be serious about your expectations!? :rolleyes:

I wasn't expecting 10 hours when doing that, more like 6 or so. But it was, at least for me, my typical usage, so it's nice to know how long I can expect my battery to last.

"wireless productivity" means running on battery.

The wireless productivity test measures battery life by wirelessly browsing various websites and editing text in a word processing document with display brightness set to 50%.
read under footnote 7 on the official technical specifications page Appel put out for us to read. Ah, linky.

Right, that's exactly what I was doing - "wirelessly browsing various websites" with my brightness set to the minimum, so it should have theoretically been longer than the 10 hours they get on half brightness. I was basically saying that the only way I could see 10 hours usage is if I had my Wifi completely off.


You're charging your iPhone? Look, the MacBook Pro has a 60 Wh battery. 60 Watt hours. 10 hours if you use 6 Watt continuously. Charging your iPhone on the USB port will use at least 2.5 Watt. So what do you expect? Next think you connect a USB coffee warmer and complain that you don't get 10 hours of battery life.

I wasn't expecting 10 hours, more like 6 or so. But the results of that aren't important - what's important is that when I actually *tried* to have my battery last as long as possible, I only got 7:45 out of it.

Set the screen brightness to 50%. As I said before, 10 hours battery life means 6 Watt power consumption. Now if you consider that a not very bright light bulb uses 40 Watt, that means your MBP must run on 1/7th of that light bulb. You can't afford very much screen brightness to use that little power.

I set my brightness to the minimum (the one right before it's off completely) and wirelessly browsed various websites. I even made sure that I had a flash blocker installed so I didn't tax the CPU. Even with this, the battery only lasted 7:45. I used MiniBatteryLogger to monitor my battery over this time interval.
 
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I just took my charger out of the plug socket and I'm getting a reading of 12 hours and 10 minutes. haha :D:p
 
You're charging your iPhone? Look, the MacBook Pro has a 60 Wh battery. 60 Watt hours. 10 hours if you use 6 Watt continuously. Charging your iPhone on the USB port will use at least 2.5 Watt. So what do you expect? Next think you connect a USB coffee warmer and complain that you don't get 10 hours of battery life.



Set the screen brightness to 50%. As I said before, 10 hours battery life means 6 Watt power consumption. Now if you consider that a not very bright light bulb uses 40 Watt, that means your MBP must run on 1/7th of that light bulb. You can't afford very much screen brightness to use that little power.

I'd just like to point out that your brightness comparison is way off. Macbook screens are LED backlit. A 6W LED would actually be over 60% as bright as a 40W bulb. So you can afford more brightness than you might think.
 
I just watched 80 min of video with about 50% brightness, which drained 45% of my battery. Not very impressed I must say. Worried that something is wrong with my battery as I only got 5 hours and 20 minutes out of my battery yesterday while surfing the web, and listening to some music for some of the time (with full brightness though).

My battery health is 98% according to coconut. I did calibrate the battery as first thing. Twice. The mac is 3 days old.

Should I worry?

Coconut also says the mac is seven weeks old, isn't that a bit old?

Love everything else with my first ever MBP:)
 
I just watched 80 min of video with about 50% brightness, which drained 45% of my battery. Not very impressed I must say. Worried that something is wrong with my battery as I only got 5 hours and 20 minutes out of my battery yesterday while surfing the web, and listening to some music for some of the time (with full brightness though).

My battery health is 98% according to coconut. I did calibrate the battery as first thing. Twice. The mac is 3 days old.

Should I worry?

Coconut also says the mac is seven weeks old, isn't that a bit old?

Love everything else with my first ever MBP:)

There's nothing to worry about. If you really want to see if you can get 10 hours, set brightness at 50%, turn off bluetooth and back-lit keyboard, open one tab in safari and view a non flash webpage over and over again. these are likely the conditions apple tests under. coconut said my mac was 6 weeks old out of the box. it just means that it was probably manufactured 6 weeks ago.
 
So on full brightness can i get 5hours?

I believe that you can get 5 hours surfing the web at full brightness. This is like reading espn, cnn, facebook, etc. Not watching hulu.

I honestly do not understand how so many people are able to be happy using the glassy + glossy screens at 50% brightness, let alone minimal brightness. I would not be able to see anything except myself on the screen. Literally. Is everyone in a a dimmed setting or something?

It does seem like the battery life definitely has been improved. I don't think that the last mbp 13" could go 5 hours full brightness.
 
I believe that you can get 5 hours surfing the web at full brightness. This is like reading espn, cnn, facebook, etc. Not watching hulu.

I honestly do not understand how so many people are able to be happy using the glassy + glossy screens at 50% brightness, let alone minimal brightness. I would not be able to see anything except myself on the screen. Literally. Is everyone in a a dimmed setting or something?

It does seem like the battery life definitely has been improved. I don't think that the last mbp 13" could go 5 hours full brightness.

50% brightness is fine, even in full daylight. It's the people that use minimum brightness I don't understand. 10 hrs at minimum brightness isn't something to be happy about. The only time I use the minimum is in the complete dark.
 
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