How can you guys see the screen at half brightness? I would just be staring at my reflection in anything but a near-dark room.
That said, NO battery ever performs like it's rated to. 7 hours is not a real-world scenario. 5 hours like you mentioned at half brightness and surfing is what I'd expect.
The dirty truth is that the 9400m graphics is integrated physically, but it doesn't consume as little energy as the intel integrated 4500hd solution, so it doesn't save battery like a true integrated solution. The battery is only 3 wH bigger than the plastic macbook's 55 wH battery, and in a test it only outlasted the plastic macbook by 10 minutes. The new 13" mbp jr. does have an LED screen, which should consume less juice, but it's offset by it's power hungrier 9400m graphics. The 15" mbp's battery lasts about half an hour longer with a 73 wh battery. In the brief time that I owned that one before selling it, the battery performed for four hours just surfing on max brightness, no flash, no video, just email, word, pdfs, no music, cnn-type sites, wifi, no bluetooth, integrated 9400m graphics, and a little msn. Using skype video conferencing and playing videos would drastically kill the battery to maybe 2 hours. If I hadn't seen this type of behavior with EVERY laptop that I've ever owned and was a total novice, I'd take it back claiming the battery was a fraud. But if Apple is fraudulent, then so is every other manufacturer.
The way to think about these batteries is that the mbp jr. has typical 6 cell battery from the pc world, and the mbp 15" has a 7.5 cell battery. A typical 9 cell battery has 85 watt hours. A typical 6 cell has 56 watt-hours. I firmly believe that a windows 7 and mac os x laptop will last similarly long and one should not think that a mac = better battery life. It's really all similar in this day and age, with components being similar. The primary thing determining battery life is the battery's size, and the only notable thing about Apple's solution is that it doesn't protrude (which I value). I am thoroughly skeptical that these batteries will last 1000 cycles, though. There is just simply no way that Apple has invented a battery technology that no one else has ever thought of before. There isn't some algorithm that they've concocted out of their laboratories that is a miracle formula. It's really yet again clever marketing. In 5 months, someone let me know if the battery health is reading about 97%. Then that would mean that there really is something special about the battery. Actually, the 17" models had a few months' head start, so we should be hearing soon whether Apple's longevity claims are more marketing hype or there is truth to these claims.
