Haswell battery life

[anonymous4a]

So 15" Haswell macbook pro's get 8 hours of battery life ? 1 hour more than last years model ? I thought haswell was supposed to bring huge gains to battery life. What could we expect from Broadwell ?

 

[hachiman]

The Retina display ate up some of those extra hours you've been expecting and that's the main difference between the MBA and rMBP.

 

[aiom]

1) retina display
2) 2 cooling fans instead of 1

There is no real enhancement to the cMBP regarding battery life. I don't know whose crackpot idea from Apple it was, but it was clear from the beginning. And it turned out as expected.

 

[dusk007]

Actually only the system of a chip Haswell were supposed to deliver HUGE battey life increases. That is the SoC the Air got, the one for the 13". The Quad Cores still have the MCH (Southbridge) out of the package and only some of the power efficiency improvments but not that big drop in total platform power or the lower system power states.
Apple could have done a lot better if they moved to more efficient IGZO panels away from their current power hungry ones.
Also the iGPU only version will help power efficiency a lot in medium load scenarios but that doesn't show in this light load battery numbers.

 

[Andy-V]

And half of that extra hour probably comes from Mavericks improvements. So very little battery improvement from the hardware.