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How do these reviews get 8-9 hours of battery life?

TSE

TSE

macrumors 601
Original poster
Jun 25, 2007
4,101
3,743
St. Paul, Minnesota
How does Arstechnica, Engadget, etc. get 8-9 hours of battery life browsing the web without flash, 50-75% Brightness, etc. ?

Do you think they are a little biased for Apple or something?
 
TSE said:
How does Arstechnica, Engadget, etc. get 8-9 hours of battery life browsing the web without flash, 50-75% Brightness, etc. ?

Do you think they are a little biased for Apple or something?
Click to expand...

I'll tell you right now that Engadget spreads its legs wide open for Apple. Just in case there's any confusion, there are flashing neon "Please enter, Apple." all over the place.
 
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TSE said:
How does Arstechnica, Engadget, etc. get 8-9 hours of battery life browsing the web without flash, 50-75% Brightness, etc. ?

Do you think they are a little biased for Apple or something?
Click to expand...

I'll admit 9hrs is a little exaggerated but I usually get 7:45-8:15hrs with wifi on, bluetooth off, display brightness at 40%, keyboard brightness at 20%, doing basic browsing (no flash).

EDIT: Oh, BTW, I'm on 2011 13" Core i5 Model
 
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My first reaction: :rolleyes:

Engadget loves Apple. Yes, they're a bit biased but so is this whole damn website.

Two, I don't know where you're seeing "8-9 hours of battery life."

Engadget said:
Used this way, we also managed to get around seven hours of battery life, which is pretty impressive -- we imagine things would have dipped had we fired up the Radeon more often, but in day-to-day usage the Intel graphics did just fine.

Notes: battery life on all machines but the Air calculated using our standard video rundown test; Air was a usage test.
Click to expand...

That was for the early 2011 15" review. I've gotten 7.5 hours of battery life on my MacBook Pro while surfing the web, half brightness, 25% brightness on the keyboard and WiFi on as long as I don't have anything using the discrete graphics card. If I do, it drops down to 4.5-5 hours immediately.
 
Best rule of thumb is to take whatever the reported battery life is and divide it by 2 to get what you can reasonably expect out of any laptop.
 
With MBP, you can get 7 hours or higher...

Set your brightness down and don't do flash.

The poster who is above me who says MBP won't go over 3 hours?

Your MBP sucks or you are doing too much flash.
 
Most websites use automated scripts to measure battery life. The scripts are usually quite slow surfers.

A real user does much more and creates more load, thus shorter battery life.

Also keep in mind that keyboard back light and bluetooth enabled or disabled can have quite the effect on battery life.
 
The biggest draws to battery (in rough order) are:

Full fledged games (such as WoW, Borderlands, etc)
High performance applications like Photoshop, C4D etc.
Display Brightness
Flash
Regular video
Programs with fancy graphical effects and animations where the discrete card has to kick in
Keyboard backlight
Regular programs

So, if you want good battery life, stay away from games and keep your brightness as low as you can use easily, and keep the keyboard backlight minimal.

From there, it's common sense. High powered applications are going to take more battery. And try and stick with applications that work well on the hd3000 compared to the discrete.

I've noticed if I force integrated only, and browse the web + itunes + tv shows on VLC, I can get about 6 hours and a bit.

The other thing that will help is having the computer sleep very frequently.

With my previous windows laptop during lecture in university I would have it sleep after 5 seconds. Just swipe the touchpad, write a bit of a note, and then off it goes. Could make it last a very long time. Sames goes with the macbook if your trying to get it to really last.
 
I have a question for the OP. Why do you care? I'm not trying to be mean here, but seriously, people complain and complain why their real life battery results are not what it says on the website. Of course that's the reality. Do you think they would like to put 4 hours of battery life when the other competitors are putting 7 hours? No, absolutely not. To answer your question, yes, some might be biased, but remember, there are plenty of other people who do actually get 7 to 8 hours with normal usage. If you are not getting the results that you want, then try doing the same test on your on. I was a bit skeptical when I got my machine, but it did run over 8 hours under the same test.
 
****. People complaining about 7-hour battery life. Even if you don't get that, you'll probably get 5 hours on usage. Well that's a whole lot better than my Late-2008 MacBook Pro. Around 5 hours = 3.5 MAX. If I want to be conservative and not really use my computer, 4.5 hours. :p
 
I get right at 7 hours on web browsing at 50% brightness. The other day I turned the brightness down to around 20% and the battery time said 10 hours with only Pages running. I think brightness makes a huge difference as well as what program you are running. In my experience Safari eats up more battery time than Chrome does.
 
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