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How many hours of battery life do you get from your 13" mbp?

J

jjahshik32

macrumors 603
Original poster
Sep 4, 2006
5,366
52
Just curious on what to expect on a full charge.

The first time I drained the battery from full charge (using full brightness) I only managed to get 3:20 minutes of battery life.

Whats your battery life like on your 13" mbp?
 
When I take it to school and do work in Photoshop/surfing the web, while listening to iTunes and talking to a few friends on AIM, I usually get 4.5-5 hours. If I'm playing a game (CoD4, WoW) I get around 2-2.5 hours.

PS:
That's also with the brightness down half way and the backlit keyboard off. Bluetooth/Airport on, fans running at 4000rpm, a 7200 RPM HDD, and nothing in the superdrive.
 
A Lot!

Well, you had it full brightness and I guess the Wi-Fi was on and some other Application. If not, doesn't matter.
I borrowed my sister's Macbook Pro (late 2009) for bench mark to compare it with my Macbook White (2007), which was battery:

Both:
60% Brightness
Wi-Fi on
Some background apps running (Bumptop, SMCFancontrol, iFreemem)
Safari on

White Macbook (2007): 2:37
Macbook Pro (late 2010): 6:48

That is a big difference I guess.
BTW, both of the battery are used less than a month (White one replaced).
 
How many hours of battery life can you realisitically expect from the 13" mbp?

Because I use 4 spaces set on 1 notch of brightness with email open, ical, safari and firefox.

I dont watch youtube or any videos just surf the web.

With my 17" mbp using the 9400m gt, I was getting 7:10 minutes or a bit more. That was the only sweet part of using the 17".

But what do you guys think I can get out of with the 13"? I'm guessing I should be getting something like 5 hours and 30 minutes at least right?

So far I've been using the mbp on battery today and its showing 3:40 left (30 minute has passed by) and I'm only browsing the net with 4 spaces open, ical, email and firefox opened using 1 notch of brightness. It seems that its estimated at 4 hours or a little over 4 hours of battery life.. Is there something wrong with my 13"?

Also I noticed that my fans are always at 1997 rpm or 2001 rpm even though my cpu is at 60-66 celsius. I've seen the fan kick in to 3000-6000 rpm once it hits the 70-90 celsius.
 
jjahshik32 said:
Just curious on what to expect on a full charge.

The first time I drained the battery from full charge (using full brightness) I only managed to get 3:20 minutes of battery life.

Whats your battery life like on your 13" mbp?
Click to expand...

It depends on how hard you were working the CPU.

Idle (Safari, Mail open but not doing anything) with WiFi on mine uses about 1000 mA on full brightness, 750 mA on very low brightness. From 5200 mAh battery that's about 7 hours on low brightness, 5 hours on max brightness.

If I start doing any serious work it drops a lot, at least another hour. It really depends on what you are doing.
 
I do this almost four or five times a day.

2.53ghz:
Brightness two notches from maximum
Safari, iChat, Mail, Skype running
WiFi enabled
Usually using about 5-20% CPU

Battery life = 5-7 hours.
 
What are some temperatures you get with your 13" mbps?

I hit 69 celsius or up to 76 quite often (running mkv videos) but the fan only gets up to 2500rpm.. Is this normal for temperatures high as 76?

And when its around 68 celsius the fan stays at 2001 rpm.
 
How long are 13" MBP owners getting with each battery charge from a mix of internet browsing and iTunes use? The initial displayed time is over 6 hours but in reality I'm getting nowhere near that length of time from a single charge, I'd say it's lucky to last 2 hours. I've ran some checks on the battery and it is charging to full capacity. Keyboard backlight is usually off or very low and the screen brightness is set at 50%.
 
Something must be dearly wrong. For one, don't use coverflow in iTunes, it takes up a lot of memoreez and perhaps CPU. As well, download the Flash 10.1 Beta 3, it brings down Flash's CPU usage SIGNIFICANTLY.

I easily pull 6 hours from casual internet, music, e-mail and iChat with keyboard lit and screen at 70%
 
Hello, i am kinda new to this forum :)

but i got a new 13" MBP since this week (before i had a unibody macbook)

the battery lasts up to 8 hours when i just chat & surf (no keyboard light, and normal brightness at 2 bars)
with my normal macbook this was up to 5-6 hours max.

also didnt think the 0,26 Ghz would make such a great difference! (or maybe its snow leopard that has improved)

once u go mac, you never go back! :d
 
I believe the ONLY thing different between the MacBook and new MacBook Pro batteries is the integrated chip that controls the charging and discharging of each cell.

If you look at an X-ray of the MacBook Aluminum, the cells are EXACTLY the same as those in the MacBook Pros. I didn't think a little controller could make such a difference. I sure hope it has some sort of trade laws attached to it like magsafe and the SMS. (Though the SMS was worked around somehow, Steve did say they patented the SMS in the iBook, but no telling if that applies to putting them directly in the drives).
 
MrCheeto said:
I believe the ONLY thing different between the MacBook and new MacBook Pro batteries is the integrated chip that controls the charging and discharging of each cell.
Click to expand...

AFAIK all Li-ion and Li-poly batteries have an integrated charge controller chip. They need it to manage battery life properly. Certainly the MacBooks going back as far as 2006 had a charge controller chip in the battery.

The chip keeps track of the actual charge within the battery, and has some fail safe logic to stop over-charging or over-discharging.
 
sneeks said:
How long are 13" MBP owners getting with each battery charge from a mix of internet browsing and iTunes use? The initial displayed time is over 6 hours but in reality I'm getting nowhere near that length of time from a single charge, I'd say it's lucky to last 2 hours. I've ran some checks on the battery and it is charging to full capacity. Keyboard backlight is usually off or very low and the screen brightness is set at 50%.
Click to expand...

You've got some kind of problem, you should be getting 5 hours plus. Could be a bad battery (look in System Profiler under Power) or a rogue process eating a lot of CPU time (look in Activity Monitor)

To be honest I would struggle to deplete my 13" battery that fast. Even using Handbrake on full brightness I get around 2 hours.
 
seong said:
Well, you had it full brightness and I guess the Wi-Fi was on and some other Application. If not, doesn't matter.
I borrowed my sister's Macbook Pro (late 2009) for bench mark to compare it with my Macbook White (2007), which was battery:

Both:
60% Brightness
Wi-Fi on
Some background apps running (Bumptop, SMCFancontrol, iFreemem)
Safari on

White Macbook (2007): 2:37
Macbook Pro (late 2010): 6:48

That is a big difference I guess.
BTW, both of the battery are used less than a month (White one replaced).
Click to expand...

cool you got a MBP late 2010!??!! lol so what was in the coming update lol
 
I seem to be getting about 6 and a half hours (Not exactly sure as I havnt depleted it all the way).

But I have seen 4 hours due to the flash player hogging up 15% of the cpu resources (just figured this out) but after force quitting it my 13" is finally running MUCH cooler and the battery lasting over 6 hours!

Man flash player sucks.
 
jjahshik32 said:
How many hours of battery life can you realisitically expect from the 13" mbp?

Because I use 4 spaces set on 1 notch of brightness with email open, ical, safari and firefox.

I dont watch youtube or any videos just surf the web.

With my 17" mbp using the 9400m gt, I was getting 7:10 minutes or a bit more. That was the only sweet part of using the 17".

But what do you guys think I can get out of with the 13"? I'm guessing I should be getting something like 5 hours and 30 minutes at least right?

So far I've been using the mbp on battery today and its showing 3:40 left (30 minute has passed by) and I'm only browsing the net with 4 spaces open, ical, email and firefox opened using 1 notch of brightness. It seems that its estimated at 4 hours or a little over 4 hours of battery life.. Is there something wrong with my 13"?

Also I noticed that my fans are always at 1997 rpm or 2001 rpm even though my cpu is at 60-66 celsius. I've seen the fan kick in to 3000-6000 rpm once it hits the 70-90 celsius.
Click to expand...

Out of curiosity, what browser do you use? I've found on both my Rev. C MB Air and the new white unibody MB that I purchased this past week that when on battery, when I fire up Firefox, my battery burns through like crazy. However, as soon as I close it, and start up Safari instead, my "time remaining" jumps back up, often by at least 1hr 45min to 2hrs, and I actually do get a lot more runtime. Since noticing this, I've played around with using each computer with Firefox running in the background, then Safari, and using Safari gets me far more runtime very single time, especially on the new white Unibody. I've gotten up to 8.5 hours out of use between charges using exclusively Safari, but using Firefox the most I can hit is around 4.5 to 5. With my Air, Safari will get me 4.5 hours usage max, but Firefox will drop that under 3. The Air is running 10.5.8 (Leopard), and the Unibody is running 10.6.2 (Snow Leopard). Has anyone else noticed anything similar to this?
 
chris975d said:
Out of curiosity, what browser do you use? I've found on both my Rev. C MB Air and the new white unibody MB that I purchased this past week that when on battery, when I fire up Firefox, my battery burns through like crazy. However, as soon as I close it, and start up Safari instead, my "time remaining" jumps back up, often by at least 1hr 45min to 2hrs, and I actually do get a lot more runtime. Since noticing this, I've played around with using each computer with Firefox running in the background, then Safari, and using Safari gets me far more runtime very single time, especially on the new white Unibody. I've gotten up to 8.5 hours out of use between charges using exclusively Safari, but using Firefox the most I can hit is around 4.5 to 5. With my Air, Safari will get me 4.5 hours usage max, but Firefox will drop that under 3. The Air is running 10.5.8 (Leopard), and the Unibody is running 10.6.2 (Snow Leopard). Has anyone else noticed anything similar to this?
Click to expand...

I noticed the flash player was running due to firefox. I had firefox opened on one of my spaces and it was also due to the flash player that was used under firefox to do my coursecompass online courses.

Even when I exit out of course compass (flash based online tutorials) it keeps the flash player running in the background and just hogs up all the cpu resources.
 
macjunk(ie) said:
install clickflash...this will prevent you from automatically running flash content
Click to expand...

+1. Clicktoflash (for Safari) or Flashblock (for Firefox) are great.

Also you can install the Flash 10 beta from Adobe website. It uses about 1/2 the CPU resources of Flash 9, for the same content.
 
I used to get 4-5 hours out of mine usually surfing the net and listening to music. Now that i have firefox installed and an addon called flashblock i get 5-6 hours with brightness at 75%.

Flash is a real battery hog on a mac, disabling it gave me an extra hour of battery life.
 
I have found in the past that sometimes the Finder will find itself in some kind of state where it consumes a ton of CPU. If you are familiar with Terminal, type "top" and see if anything is using more than a couple percent of CPU. Activity Monitor probably gives you something similar.

If Finder is sitting constantly at 90-100% CPU, then restart it, or restart the whole computer.

If your system seems to be running unusually warm, fans on louder than usual, and battery life worse than usual, this is worth checking. With the older machines, you'd notice a definite slowdown of the whole system, but with the dual core machines, Finder could be happily using up all the processing power in one core without you really noticing.
 
No...my MacBook Pro sometimes lasts eight hours during the lightest internet use...

Somebody told me that at the late hours of the night, Macs perform a self maintenance. Cleaning out caches, storing files, managing ram. Is this true? If so, is Apple really so thoughtless to think that maybe some people turn their computers off every night thus eliminating the possibility of the machine EVER doing maintenance?
 
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