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MacChinoNyc

macrumors 6502
Original poster
I'm curious to know what your battery life is? How is your performance on Mavericks, any beachballs? I do experience this every so often and worried when I start using photo editing software I'll see more. At the same time I'd like to future proof a bit, without taking a huge hit on battery life.

I'm on the fence and thinking of returning my i5/4gb/256 and order this as I'm still withing my return period? Would you definitely recommend this? How long would apple take to receive it?
 
I have the i7/8GB/256GB model and on a clean install of Mavericks, it runs great. No beach balls yet. I use Illustrator and Aperture, along with the basic apps. So far so good. I had the i5/4GB/128GB version and was always watching the memory. Once I traded up, I don't look at the memory usage anymore.
 
I have i7/8GB/256GB upgraded from ML to Mavericks. No problem at all. Never had chance to run the battery to 0%, the battery life is too long to exhaust! 😀
 
On weekends with just light web browsing and the odd video i can make it last all day Sat-Sun on one charge.

On a workday where I use it pretty much non stop for the entire working day it can last a good 9 or 10 hours before it shuts down.
 
i7/8gb/512 SSD MBA upgraded to Mavericks.. Frequent short beachballs. You have to be looking to see it though. Can't understand why 8GB ram and the PCI-e SSD would beachball if all I have running is Firefox and 1Password..

Jeez...I re-read the above paragraph, realized I misspelled Password, went back to correct, and got a beachball just as I added 1 character..

It doesn't seem to slow anything down, but why all the beachballs?
 
I updated to Mavericks on my i7/8/256 and feel like I get better battery life. Performance seems the same...still smooth, fast and flawless.

I don't use it a lot right now, but I think the last time I had it plugged in was..Tuesday night? I'm still showing 37%/6 hours remaining and probably won't need to plug it in again until Sunday night..

I assume by beach balls you mean the loading wheel thing? I might have seen it twice, at the most, since Mavericks launched..I've been extremely happy with Mavericks.
 
I have the I7/8GB/128SSD and I upgraded to Mavericks. I was also getting the beach balls, and when I would let close the lid at 100% battery life, I'd open the lid 8 hours later to find 30% battery life.

I decided to do a fresh install (had to make a bootable usb drive with the image downloaded from the App store). Now I get much longer battery life (two extra hours), no beach balls, and when I close the lid and reopen it 8 hours later, battery is still high (around 99%).

I usually do a clean install whenever a new operating system version comes out, but the App store only allowed updates.

Edit: Oh, I get about 12 hours per charge, unless I'm using Photoshop, then about 8 hours.
 
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