iBook battery life

[Hobbit]

Hello everyone,

I received my IBook 12" yesterday and after caliberating the battery, the time left when the battery is fully charged and the iBook of default manufacturer settings is only about 4 hours. Is that the norm? I tried changing settings to save energy but the time can no way reach apple's predicted battery life of 6 hours. any Advice?

 

[mad jew]

I get it saying 4.0 hours initially, but after half an hour it says 4.5 hours, meaning I actually get about 5.0 hours in total. I think this is normal and has something to do with the way the adaptive software works that checks battery status and matches it against power consumption. Initial start up has a default consumption which is generally higher than most people's actual usage. I could be wrong though.

 

[gallivant]

What's your brightness set at? Do you have Bluetooth and Airport on?

 

[Applespider]

Let Tiger switch you to 'best battery life' and see what happens.

Bear in mind that you'll probably only get 6 hours, if you're sitting with the screen brightness turned down, airport and bluetooth turned off and you're typing in a single textedit document so you're not using the optical drive at all and barely using the hard drive.

The time shown on the iBook is based on what you are currently doing. If you've got BT/Airport on, you've got several applications active and your screen brightness is up fully, you're going to get less time. If I start burning a CD on my Powerbook with 2 hours of battery showing, it will drop down to 40 minutes or so. When I stop using the optical drive, it will go back up again to 1:40 or so.

 

[Studawg7]

granted im still using panther on my 1GHz ibook, i usually show around 4-5 hrs of battery life in the beginning when unattached from the power outlet. Like everyone above is saying there are many factors that change the time left as well as the system updating its estimate based one whats going on. I find that i always have plenty of power and i think you ll notice that the ibook should work quite well on the battery.

 

[AJ Muni]

with my ibook, as stated above it depends on what your doing. mine will say 4:30 left, and then i stick in a dvd and itll say 2:20, but if i take it out itll go back to 4:30 or so. all in all, i feel i get about 3:30-4 hours, which is great, but never as advertised for 6 hours.

 

[Zman5225]

On my new iBook 12" i've been getting about 5.5 hours per charge. I have bluetooth and airport turned off most of the time and my brightness turned down to about 3/4 up. Or is that turned 1/4 down? Anyways i'm loving the battery life of this little iBook. When i'm watching movies or something it does go down a lot like already stated but no worries, it goes to around 3 hours or so total. I already tried to see how many I can watch in a row and I get 2 full movies, this is on a full charge, and i'll have a little bit left over after we're done.

Jack

 

[Warbrain]

On my iBook G4 14" that I just got on Saturday, I have consistently gotten 7 hours of battery on a full charge. I don't know how or why other than I've been turning off Airport and Bluetooth since I have no use for them yet and I keep my brightness down, but it happens during regular use with Safari and Adium.