Just bought a MacBook Air 11, battery life is subpar?

[ebolamonkey3]

Hey guys, just picked up a 2014 MBA 11 from Best Buy a couple of days ago, with a full charge I'm seeing an estimated 6hrs battery time from the top bar. I have the brightness set to 10 boxes, no bluetooth. I have about 10 tabs open in Safari, and have Airmail and Dropbox open in the background.

The first day I bought it and was setting things up and installing stuff, I got around 4.5hrs before I had to charge. I keep seeing people claiming 9hrs of battery life, can anyone help me figure out what might be wrong?

 

[b3av3r]

Depends on what you are doing. What do you have running in those 10 tabs in Safari? Flash will kill your battery quick. I use the extension "click to Flash" so that Flash does not automatically load on a website instead you have to click the area.

Also, your screen brightness seems to be set to about 1/2. I usually run mine on 1 or 2 brightness. This makes a big difference as well.

If you click the battery icon at the top it will let you know what programs are sucking your juice.

 

[yosemit]

First don't trust the battery bar. It's not accurate, particularly for a new machine.

Second, yes, when the computer installs new software, battery time is much shorter than usual.

 

[Gregintosh]

I would never expect to get the full rated amount, but after a few full charge/discharge cycles, especially after you're just using it and not installing stuff and spotlight isn't indexing, I'd expect maybe 6 to 7 hours. That is unless you're running on low brightness and browsing static pages.

 

[ebolamonkey3]

How do you see anything on 1 or 2 brightness? There are 15 bars total, and I'm using anywhere between 6-11 depending on the environment. I can't really see myself using less than that unless I turn my room's lights off or something.

I checked the battery bar, and it always says no apps using significant battery :| I also looked up some threads from last year when the 2013 just came out and people were saying they're getting 9-10hr on the 11" and 12hr on the 13", so I thought something must've been wrong w/ mine since there's such a large discrepancy.

Edit: btw I already have click to flash installed on Safari, as well as click to plugin. Haven't watched any videos yet, the tabs are just browsing the web, looking up Mac tips on various websites. When I was installing apps the first day, it got 4.5hrs, then today around 6 or 6.5.

 

[tom vilsack]

Maybe you should have bought a chromebook if your concerned about battery life...

 

[ShiggyMiyamoto]

Maybe you should have bought a chromebook if your concerned about battery life...

Or a 13" MBA like I'm tempted to get....

 

[Meister]

It depends on what you are doing.
If you install apps then your battery will be drained fast. Same with webbrowsing.
8-9 hours is mainly with using word.
Ive used several of the new haswell macbooks and What you are experiencing fits what I saw.

 

[yosemit]

I got 9-10 hours in meetings and conferences with wifi in use. I don't lower the brightness intentionally. My air is 11" i7/8GB/256GB.

How do you see anything on 1 or 2 brightness? There are 15 bars total, and I'm using anywhere between 6-11 depending on the environment. I can't really see myself using less than that unless I turn my room's lights off or something.

I checked the battery bar, and it always says no apps using significant battery :| I also looked up some threads from last year when the 2013 just came out and people were saying they're getting 9-10hr on the 11" and 12hr on the 13", so I thought something must've been wrong w/ mine since there's such a large discrepancy.

Edit: btw I already have click to flash installed on Safari, as well as click to plugin. Haven't watched any videos yet, the tabs are just browsing the web, looking up Mac tips on various websites. When I was installing apps the first day, it got 4.5hrs, then today around 6 or 6.5.

 

[rewardsguy]

I think Dropbox is what's killing your battery life. I read somewhere that it's one of the worst offenders next to flash. You should install Coconut Battery to see if there's an issue with your battery. FWIW my new 2014 MBA 13" is showing max charge >100% design capacity and I'm getting 10-14 hours on a single charge depending on what I'm doing.

 

[26139]

Bash

Open Activity Monitor, change view to All Processes, click CPU, find Bash, and force quit it.

No idea why, but that's helped battery life on both my 2011 MBA 11" and my new rMBP.

 

[ebolamonkey3]

It depends on what you are doing.
If you install apps then your battery will be drained fast. Same with webbrowsing.
8-9 hours is mainly with using word.
Ive used several of the new haswell macbooks and What you are experiencing fits what I saw.

I got 9-10 hours in meetings and conferences with wifi in use. I don't lower the brightness intentionally. My air is 11" i7/8GB/256GB.

Hmm yea it seems the 9hr quoted is with very limited use, and Safari and Airmail seems to take up a lot of battery.

I think Dropbox is what's killing your battery life. I read somewhere that it's one of the worst offenders next to flash. You should install Coconut Battery to see if there's an issue with your battery. FWIW my new 2014 MBA 13" is showing max charge >100% design capacity and I'm getting 10-14 hours on a single charge depending on what I'm doing.

I'll try closing Dropbox when I don't need it to see if it makes an impact.

Open Activity Monitor, change view to All Processes, click CPU, find Bash, and force quit it.

No idea why, but that's helped battery life on both my 2011 MBA 11" and my new rMBP.

Interesting, what is it? I didn't see it under Activity Monitor so I don't think it's the problem.

 

[yosemit]

Hmm yea it seems the 9hr quoted is with very limited use, and Safari and Airmail seems to take up a lot of battery.

Just OS X Mail, Safari, Note, MS Word, and PowerPoint. No photoshop, VM or game.

BTW, a brand new MacBook may have a shorter battery time because of index building.

 

[Boyd01]

I also get excellent battery life with my 2013 11" i7/8gb/512gb MBA. Never ran it all the way down but think it would go for 10 hours for "everyday" stuff. Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro suck it down pretty fast. Also goes down pretty fast when I connect it to my Sony TV with HDMI. Screen brightness seems to have less effect on battery life than I would expect.

I almost never use flash or dropbox and don't even know what "airmail" is. I can't imagine why I would ever want to have 10 tabs open at the same time in Safari. Battery life while watching ripped DVD's in iTunes is especially impressive.

 

[Mac.User]

I just attended a training event for work and I went all day, every day on my new 11in. i5/4GB/128GB

1-3 brightness bars, no KB backlight, WiFi, Bluetooth on(not used)and a few apps:
Crashplan
Google Drive
Skype
Bartender
Cloud App
Safari 2-5 tabs

With Safari open and reading PDF: http://cl.ly/image/2m3L0j43081J

I went from 8AM-5:30PM and still had over 20-30% battery left each day.

----------

Maybe you should have bought a chromebook if your concerned about battery life...

My Chromebook gets 3.5-4hrs, and its an ARM CPU.

 

[chrisrosemusic1]

I just attended a training event for work and I went all day, every day on my new 11in. i5/4GB/128GB

1-3 brightness bars, no KB backlight, WiFi, Bluetooth on(not used)and a few apps:
Crashplan
Google Drive
Skype
Bartender
Cloud App
Safari 2-5 tabs

With Safari open and reading PDF: http://cl.ly/image/2m3L0j43081J

I went from 8AM-5:30PM and still had over 20-30% battery left each day.

----------



My Chromebook gets 3.5-4hrs, and its an ARM CPU.

^ THIS for my chrome book (well my daughters anyway). I'm getting 9-11 hours out of my 13" Air (2014) depending on my usage so 6-7 on the 11" seems about right to me.