Macbook Battery Life

[cayley]

Hi all,

There were way too many threads to wade through on a 'battery life' search. So here goes:

About how long will a Macbook with a full charge last (under default settings) using wifi to go online? We can assume continuous use.

Thanks.

 

[TBi]

I usually get about 3-4 hours depending on how much cpu usage there is and how bright the screen is.

 

[cayley]

Ah, almost long enough 😛

Guess I'll have to carry the AC adapter. 🙁

 

[deadpixels]

you can turn brightness down for more battery life and tweak some of the settings in Energy Saver preference pane 😀

 

[junkster]

"Continuous use" is too vague of a term these days. If you're writing in a word processor, the CPU load is likely pretty light. At the other end, you can be running a multi-threaded, CPU-intensive application that gets both cores going. Or you may be running multiple applications that result in the same sort of usage pattern. It also depends on exactly what applications are doing, such as pushing the graphics chipset or using the vector math units of the CPU.

Try firing up the Chess game that ships with OS X, and you'll hear the fan roar estimated battery charge drop. Browsing the web won't normally do that, but playing a graphically-intensive Flash game online might.

The short version is that there are a lot of variables 🙂

In any case, turning off wi-fi, bluetooth, and dimming the screen a bit will extend battery life.