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MBA battery sucks so I'm testing it!

petrucci666

petrucci666

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Apr 30, 2009
714
14
Los Angeles, CA
I just unplugged my MBA, it was 100% fully charged.

I'm gonna follow Apple's guidelines to getting 'optimal' battery life i.e. 7 hours

So:

Safari, Mail, Pages, iTunes and Adobe Reader are open.
Nothing is being downloaded/uploaded nor is there any other program running.

As I'm typing this, the battery is already down to 97% with 3:04 left but I doubt it'll even make it that far.

I've had the MBA for over a month now so all the indexing should've already been take care of and the battery indicator should be accurate now.


If it doesn't make it to at least 6 hours, I am taking it back to Apple and getting a replacement because this is ridiculous!
 
petrucci666 said:
Safari, Mail, Pages, iTunes and Adobe Reader are open.
Nothing is being downloaded/uploaded nor is there any other program running.
Click to expand...
Your battery life is dependent on many factors, including screen brightness, WiFi, Bluetooth, Flash on websites, browser extensions, apps/widgets/processes running, etc. When people say "nothing else running", many times they forget about processes they may have running. Launch Activity Monitor and change "My Processes" at the top to "All Processes". Then look to see what processes are running.

This should answer most, if not all, of your battery questions:
 
what if u keep replacing and replacing and they all last the same time?
 
petrucci666 said:
I just unplugged my MBA, it was 100% fully charged.

I'm gonna follow Apple's guidelines to getting 'optimal' battery life i.e. 7 hours

So:

Safari, Mail, Pages, iTunes and Adobe Reader are open.
Nothing is being downloaded/uploaded nor is there any other program running.

As I'm typing this, the battery is already down to 97% with 3:04 left but I doubt it'll even make it that far.

I've had the MBA for over a month now so all the indexing should've already been take care of and the battery indicator should be accurate now.


If it doesn't make it to at least 6 hours, I am taking it back to Apple and getting a replacement because this is ridiculous!
Click to expand...

Is this the 13" or 11" Air?
 
GGJstudios said:
Your battery life is dependent on many factors, including screen brightness, WiFi, Bluetooth, Flash on websites, browser extensions, apps/widgets/processes running, etc. When people say "nothing else running", many times they forget about processes they may have running. Launch Activity Monitor and change "My Processes" at the top to "All Processes". Then look to see what processes are running.

This should answer most, if not all, of your battery questions:
Click to expand...

You should add the link to your sig...:p It will save you a lot of time...
 
GGJstudios said:
Your battery life is dependent on many factors, including screen brightness, WiFi, Bluetooth, Flash on websites, browser extensions, apps/widgets/processes running, etc. When people say "nothing else running", many times they forget about processes they may have running. Launch Activity Monitor and change "My Processes" at the top to "All Processes". Then look to see what processes are running.

This should answer most, if not all, of your battery questions:
Click to expand...


You're right. I did forget to mention that Bluetooth was off, flash wasn't running, no browser extensions installed.

It's the 13" base model.
 
petrucci666 said:
I just unplugged my MBA, it was 100% fully charged.

I'm gonna follow Apple's guidelines to getting 'optimal' battery life i.e. 7 hours

So:

Safari, Mail, Pages, iTunes and Adobe Reader are open.
Nothing is being downloaded/uploaded nor is there any other program running.

As I'm typing this, the battery is already down to 97% with 3:04 left but I doubt it'll even make it that far.

I've had the MBA for over a month now so all the indexing should've already been take care of and the battery indicator should be accurate now.


If it doesn't make it to at least 6 hours, I am taking it back to Apple and getting a replacement because this is ridiculous!
Click to expand...

Why don't you just plug it in before the 6th hour? Seriously. Outlets are everywhere.
 
LOL

Open only Safari, brightness at 50% or lower and don't browse to much and you'll get 6-7 hours.

With all your apps open, it's completely normal that it says 3 hours.


As I'm typing this, only Safari is opened, brightness at around 50-60% and with like 85% battery it says 6:15 hours left.
 
After reading this last night, I decided to see what would happen on my 3 day old 13/256/i7. I unplugged the magsafe, and with an external hard drive still connected and active as well as the Superdrive, I was able to rip and compress a DVD. At that point the battery monitor said I had about 35 minutes left; however after a few minutes of regular surfing (wifi obviously still on as well as Bluetooth) it said I had 3 hr 4 min left. Didn't bother to test that. Plugged back in.

Tonight I think I'll see how many hours of video I can watch on a full charge. Bluetooth and wifi on, screen brightness set to half. Superdrive connected but not active. External hard drive connected and actively used for Time Machine.


Tom

(I expect it will get very active mobile use if I get to Europe later this fall, so I am going to test with Skype and FaceTime as well, but not at the moment)
 
I'm guessing it's because of the screen brightness. Keeping it on max or very high makes the battery last as best half as long as it does on 50% brightness. If I'm ever low on battery (say <1h left) and I need it to last longer, I usually pull the brighness down another notch or two and thereby doubling the time I can use it :)
 
On my 13" 2011 MBA, last night, I streamed @ 3hrs of video (cbs, abc, and youtube). Surfing added about 11 minutes. So, I got a total of 3hrs 11minutes; my screen brightness was at half, wi-fi on, BT off.
 
Did you use flash? If so 3 hours seems normal to me. Same thing with HTML5 would have give you at least 4,5 to 5 hours.
 
echo.park said:
Did you use flash? If so 3 hours seems normal to me. Same thing with HTML5 would have give you at least 4,5 to 5 hours.
Click to expand...

Yes, both cbs and abc use flash.; when possible, I need to get used to using html 5. I agree that this is about normal. Recently, though a little less substantiated test, I got over 5 hrs watching a little video, using Office (excel and word), and surfing with wi-fi and a little higher screen brightness.

----------
rkahl said:
Why don't you just plug it in before the 6th hour? Seriously. Outlets are everywhere.
Click to expand...

Yeah, why do we even need batteries?:rolleyes:
 
Last edited:
echo.park said:
Did you use flash? If so 3 hours seems normal to me. Same thing with HTML5 would have give you at least 4,5 to 5 hours.
Click to expand...

My MBP 13inch 2011 is in repair and i got a temporary MBP 2006 as a replacement with a battery life of 40mins with textedit open and screen brightness on 1 bar. Even though this machine should have a battery life of 4.5h... and the battery only has 194 cycles so 3 hours sounds like a dream :D
 
Under real-world usage (WIFI, surfing the net, emails, text-chatting over skype, etc), I get between 4 and 5 hours with my 2010 13" MBA running at low screen brightness. There is NO CHANCE I could possibly get 7 hours of battery life doing any real-life usage.
 
Was able to play at least 274 minutes of video (3 complete movies and then I just forgot about it and it died on it's own).

I had the sound off because I was watching TV and using an MBP to surf. So I expect at least 4.5 hours of battery life under moderate settings (1/2 brightness, bluetooth and wifi on) and heavy usage.

With very heavy usage (connected to a time machine backup, the superdrive and ripping/converting a DVD) 100-200 minutes.

I'll try Skype and FaceTime next.

Tom
 
toi said:
what if u keep replacing and replacing and they all last the same time?
Click to expand...

That's exactly what's going to happen. These people are delusional.

OP, you're complaining about the battery life a month later. If you weren't happy with it, you should have returned it and decided it wasn't for you. Seriously, what do you think exchanging it will accomplish?
 
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