Part of the reason I switched to mac was a promise of great battery life. My new MBP can't seem to go beyond 3hr no matter how simple the usage. What are your experiences?
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MBP 7hr battery lie?
- Thread starter deadkennedy
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I've had over 7hrs with wireless/bluetooth/keyboard light off. Display at lowest setting and intel only graphics on. I was not doing anything hefty but just reading text and writing code.
What settings did you have?
What settings did you have?
if you're using flash sites don't expect more than 4 hours - I use hulu on battery and it lasts maybe 4 episodes (each episode being about 45 minutes) and then the battery conks out
I don't know exactly what I was doing, I might be watching some video through Flash players but not all the time. However, I had it also on standby for a while. What would be the best way to measure it so that I can claim the warranty? I'm definitely not letting this go having paid over $2500 for a laptop.
did u recalibrate your battery yet? download coconut battery
i get really good battery life on mine, i can go 8 hours with light surfing, brightness at 50% with wifi on.
On the basis that you are talking about a '7 hour' battery, I assume that it's a 13" mid-2009 MBP. I have one of those and even when new, I haven't reached anything above 3 hours.
My 15" late-2008 one does an hour, so should I be grateful to Apple?
These battery-statements are so out of line that when the new '9-hour' battery came out, I just thought of it as a '4 hour' battery.
My 15" late-2008 one does an hour, so should I be grateful to Apple?
These battery-statements are so out of line that when the new '9-hour' battery came out, I just thought of it as a '4 hour' battery.
While Flash is playing your MBP uses about four times more power than normal. There is a reason why Apple wants to get rid of Flash. Battery life depends on usage. If you want to make a warranty claim then you have to test the way Apple tests it: "Battery life depends on configuration and use. See www.apple.com/batteries for more information. The wireless productivity test measures battery life by wirelessly browsing various websites and editing text in a word processor document with display brightness set to the middle setting."
Do you hear fan noise? If you do, find out what uses the battery. Open Activity Monitor, show CPU usage. Anything above 20% is _really_ killing battery life.
1. You don't need Flash to have the computer's battery depleting in three hours.
2. Compare Flash with HTML on similar content and there will be hardly any difference. Some people abuse Flash but you cannot blame the software for some people overloading it with heavy content.
3. This Flash-hate should stop.
Your battery must be malfunctioning, I guess. I use mine for well over 6 hours uptime with brightness over 50%, backlit keyboard wifi with loads of presentations, documents, emails, websites open and no problem. I use it a uni for 5-7 hour days with no problem.
1. Correct. Handbrake is also very good at it. Except Handbrake intentionally uses all cores to perform a hard task as fast as possible, while Flash wastes CPU cycles.
2. On my MacBook, Flash uses 60-70% CPU playing a tiny movie, about the same as is needed to play h.264 full screen with a decent player. But the real bad thing is that I use h.264 to play movies that I want to see, while Flash is used mostly for adverts that I don't want to see. So Flash empties my batteries just to get on my nerves.
3. It's not hate, it is just plain realism. On one evening I had four Safari crashes and two hangs, and each single one caused by Flash (unless Apple fakes CrashReporter results).
Which MBP do you have? do you also have your display set on full brightness? When my mbp is on full brightness it loses quite a bit, and same as downloading stuff from the internet, but basic web browsing medium brightness and some music playing my computer can last about 5 or 6 hours with a couple downloads every so often which isn't too bad.
nobody's hating on Flash - we're just noting that it may be one of the reasons for the OP's mbp to be losing so much battery power in such little time
I was referring to the general climate here, on Macrumors. Some people say completely unfounded things about Adobe or whatever the weekly enemy happens to be in Cupertino.
So many people ask about the 7 hr battery thing... Hey! I'm going to write an article about it so that I can just point them to the article when the question is asked 
Because it seems to be asked an AWFUL lot
Because it seems to be asked an AWFUL lot
Actually Steve Jobs claimed that the iPad watching flash video would only run an hour and a half vs. the current 10 hours it gets today with HTML5.
I just got 14 hours out of my 2009 model MBP!
Mind you, I had the screen turned off and was only listening to audio. But still 14 hours!
I routinely see 8+ hours with my 15" 2010 MBP.
Please search the hundreds of threads on battery life. You don't have a warranty claim. Sorry, but that's just the truth. You're running something in your system that's sucking juice. Luckily for you, this is the first or second most common topic here and tons of good advice on how to diagnose, monitor, and fix the situation is available just for the search and reading.
Please search the hundreds of threads on battery life. You don't have a warranty claim. Sorry, but that's just the truth. You're running something in your system that's sucking juice. Luckily for you, this is the first or second most common topic here and tons of good advice on how to diagnose, monitor, and fix the situation is available just for the search and reading.
This is a '7 hour' battery. I only have a Macrumors window open with Safari as I am working on my other MBP. The backlight is set at around 50% and I am not constantly on it, hence the 3hours+ figure.
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Steve Jobs also claims that there's nothing wrong with the inherently flawed design of the iPhone4 antennas. Anyone can make claims, doesn't make them right.
As for the battery issue, well I think it's a non-issue. If the battery lasts 7 hours during Apple's tests, then that's how long it lasts. They don't perform real world tests, they just display specific web pages, for specific durations, under specific circumstances.
I don't recall the exact wording, but the test is something like "browsing web pages, with wifi on and backlight at 50%". There are so many ways to interpret this that it's silly to even try and emulate the results. Hell, they could be browsing "web pages" which are locally stored on the machine, thus cutting down on wireless transfer. These web pages could also be empty html files, or files which just display a simple line of text. They may not be, but regardless, Apple sets the rules for their tests, so if they want a test to show a specific result (7,8,9 hour battery) they'll design the test to achieve that result.
Bottom line is that it's just a marketing gimmick. Whenever someone says "I got 10 hours out of my battery" I do believe them, but I think their circumstances likely involve things like plenty of idle time, and little to no usage of any sort of media.
Oh, trust me, I will get a warranty claim
Or they want see me out of their shop until they fix it. I have a virgin MBP, browsing the web and I get some 3hr battery. That's 60% less of what was claimed for a device that costed 400% more than my previous Thinkpad (a workhorse I would seriously recommend). Maybe I just put the money in the wrong place, Apple is supposed to be a technical company and the way they lie and spin their flaws is just unbelievable and insulting when it comes from the vendors you're supposed to trust with your tech needs. Their explanations on Flash, latest antenna issue are just moronic.
Is there any software that would emulate usage of a computer by a human, so that battery test could be done in a controlled manner?
Flash sits in the background eating CPU far more than HTML5/CSS3. The difference between 2% CPU and 10% CPU usage may look tiny but it seems to have a huge affect on battery life in my testing - probably because (I'm guessing here) it's a trigger for the CPU to run at high clock speeds via Turbo. The other point is that flash VIDEOS on OSX are excessively CPU-intensive compared with hardware-accelerated H264 vids. So keep that in mind when you talk about flash not being a CPU hog.
And what's wrong with disliking something that is legendary for its poor coding, poor accessibility and security issues? OSS coding geeks have hated flash right since the start - it's nothing new, but rather part of a growing trend. Get with the program
Anyway, back on-topic: my MBP gets at least 5 hours, often 6 running spotify, skype, web browser, imovie, xcode with low brightness and wifi and bt enabled. I've never had to charge it when using Safari only, so I presume pure browsing exceeds 6 hours? But I only get this by disabling flash and keeping a careful eye on CPU; if it creeps up to 5-10% even whilst idle it's a sign a process needs killing... often skype getting stuck in a loop or indexing or something.
Hope this helps.
Here's a very good post written by GGJstudios so have a good read and follow some of the guidelines contained in the post, links and in your user manuals before having a go at Apple.
The OP has not mentioned what any of his MBP's settings are, his activities, whether all guidelines have been followed eg. calibration etc. Without sounding harsh, without the information it is difficult to say whether you have a duff battery or not and makes it difficult for some of us to empathise if the whole picture hasn't been painted.
The OP has not mentioned what any of his MBP's settings are, his activities, whether all guidelines have been followed eg. calibration etc. Without sounding harsh, without the information it is difficult to say whether you have a duff battery or not and makes it difficult for some of us to empathise if the whole picture hasn't been painted.