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New MacBook Air Battery life pretty bad

S

Subiklim

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Mar 31, 2006
288
0
Manhattan, New York
I just got a new core i5 MBA, and the battery life is not impressive . . . at all. I get about 3 hours out of it when I'm just browsing the internet. Screen brightness is down to a reasonable level too.

I had the previous gen MBA and the battery life was better. Why would it be worse on this new machine, with a fresh OS install?

Also, this new machine won't auto-connect to my Airport network when I wake it from sleep. I usually have to wait about 2 minutes before I can select my (5ghz) network. Could it be hardware issues?
 
Remember on the first day, the machine will spend a lot of time and energy indexing your drive. I had an 11" 2010 (1.6GHz Core 2 Duo) and now have a 1.8GHz i7 11" model and get a pretty similar battery life out of the 2011 as I got from the 2010.
 
Weird i got mine macbook air ultimate and today i have 6 hours and the baterry still have 10%, i was working on it, view some webs and 50% brightness.
 
I only had my MBA for a 3 days but i am not so impressed the 'upto' 7 hrs battery life claim.

I appreciate it still requires calibration over the coming week as the estimation is jumping around when i start to use it.... but my actual experience is I'm getting around 5-6 hours max at my usage, which is slow-fast browsing & text documents. Screen brightness between 30-50% depending on time of day.

I was hoping id be getting consistently 7-8 hours as past apple laptops I've had have always over-performed in the battery life department, in the first year at least.

Overall its the best laptop I've had, but the battery life 'takes the cherry off the cake'.
 
I get about 6 hours with music/internet use.

Max out the brightness and encode a movie and of course you'll see the battery die
 
Subiklim said:
Also, this new machine won't auto-connect to my Airport network when I wake it from sleep. I usually have to wait about 2 minutes before I can select my (5ghz) network. Could it be hardware issues?
Click to expand...

This appears to be a fairly common bug with OS X Lion. Hopefully it gets fixed with 10.7.1, which should be coming out any day now.

One suggestion is to delete the network and set it up again. Alternatively, if you keep your Mac plugged in when it's asleep, it won't go into "deep sleep" mode and may wake up faster and remember your network preferences.
 
KPOM said:
This appears to be a fairly common bug with OS X Lion. Hopefully it gets fixed with 10.7.1, which should be coming out any day now.

One suggestion is to delete the network and set it up again. Alternatively, if you keep your Mac plugged in when it's asleep, it won't go into "deep sleep" mode and may wake up faster and remember your network preferences.
Click to expand...

It just came out and it does say something about better WiFi, will see
 
I have the 11" higher end model. Calibrated my battery a few days ago. Consistently, with wifi on, brightness at 12 bars, bluetooth off, time machine not configured, Flash installed, AdBlock Plus, no other Flash blockers, I get 3:45 mins with Firefox. With Chrome 3:25. With Safari, 3:09. I've run this test 3 times, exact same results.
 
Fyi

Just a heads up guys, the 11in MBA is said to have 5 hour battery life

while the

13in MBA is said to have 7 hour battery life

the 5-7 hour thing was depending on your model. (check the apple website)

10.7.1 has just been released today.

I got the first unibody macbook pro, and it was supposed to have 5 hours but running music, web, and couple other things i get 3 1/2 hours of use.
 
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