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New UMBP 17” battery life and a video problem-a little bit weird

123free said:
I did the calibration. the update...everything..
as I said, the weird thing is: the battery life with 9400 is almost the same as it with 9600:confused:
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are you gaming/actually using the card? maybe just leaving the computer on with one "active" isnt actually going to make much of a difference...
 
123free said:
I did the calibration. the update...everything..
as I said, the weird thing is: the battery life with 9400 is almost the same as it with 9600:confused:
Click to expand...

Even apple's estimates only rate an hour difference between the 9400 and the 9600.
 
Digital Skunk said:
It's a Rev A battery.

Expect a recall soon where you'll have to take in your ENTIRE laptop! :D
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Yeah!! Hahaha!!
It's moments like this, where I'm really glad I have a classic aluminium MBP17.
Unlike newer upgraders, they (apple) gave me 100Mhz and Matte screen for free! Saved loads too!

...Just think of all those people without their machines, when the cell under performs...
how long for a serviced replacement? a couple of weeks?
 
smartalic34 said:
are you gaming/actually using the card? maybe just leaving the computer on with one "active" isnt actually going to make much of a difference...
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No, I did not gaming...
If 6 hours is what you can get with 9400M...well...it is a little bit far from the '8 hours' claimed by apple...
 
Digital Skunk said:
It's a Rev A battery.

Expect a recall soon where you'll have to take in your ENTIRE laptop! :D
Click to expand...

Apple only issues a recall when they are willing to admit a mistake---or legally obligated to do so. In other words, Apple only issues a recall when legally obligated to do so.
 
xpovos said:
Apple only issues a recall when they are willing to admit a mistake---or legally obligated to do so. In other words, Apple only issues a recall when legally obligated to do so.
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Out of curiosity, who manufactures the cells i the battery brick, in those shiny new Unibody MBP17's? Sony?
 
123free said:
No, I did not gaming...
If 6 hours is what you can get with 9400M...well...it is a little bit far from the '8 hours' claimed by apple...
Click to expand...

You can not extrapolate battery usage. You can not say that because the battery took 3 hours to get to 50% that you'll get 6 hours from it. You have to run the battery from full to empty and measure the time. Nothing else will be anything close to accurate. Even that will not be accurate since every charge/discharge cycle will have a different usage pattern, and therefore give you a different amount of time.

Batteries do not get to their full charge for several charge/discharge cycles. That is a brand new battery will not hold as much charge as a battery with 10 cycles on it.

Your experience is right in line with what it should be. You will probably end up getting just over 7 hours on your 9400, which given Apples limited use during their tests, is just about right.
 
123free said:
OK, I played with my New UMBP 17” for 3 days.
I did not do tests for CPU, HD, …. Actually, I believe it will not give out surprising scores ---2.66G T9550 will not give out a 2.93G’s score, right?
I believe everyone want to know about the battery life. So, I did several tests for that and got weird results:
On Tuesday, after got my New UMBP 17”, I fully charged the battery to 100% and then use it for 1 hour and 5 mins for internet surf and downloaded some files ( use 9600M video card, the LCD is 75%). The battery went to 80%. So, it seems the battery life with 9600M will be nearly 5.5 hours (light use, 75% LCD brightness).
Yesterday, I used up the battery and fully charged it. It took 2 hour and 15 mins to charge from 0% to 100%. Then, I did a heavy load test. I connected it with a usb hard drive (WD passport) and a usb mouse. I played HD movie with Plex 0.7.7 (the beginning of batman, it is 1080P, VC-1 , use 9600M video card, the LCD is 75%). The battery ran out in 3 hours and 5 mins.
So, it seems that you can expect a battery life for around 5 hours for regular use (use 9600M, 50-75% LCD brightness, 1/3-1/4 time with heavy load work)
Today, I test the 9400M. I expect it will have around 7 hours battery life. However, I use it for internet surf (use 9400M video card, the LCD is 50%), 2 hours later, the battery went to 66%. So, the battery life will be 6 hours---much shorter than what apple claimed.
QUOTE]

You are assuming the percentages of battery life are accurate and usable for forecasting battery times. Like a car fuel gauage, those percentages are not accurate. You need to run it until it dies to get an accurate test.

The best test to use, IMHO, is to set it playing iTunes with a visualizer to keep the display active, and let it run. Set the volume at 1/2 and run it into external speakers, and put the display at the dimmest on the onboard graphics. Then time it. I bet the run time is fairly long, but not 8 hours.
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gilesrulz said:
You can not extrapolate battery usage. You can not say that because the battery took 3 hours to get to 50% that you'll get 6 hours from it. You have to run the battery from full to empty and measure the time. Nothing else will be anything close to accurate. Even that will not be accurate since every charge/discharge cycle will have a different usage pattern, and therefore give you a different amount of time.

Batteries do not get to their full charge for several charge/discharge cycles. That is a brand new battery will not hold as much charge as a battery with 10 cycles on it.

Your experience is right in line with what it should be. You will probably end up getting just over 7 hours on your 9400, which given Apples limited use during their tests, is just about right.
Click to expand...


I should have read your response before writing my other one. I agree 100% with your statement.

Also, I think it is important to note that a 100% charge is not necessarily a 100% charge. Leave it charging overnight, and then run a test that takes it to 0%--that is a test.
 
UltraNEO* said:
Yeah!! Hahaha!!
It's moments like this, where I'm really glad I have a classic aluminium MBP17.
Unlike newer upgraders, they (apple) gave me 100Mhz and Matte screen for free! Saved loads too!

...Just think of all those people without their machines, when the cell under performs...
how long for a serviced replacement? a couple of weeks?
Click to expand...

Ok, not that is a comment I'd expect from someone in junior high. It will be a piece of cake to user replace this battery.

Enjoy your old slow machine.
 
NightSailor said:
Ok, not that is a comment I'd expect from someone in junior high. It will be a piece of cake to user replace this battery.

Enjoy your old slow machine.
Click to expand...

I think I read the battery is easy to change. Anyway, it is supposed to
have a longer life anyway.
 
UltraNEO* said:
Yeah!! Hahaha!!
It's moments like this, where I'm really glad I have a classic aluminium MBP17.
Unlike newer upgraders, they (apple) gave me 100Mhz and Matte screen for free! Saved loads too!

...Just think of all those people without their machines, when the cell under performs...
how long for a serviced replacement? a couple of weeks?
Click to expand...

And in comes the haters...

It's funny how people with old products, that deeply want the new ones, find a way to give themselves little confidence boosters. However, not realizing how stupid they look.
 
There have been some interesting posts here concerning the battery life of the books.. it's been my experience.. and I have owned many books since the very first Mac laptop graced us.. as well as "lesser" PC books.. without fail, it has been my experience that battery life is an estimate.. but as well is based entirely on usage, system setup, etc..

For example.. a book with a 5400 RPM drive will require less juice to spin than a 7200.. a book with 8GB of RAM will have to make use of the hard drive for temp use less than one with 4GB. The higher the RAM, slower the hard drive.. the more energy you will conserve. Turning off BlueTooth, setting your energy saver to put the hard drive to sleep when not in use, dimming the display to 50%.. all of these things are ways to increase battery life.. even things as simple as turning off the sound to your speakers, adjusting the keyboard illumination settings...

Face it.. everything on these little speed demons requires juice to make it happen. I'm sure when Apple tests these batteries.. it's as mentioned earlier.. after the battery is calibrated, and as one poster very intelligently pointed out.. after the battery has been sufficiently broken in with 8-10 charge cycles.. testing I'd be willing to bet occurs with keyboard illumination off, speakers off/low, display at 50%, typical wireless surfing with BlueTooth turned off .. hard drive put to sleep when not in use.. and even my guess with the upgraded 8gb of ram..

In order to get the peak battery performance.. I'm sure the folks at Apple adjusted every setting to be at it's peak. Every little nuance effects the battery.. Flash animations, large images loading into memory (or on disk in temp web cache files).. so it really depends on the specifics..

I'd be willing to bet once the above is tested.. most books will get close to 7 and 8.

The 3 hours achieved on a fresh (non broke in battery) while watching HD movies is a step in the right direction. I have a late 2008 unibody 15 I'm using till the 17 arrives.. the best I can get is about 2.5 with movies playing.. so an improvement.
 
UltraNEO* said:
Umm.. Ok, you have fun removing a dozen screws, while your on the move. Sounds like complete fun!!
Click to expand...

Hm. Do you own a second battery? Do you ever find yourself in a situation where you thought to yourself "damn I need another battery!"? I didn't think so.

Most of the people who complain about the "non removable" battery do not carry around a second battery with them. I mean, be realistic.

~SysRq
 
bodhisattva said:
...For example: a book with a 5400 RPM drive will require less juice to spin than a 7200. A book with 8GB of RAM will have to make use of the hard drive for temporary use less than one with 4GB. The higher the RAM, and the slower the hard drive, the more energy you will conserve. Turning off Bluetooth, setting your energy saver to put the hard drive to sleep when not in use, and dimming the display to 50%, all of these are ways to increase battery life. Even things as simple as turning off the sound to your speakers and adjusting the keyboard illumination settings.

Face it, everything on these little speed demons requires juice to make it happen. I'm sure when Apple tests these batteries, it's as mentioned earlier—after the battery is calibrated, and as one poster very intelligently pointed out, after the battery has been sufficiently broken in with 8-10 charge cycles; testing I'd be willing to bet occurs with keyboard illumination off, speakers off/low, display at 50%, typical wireless surfing with BlueTooth turned off, hard drive put to sleep when not in use, and even my guess with the upgraded 8gb of ram.
Click to expand...

Aside from correcting the atrocious grammar in your post (me = grammar Nazi :rolleyes:), I agree with your assessment on how to optimize battery life and how Apple likely tests for battery life aside from the known screen brightness at 50% (which is perfectly usable in most conditions I've found). However I question the validity of your claim that using 8GB of RAM will reduce access to the hard disk over 4GB of RAM under normal conditions. In situations like these, a 7200RPM HDD is actually found to be more efficient because it is able to transfer data more quickly, so while it consumes more power to spin more quickly, it does so for a short enough time to offset its extra energy use. But this really depends on the conditions in which it's used, as less demanding environments will squander its performance/energy use ratio. But the main reason I question the energy savings of 8GB vs. 4GB is that 8GB should theoretically require a higher amperage draw (even while idle or underutilized) than 4GB because it has roughly twice as many transistors. I think the largest gains in battery life (and the way Apple achieves its high battery times) is by using SSD's. The unibody MacBook, with a 5 hour battery life rating, improved upon its predecessor by using an LED backlit display, and a graphics chip with a more efficient power/performance ratio, and they still had the energy saver settings set to "better graphics". But just within the electronics, actual energy use has not improved so much; it just uses it more effectively. I bet if you were to put the old and new MacBooks side by side, turned off the screen, speakers, Bluetooth, WiFi, etc., and gave it a task like Prime95 (under Windows in BootCamp) to put it under full load and drain the battery, they would end up with somewhat similar battery life times, perhaps even less for the unibody because of its smaller battery. But this is just me blindly making wild claims with no substantial evidence to support them. :D

So, I guess at the root of it all, if you do very little with your machine, you want the lowest specs to minimize idle energy use, but if you do a lot with your machine, the highest specs will accomplish heavy tasks sooner and use less energy by minimizing the duration for heavy processing loads.
And SSD's are getting to the point (finally) where idle power consumption is similar to an idle 5400RPM drive, whereas a SSD not only accomplishes data transfer exponentially faster, but has dramatically lower power consumption at maximum load. So, I think that may be the best upgrade to look for if you want to maximize battery life.
 
SysRq said:
Hm. Do you own a second battery? Do you ever find yourself in a situation where you thought to yourself "damn I need another battery!"? I didn't think so.

Most of the people who complain about the "non removable" battery do not carry around a second battery with them. I mean, be realistic.

~SysRq
Click to expand...

Occasionally in the past, I've find myself in a situation where power points ain't always convenient and not having a suitable adaptor for the car's electrical outlet, well.. it doesn't help. So learning from experience, it's fairly normal for to carry a spare or two, usually I don't use all of them but it's better to have power, than be without. Though both of them are for my ageing MBP15.

Apple's batteries aint' the best, in my honest opinion.. Occasionally they do under perform and don't always hold it's charge as long as one likes. If the system doesn't sleep properly, well, I'm in trouble without a paddle! Since your asking do I carry spares? Well, come to think of it, I do and I carry many cells, those include six BP-511A cells for the battery grip & strobe plus two BP-827 cells for the digicam and a couple for my Keitai.

Since upgrading to a very cheap refurb MBP17 2.6, I've also ordered two spare cells from a third-party, cause they're offering compatible cells with a much high-capacity called 'TruePower'. Unfortunately at this point, the reseller doesn't have stock (see attachment).
 

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MAGICMOXTER said:
There is, its in some random part, do you live in the US?

You can find it on Apples site too easily enough

Here

First result
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What you are referring to is dated October 2008 and pre-dates this new battery. You cannot use that as an argument that this new battery technology needs to be calibrated. Whether it does or does not need to be calibrated seems to be the question of the day and it would be great to get a definitive answer from someone who knows.
 
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