Somewhat disappointed with MBP 15" battery life - were my expectations too high?

[hl450]

Next question, what is battery life like in bootcamp?

If I remember correctly, Windows 7 off Bootcamp isn't able to use intel graphics so will be always on discrete graphics.. which in turn drains more battery...

 

[revelated]

Next question, what is battery life like in bootcamp? Just managed to install windows 7 - had to muck about with restoring my OSX install from a time machine backup before boot camp would let me partition - so I haven't had any experience yet.

Whatever you're getting when not running Parallels - slice it in half, and that's what you can expect in Bootcamp with light usage assuming Windows XP. Assuming Vista or Windows 7, I'd say 4-5 hours tops. But that's not the hardware's fault, as I said, Windows thrashes the drive constantly doing indexing, paging, searches, SuperFetch, etc...and all of that activity is going to kill the battery more than what Snow Leopard would do.

I would submit the following:

If you need your battery life to exceed 6 hours, you need to treat Windows as an "when I need it" application and use Snow Leopard for every other instance. Otherwise, it's not happening.

Case-in-point:

The only time I open Windows is when I need to use Audacity (Mac's version is terrible) or Windows Live Movie Maker. That's it. Email, Web, GoToMeeting, audio recording, video recording, Adobe, etc...are all done in Snow Leopard.

 

[diablo2112]

I do like reading all these battery threads. Kind of a self-administered reading-comprehension and intelligence test for the posters. The advertised battery life in the new MBPs is accurate, achievable, and defensible. If someone thinks or experiences otherwise, its a problem with how they setup the machine, what software and settings they run, and the general inability to read, comprehend, and make necessary adjustments. A version of the old poker adage, if you can't look around the table and spot the fish, guess what??

I routinely exceed Apple's battery specs on my i7, 15", AG, Intel SSD.

 

[elleana]

I do like reading all these battery threads. Kind of a self-administered reading-comprehension and intelligence test for the posters.

So, do I pass?

 

[Tex-Twil]

Also, is there some sort of battery monitoring utility that can accurately detect what exactly the battery is doing? I find the default one to be somewhat sparse in terms of details.

There is "mini battery logger" which allows you to get some info + stats on the current battery state. iStat menu allows you also to see the current battery amperage.

 

[TonySwank]

Not to hijack the thread but I've experienced similar problems with my i7 15". Max battery life I was getting brand new was maybe 5 hours, but that is pretty rare, never saw anything near 9 before I installed a single application. Don't run any virtual machines or anything too heavy, however do use a bluetooth mouse. I will often have Firefox open with a couple of tabs, iTunes playing, and maybe iCal or Tweetdeck going. With that set up 3-4 hours is pretty standard.

I know the time remaining is not entirely accurate, but I just restarted my machine so nothing is running and with 30% battery life it's showing 54 minutes remaining. Battery condition in system profiler is normal. Just started using coconut battery to see if monitoring it a little more helps.

Is there something I'm missing in the way I set up the laptop? Any recommendations on what I can tweak to get up to that 7-8 hour mark? Seems like I shouldn't be that dramatically off with a relatively new machine.

Did some searches but have not been able to find anything that worked yet. Thanks for the help.

 

[elleana]

As an update, I put in about 6 hours work on my MBP today, and at the end of the day I still had about 20something% left. By my guesstimation that means the battery should be good for about 8 hours. Bluetooth + wifi off, no VM running, screen at half brightness.

Working as intended!

 

[dvoran]

Battery killing apps

Parallels does run up the CPU cycles. Apple certainly doesn't say anything on their page about running virtual machines and achieving 8-9 hours. 5 hours is pretty good for running Windows 7 in a VM. It's too much to expect if you want better battery life while running 2 OS's at the same time.

Yeah, I'll vouch for that. Would kill for 5 hours of battery life running Parallels. Am getting just a little under 2 hours of life on a New MPB 15" Core i7 with 8 Gigs when I launch Parallels and use two displays (Mac on the MPB and Windows on the HP LP2065 (or the other way around as in the picture below). Drained even faster when using the Thunderbolt display with Mac on the 27" Thunderbolt and Win on the MBP.

Fortunately this is usually at the desktop so there's always power. Am getting a goot 7-8 hours if I'm just traveling and using the native screen without launching Parallels.

What's kinda interesting is that the device will barely charge when plugged in using the draining configuration. Kill Parallels and other virtualizations and it'll charge in a couple of hours with both screens running.

Virtualization is great but it is surprising how costly it is. Here's a typical work flow that requires both environments even though it would probably be cheaper to have a Windows and MBAir .... would it be as much fun? Nah!