Sudden fall in battery capacity

[t101]

I have only had my MBA 13" for a few weeks and after just 8 charge cycles it is showing a 3% drop in battery capacity now at 6530/6700mAh. The battery life also seems terrible and only lasts around 3-4hours just on web browsing. This MBA was a replacement for a previously defective model although that model seemed to show much better battery life at around 6-7hours. I am wondering whether this is a defect and warrants a replacement as I just left the MBA on sleep for an hour with no background apps running and battery life dropped by 30% from 62 to 32.

 

[simsaladimbamba]

Have you calibrated your battery yet?

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This should answer most, if not all, of your battery questions:
Apple Notebook Battery FAQ by GGJstudios
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The culprit could be Flash.

Adobe Flash Player is CPU intensive, thus more power is needed to feed the CPU, which results in higher temperatures and often higher fan speed(s) on mobile computers. As more power is used due to Flash, the battery life of mobile computers is shortened by a good bit.
To check, if Adobe Flash Player is responsible for less battery time, go to Applications / Utilities / Activity Monitor and select to show ALL PROCESSES and sort by CPU.

There are a variety of Flash blockers for all the four major browsers available.
A Flash blocker does what it says, it blocks Flash content, but via a click on the marked Flash object, the Flash object can be activated and used.

• Safari: ClickToFlash, for which there is an extension and a plug-in; CTF allows you to download YouTube and other kinds of MPEG-4 encoded video too.
• Opera: has a built-in Flash blocker
• Firefox: Flashblock is an add-on to block Flash
• Chrome: FlashBlock is an extension to block Flash

Also make sure to have the latest Adobe Flash Player version running, you can get it here.​

 

[warfed]

The 30% drop while it was asleep would concern me. But the 3% drop in capacity wouldn't. My capacity dropped 5% and I'm only on my 4th cycle. In the beginning the capacity goes up and down, takes a few weeks to stabilize.