Thinking about taking my MacBook pro to Apple...

[GuitarG20]

I own a 2010 MBP and do what I can to maximize battery life. I have a 7200RPM HDD, so I'm sure it's hurting battery life some, but the performance boost is worth it for me.

I used to get about 5 hours of battery life, with JUST internet browsing. Going from Chrome to Safari increased battery life 2 hours, going to click to flash and adblock, another hour. I went from 5 hours of light browsing, to 8 hours of light browsing, by simply changing my browser to Safari and getting rid of the background ads and flash that were sucking up the CPU power.

Now I'm getting 8 hours or more of browsing with just Safari and Outlook open, with Outlook being run in the background.

Just out of curiosity, I unplugged my MBP and used it for about 5 minutes without the charger so the battery timer would stabilize. It estimated 9 hours of battery life remaining. I then opened iTunes and started playing some music through the internal speakers with volume at about 25%. My battery timer went from 9 hours remaining, to 5:30 remaining. iTunes put about an 8-10% load on the CPU just playing music in the background.

Unfortunately the huge battery life numbers Apple posts are over inflated for marketing. I've got about 12 hours on a charge doing strictly word processing with bluetooth and airport off. Otherwise, I've never made it to the 10 hour claim while using Safari, Excel, or anything else. 9 hours is about the best I can get while doing anything other than word processing.

did the claim used to be 10 hours? I know it's only 7 on the early 2011 MBP's...

 

[kolax]

did the claim used to be 10 hours? I know it's only 7 on the early 2011 MBP's...

They introduced realistic battery testing to get real world numbers, not some unreachable one they used to give (and most other manufactures still use).