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    Battery life of a MBP 15" ?

    Discussion in 'Apple and Mac OS X' started by Matmi, Jun 5, 2010.

  1. Matmi

    Matmi Notebook Enthusiast

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    Hello to all,

    I've seen very conflicting numbers for the battery life of the MBP 15". What's your experience ?

    Let's take a "middle of the fairway" situation : wifi off, screen brightness slightly reduced, Word + Excel running. How long in that scenario (roughly speaking, of course) ?

    Scenario 2 : wifi still off, watching a DVD (nothing else running, of course)

    Scenario 3 : wifi on, internet + emails.

    I also wanted to ask how long with a photo editing/processing software like Photoshop but I guess it really varies how hard you push Photoshop.

    Thanks !
     
    Matmi, Jun 5, 2010
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  2. JohnSavage

    JohnSavage Notebook Guru

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    My experience with my 15", 7200 RPM, i7 hi-res (on which I've never watched a DVD, and on which I *never* have wifi off), is that I will get between 4 and 6 hours in the situations you describe, with screen brightness "slightly" reduced.

    With brightness at half or below, and only doing browsing / office / email type work, I can say I reliably get around 6 hours.

    Doing processor or GPU intensive stuff, such as heavy use Matlab, or gaming, the figure drops to around 3 hours.

    With the processor pegged doing chess analysis continuously, it is probably closer to 2 hours.

    I can't tell you anything about what kind of improvement you can expect with the wifi off. Who would ever do that? :) If you can plug into ethernet, you can plug into the outlet. And if you can't.. well what can you do on a computer without the internet? I mean, I'm doing homework right now, but I can't work for more than 15-20 minutes without stopping to check some websites. Whatever happened to our attention spans, anyway?
     
    JohnSavage, Jun 5, 2010
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