MacBook Pro Unibody Battery Life

Id call Apples battery life average in most situations. OS X does a very good job of power management but I have and have worked on laptops where 5 hours is the norm and some of the 10.4" units with digitizer screens are giving me upwards of 12 hours but those units are also NOT big on graphics and do not posess optical drives ... add an SSD and one series is easy to get 17 hrs on 40% cpu load

 

I assume the new Macbook Pro 7 Hour+ batteries will work on the old macbooks?

 

dont think so, it looks like the new batteries are specifically designed for the new units

 

guess your right

 

It takes 6 hours on mine to be drained out... Brightness is 50%, 2.53, 250GB 5400rpm

 

sorry to bump this thread, but i actually am a computer engineering major.

my battery life (same machine) is still giving me 7 hours plus, and no, my classes are not back to back. there is 20 mins between them. so if i sit around for a solid 7 hours of time, using my laptop on and off, with a few breaks in between, is that not 7 hours of battery life? i'm pretty sure 7 hours with normal usage patterns (short bursts/lulls in activity) is a better indicator of battery life than 7 hours of handbrake encoding, or 7 hours of file downloading.

i maintain that TO THIS DAY my late 2008 uMBP with user-replaceable battery gets me up to the 7 hour mark with one notch of brightness, no keyboard backlight, no wifi, no bluetooth, no background apps, and nothing but textedit on the screen. is that really so hard to believe?

i don't do that often, but i definitely have in the past.

also - through regular calibration - my battery is actually at HIGHER capacity then it was originally, as verified by coconut battery. see attachment.

maybe i'm just lucky. or maybe i know how to properly maximize battery life while still keeping it conditioned.

 

In my experiences I think Acer is one of the few companies whose battery life numbers are about right or sometimes even an underestimate of its true battery life in real time usage. For example for their new Timeline X series they claim 8 hours however A mobile mark 2007 tests at 30% brightness revealed battery life anywhere from 8.5-9 hours with WiFi on.

And this thread was sort of a shocker for me. I thought MB's were supposed to have astounding battery life? At least that's what I've heard from other Mac owners that I know.

 

with wifi and BT both off and screen dimmed ... and no load on CPU I can see you hitting 7 hours. but for most of us wifi is a necessity and users like me have to run apps which will run the cpu a little harder than notepad.

try running a base load of Office or iWork, wifi enabled and connected and a couple of browser windows. your bat life will fall off quite well.

Acer does under rate on some of their machines and ASUS is close on some series's. ( since I last posted here I have replaced both my uMBP 13"'s for the UL series ASUS for the 10-12 hour battery life. Dont believe what you hear all laptop battery life times are dependant on what you do and need. manufacturers also rate battery life different, Apple and many others give run time by a very dim screen, and normally with all wireless capabilities off and in most cases the CPU and GPU on idle, a rare few companies actually rate by a max bright screen and everything turned on at 40% CPU load.

 

He's only getting 7 instead of slightly over 5 because of having the solid state hard drive which is non standard... put a 5400rpm hard drive back in there and your going to lose some.

Apple runs their tests with WIFI on and screen at 50% brightness

On my late 2008 unibody 15", I used to (the battery is getting old now) be able to pull out slightly over 5 hours, with WIFI going, and Pages, and Safari both being used. I only can pull about 4 hours now when I try that, but since the battery is a year and a half old and I use it a lot, I'm not that surprised.

 

Less than 3 hours, see sig.

 

i get 3hours something while browsing the net. while developing, i get around 4 hours something.

 

I have a 13 inch uni, about a year old, gets 3-4 hours at moderate brightness and wifi on. This with a 5400 rpm HD. Pretty decent.

 

Xhibit, are you using OSX??

How is it that so many online reviews (including Notebook Review) cite 6+ hours?

 

we run the CPU a little harder than a base idle and prob have the screen a little brighter too ... its all on how you use the machine and what you do.

in OSX I rarely get over 3.5 hours on any of my MBP's with HDD's and do get a little better with an Intel SSD

 

May be because he has the late 2008 model which has the removable battery. It has a lower capacity than the new ones.

 

My MBP MB991 with a SSD can easily go over 7 hours per charge (almost minimum brightness, wifi, some software like safari, word and entourage on.

 

also, i use an SSD.