How Long Does Your MacBook Unibody Battery Last?

Forum Moderators: travelin cat

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How Long Does Your MacBook Unibody Battery Last?

MacBook Pro unibody battery comparisons…

bouncybunny

7:55 am on Jan 26, 2010 (gmt 0)

Recently bought one of the 15" unibody Macbook Pros with the built in battery.

Fantastic machine. But, I'm slightly disappointed with the battery life.

I haven't done any structured testing of the battery life, but I seem to be getting between 3 and 4.5 hours out of it, depending on what I'm doing (although I haven't let it run completely flat apart from when I calibrated it). This is generally just word processing and web surfing/emails. When I'm on the road, I'm less likely to be using Photoshop or watching videos, so I hate to think what would happen if I really did some production work on it.

I never expected to get anywhere near the claimed maximum 7 hours, but I did expect something a bit better than this.

Is it just me, or is this similar to your real world experiences?

weeks

1:53 pm on Jan 26, 2010 (gmt 0)

It can probably sit there on for 7 hours, maybe. If the temperature is right and the battery is new. Your experience is normal.

It's a powerful machine, which takes a lot of power. There are power paks available, I think.

travelin cat

2:30 pm on Jan 26, 2010 (gmt 0)

4 hours is the most I have ever gotten out of my Macbook, and this is with turning the monitor brightness down to about 60% and turning off bluetooth.

Also, using anything that is processor intensive, such as Flash, or Photoshop will eat up battery life.

bouncybunny

1:25 am on Jan 27, 2010 (gmt 0)

Thanks folks.

stuntdubl

8:14 am on Jan 29, 2010 (gmt 0)

I've gotten about 3-4 of video on airplanes. Working without power supply on html, doc, xls, etc. I can sometimes get 5-6. Not the advertised 7, but still better than the sub 2 hrs I got on my vaio.