brand new 13" macbook air -- horrible battery life =(

[pfjellman]

so my brand new 13" macbook air arrived last tuesday. over the last few days i've noticed that i only get 2-3 hours of battery life even with the screen brightness nearly all the way down. right now, i have 79% battery life remaining and it only says 2 hours 24 min left. I've only used it for about 30 minutes this morning and it was fully charged.

i'm about ready to return it, this is extremely disappointing. anyone else having this issue???

 

[pfjellman]

in the 4 minutes since this post it now says 2 hours 13 minutes. it's ticking down wayyyy too fast. something is wrong here.

 

[WardC]

This sounds about like the battery capacity of the OLD models, NOT the new ones.

 

[tomtendo]

so my brand new 13" macbook air arrived last tuesday. over the last few days i've noticed that i only get 2-3 hours of brightness even with the screen brightness nearly all the way down. right now, i have 79% batter life remaining and it only says 2 hours 24 min left. I've only used it for about 30 minutes this morning and it was fully charged.

i'm about ready to return it, this is extremely disappointing. anyone else having this issue???

Try calibrating it. See the life percentage after that.. If still bad take it to an apple store or if no store call them.

 

[pfjellman]

i have calibrated it. guess i'll try again today. argh

 

[Hellhammer]

What are you doing with it? 2-3 hours is normal if you're doing something intensive but not if you're just browsing non-Flash sites and using Word.

 

[pfjellman]

all i have open is finder and safari. i have click-to-flash installed so no flash loads, and i'm not visiting any flash video sites. just browsing around, google searches, reading blog sites, etc.

and the battery life has been like this constantly, ever since it delivered last tuesday. i haven't done ANYTHING intensive on it, because I have a Mac Pro. that's why i ordered this -- to be the ultra portable ultra light ultra long life laptop to handle text, email, web browsing, etc.

 

[Bokes]

Something wrong bud.
I get 4 1/2 hours on a revC MacAir.

Another poster claimed he got 11 hours + life on his new 13inch.

 

[spinnerlys]

Have a look at Activity Monitor ( Applications / Utilities / *) and select All Processes*and sort by CPU to see what the culprit may be.

image below uses sorting by CPU as an example

 

[pfjellman]

Have a look at Activity Monitor ( Applications / Utilities / *) and select All Processes*and sort by CPU to see what the culprit may be.

image below uses sorting by CPU as an example

thanks for the tip man, but I'm a software developer and I know about activity monitor -- it was one of the first things i checked. as i said, i only have finder and safari open. i've also installed imenustat 2 (the free version)

 

[spinnerlys]

thanks for the tip man, but I'm a software developer and I know about activity monitor -- it was one of the first things i checked. as i said, i only have finder and safari open. i've also installed imenustat 2 (the free version)

I didn't know that, and two open applications don't meant that there can't be a runaway process like MDS or QuickLook Helper, which are visible via selecting "All Processes".

Have you checked the battery via System Profiler or CoconutBattery? What about contacting Apple?

 

[pfjellman]

I didn't know that, and two open applications don't meant that there can't be a runaway process like MDS or QuickLook Helper, which are visible via selecting "All Processes".

Have you checked the battery via System Profiler or CoconutBattery? What about contacting Apple?

yes, that's true. but the only thing taking more than 1% of CPU is kernal_task which is using about 3%. everything else is less than 1%.

i will contact apple this week if it continues.

 

[neteng101]

I went at least 5+ hours with time remaining on battery yesterday (and lots of brightness, maybe 60-70%) with a lot more apps running. Either a bad battery or some system component (hardware) sucking up the juice in yours?

 

[ReallyBigFeet]

They can hook up one of their diagnostic tools at the Genius Bar and isolate whether or not its a bad battery in like 30 seconds. I wouldn't waste a bunch of time trying to troubleshoot it yourself if you just bought it. Set up an appointment...you could walk out the door with a new one unless it was a CTO.

I played Left For Dead 2 on my 13" MBA yesterday for 3 hours on a full battery charge. My fans were whirring the whole time and even then, after that whole time, I still had over an hour left on the battery when I was done. With normal daily use, I'm averaging right around 7 hours.

 

[Hankster]

Seems like a defective battery. Time to head to Apple or ship it back.

 

[HiRez]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_0 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/532.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.5 Mobile/8A293 Safari/6531.22.7)

I would run Activity Monitor to see if some process is sucking up all your CPU cycles, it could be something like mds (file system indexing), Flash player, Finder (which can actually be a lot of things). One thing to check is your Finder view preferences, there is a bug in Snow Leopard where if you have Calculate File Sizes checked and have any Finder window in list view, it will constantly peg your CPU and disk access and drastically reduce battery life, even after the visible sizes are all calculated.

 

[chrono1081]

Something is totally wrong. I get 6 - 8 hours of decent use out of mine.

 

[kp98077]

How to Tell Time Since Last Charge?

Hello

Wondering if there's a way to tell how much time i was able to get out of one charge on my 11.6"? I'd be currious. I have been on it pretty much since7 am this morning till now (1pm) with transferring itunes library, internet. etc and it still says i have 1:32 left!!

 

[pfjellman]

They can hook up one of their diagnostic tools at the Genius Bar and isolate whether or not its a bad battery in like 30 seconds. I wouldn't waste a bunch of time trying to troubleshoot it yourself if you just bought it. Set up an appointment...you could walk out the door with a new one unless it was a CTO.

I played Left For Dead 2 on my 13" MBA yesterday for 3 hours on a full battery charge. My fans were whirring the whole time and even then, after that whole time, I still had over an hour left on the battery when I was done. With normal daily use, I'm averaging right around 7 hours.

the nearest Apple store to me is about 5-6 hours away so that is not an option, unfortunately.

i'm going to try to recalibrate the battery again and test it for a couple more days. if it's still doing this i will probably send it back and get a 13" macbook pro for $200 cheaper.

i've verified there are no process running sucking the CPU. i've also noticed once that the screen gets little white lines flickering on the lower right side, but that problem only happened the second day i had it (wednesday) and hasn't happened again since. it went away when i closed the lid and re-opened it.

 

[wirelessmacuser]

the nearest Apple store to me is about 5-6 hours away so that is not an option, unfortunately.

i'm going to try to recalibrate the battery again and test it for a couple more days. if it's still doing this i will probably send it back and get a 13" macbook pro for $200 cheaper.

i've verified there are no process running sucking the CPU. i've also noticed once that the screen gets little white lines flickering on the lower right side, but that problem only happened the second day i had it (wednesday) and hasn't happened again since. it went away when i closed the lid and re-opened it.

I've followed this thread since your original post, as I am experiencing the same behavior with mine, and I too am quite experienced in these things. Ironically, my plan prior to reading this thread was / is the same as yours. I'm going to recalibrate the battery again, then see where it stands.

Secondly, and of even greater concern, is that I've got the same issue with flickering, only mine is more frequent. The genius at the local Apple store verified it, but of course cannot exchange the machine as they are out of stock. With no promise of an estimated date, I've decided to monitor it myself for a few more days.

Cheers...

 

[pfjellman]

I've followed this thread since your original post, as I am experiencing the same behavior with mine, and I too am quite experienced in these things. Ironically, my plan prior to reading this thread was / is the same as yours. I'm going to recalibrate the battery again, then see where it stands.

Secondly, and of even greater concern, is that I've got the same issue with flickering, only mine is more frequent. The genius at the local Apple store verified it, but of course cannot exchange the machine as they are out of stock. With no promise of an estimated date, I've decided to monitor it myself for a few more days.

Cheers...

well at least i'm not alone! let's keep in touch in this thread and share our findings. =)

 

[Nautilus007]

adff

mine said 2 hours i fully drained it and then charged it overnight now im getting 4-6 hours ezmode.

 

[pfjellman]

Yeah I've fully drained it now, only took about 2 hours for it to die from a full charge. Gonna let it sit overnight and fully charge it in the morning and see how it is.

 

[bcaslis]

What does yours say in System Profiler for maximum charge capacity? Mine say 6644 mAh.

 

[pfjellman]

What does yours say in System Profiler for maximum charge capacity? Mine say 6644 mAh.

I'll let you know when I boot it up tomorrow.