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High end 13" MBA battery life?
- Thread starter mark28
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Battery life is dependent on usage. Apple already gives you estimates as a baseline on their webpage.
I have the 13" Ultimate and the battery seems "okay". I just did a full charge. I have iTunes (playing in background), Safari (10tabs), Mail, iCal, PS and Twitter. It says about 4:40 left. I would of thought better. I'm sure it will bounce up and down a little, but not 7 hours like they claim. Maybe 5 hours, but surely not 7. I'm kind of regretting not going with i5. I doubt I will see any difference in speed between the two as it's been reported there is about 7% increase in speed using the i7. It might not be worth it for hotter temps and noisy fan. Yes, my fan is running.
It wasn't a "smart ass, useless, or unhelpful post". The fact is that battery life is very much dependent on each individual's operating environment, including screen brightness, WiFi, Bluetooth, apps/widgets/processes running, etc. Comparing battery life on two different computers, even the same model, is not helpful, as the likelihood that they're running exactly the same configuration and workload is remote. So you get one user saying they get 4 hours on a charge and another getting 2, thinking there's something wrong with their battery, when the one getting 2 may have Spotlight indexing or the Parallels Dock problem that affects their battery life. Asking what others are getting in terms of battery life, without exact details of everything running and all settings, is meaningless.
Not 2, but 5, 10, etc, esp. when the give extra info about usage? You can get a feel. It's helpful.
I can go to Fuelly and quickly find out whether or not the EPA estimates for a particular vehicle are optimistic/pessimistic vs. real world usage averaged out over a variety of conditions. IME those numbers are more important to me than a synthetic fixed test.
It's just data.
Subjectively, it's about the same for me as my 13" Core 2 Duo Air was. Yesterday I spent 2-1/2 hours working in a coffee shop, running a VMware Fusion VM, writing and browsing the web. I still had 65% left afterwards which is about what I would have seen with my previous Air.
I'll know for sure the next trip I make from Denver to Frankfurt. I always landed there with 15% left without a VM running, but listening to music and writing documents, slides, etc. I'm sure everyone will now be waiting for my next report ;-)
Best,
Dave
Of course it's more meaningful when there are large numbers of computers being compared and when data about the operating configuration of each is included, but that's rarely the case in these threads.
Apple Expert just gave us that data. All we need are more to chime in. Not people pointing out the obvious "results may vary". That's not helpful.
I was well aware before I bought my 11" in March that at lowest load conditions people were getting over 9 hours down to about 3-3:30 playing a DVD with brightness up, and on average about 5-6 hrs, the numbers were definitely pessimistic on Apple's part.
It's just data. It's helpful.
You have to ask yourself if the i7 is really worth it. I have the i7 and my wife has the i5. So far I have noticed the i7 seems to run a tad hotter and more fan noise. Speed wise, I haven't been able to tell the difference one bit!! I'm all about maxed out apple products, but I have yet to see any difference in terms of performance. Just keep this in mind folks. Would hate for you to spend your hard earned money on something you may think your getting better of. No doubt the i7 is better than i5 on paper, but I have yet to see any difference between the two. I'm thinking of exchanging and going i5. Also both have Samsung SSD so hardware is identical. Hope this helps out you guys.