how do you know when the mac air is fully charged and how long should that take?

[ayzeyah]

hello there,

i just bought my mac air last week and have only charged it like 3 times... i've charged it all the way up to the 100% mark. i understand that a full charge is supposedly supposed to last for up to 10 hours, however, i'm pretty sure a full charge is lasting me a lot less than that.

any clues? am i not fully charging it? this mac air is new from an unopened box, so there shouldn't be anything wrong with it.

thanks guys

 

[carjakester]

the new macbook air 13 inch will have battery life of at least 12 hours. how long is your battery lasting? what programs do you have running? brightness settings? these all can drain your battery fairly quick.

 

[old-wiz]

the light on the charging cable turns green when it's fully charged.

usage time depends a lot on what you are doing, how bright the display is, etc.

 

[DisplacedMic]

give it some time to settle in. respectfully, if you're not even sure how long it's lasting we can't really help you much

For example, if you're only getting 8-9 hours I wouldn't worry. especially if you're using it to watch videos etc.

if you're getting substantially less than 8-10 hours then i would start to worry.

early on your laptop is doing a lot of things, spotlight indexing being a big one.
you're installing new programs, loading up old emails etc.

me for example i really pound a new computer into the ground early on. all the programs i use, 15ish years of emails, all my music videos, documents etc. it really does a number on the battery life early on.

and then since you're doing all that, your incremental backups are going to be larger so if you are using time machine (and especially time capsule) or another backup option you are going to burn through battery life there as well.

my advice would be to give it a few days/weeks of regular use and come back to us if you are still having a problem. barring that give us a real-life representative number and we can help you trouble shoot if there is something wrong

 

[scaredpoet]

i just bought my mac air last week and have only charged it like 3 times... i've charged it all the way up to the 100% mark. i understand that a full charge is supposedly supposed to last for up to 10 hours, however, i'm pretty sure a full charge is lasting me a lot less than that.

How long your battery lasts depends a great deal now hat you're doing with it, and what's connected to it. When I'm just working on Word documents, web browsing, some ssh stuff to other servers, and e-mail checking, I can very easily get 12 hours or more out of my MacBook Air's battery.

But even so much as having an SD card plugged in uses more power, enough to bring the battery life down to 9 hours or even less, as the MacBook Air now has to power that storage device (which surprisingly, takes quite a bit). The same is true if you have external portable USB drives or other hardware connected, that expects to get power from the laptop.

Then there's CPU intensive stuff. Heavy batch photo processing, video editing, games, and lots of Flash video viewing will all suck a battery dry quicker. If you're running Mavericks, you can tell which apps are using a lot of power, by clicking on the battery menu on your menu bar. You should get a list (or, you'll be told if no apps are using significant energy).