MacBook Air Impression After 3 Months

[mhnajjar]

Still remains a mystery to me to hear people with 4-5 hours of battery life with MB Air. I wonder if you are really putting a clock on it or if it is just your perception. To make sure I was being accurate myself, I clocked it this a.m. and again this p.m. Machine was on running Word and VMware Fusion with Internet explorer running on that (have to use for compatibility with my office). I was primarily doing work via explorer. Was using it heavily for the entire hour.

Fully charged battery overnight and read 100%. 1 hour of work and battery had only 60% of life remaining. As I type this, I have had 30% battery d/c in 45 minutes with the same activity.

Assuming consistent battery discharge, that extrapolates to 2.5 hours. Pretty poor if you ask me and totally discordant with the 5 hour reports.

Wouldn't VMware + Windows in addition to Leopard drain the battery more than just using Leopard by itself?

 

[sanPietro98]

In terms of battery, I'm very pleased with the MBA. I routinely get 3.5 - 4.0 hours of use. I am typically running XCode, safari, and iTunes. I keep WiFi on, but I do dim the screen.

For those who get lower battery performance, did you condition the battery? I got noticably better performance after that.

 

[steve31]

I have had my MBA since launch day and still LOVE it. I still get 4-5hrs on the battery. I have not seen any core shutdowns yet but I only use it for the web.....I use my MBP for video. I love stitting on my couch at night surffing with the Air.

 

[ayeying]

Wouldn't VMware + Windows in addition to Leopard drain the battery more than just using Leopard by itself?

VMWare will kill battery extremely fast due to the upped CPU and RAM usage.

 

[quidire]

Machine was on running Word and VMware Fusion with Internet explorer running on that (have to use for compatibility with my office). I was primarily doing work via explorer. Was using it heavily for the entire hour.

Running a VM is very CPU intensive; this doesn't represent "moderate use". The people running their Airs for 5 hours between charges are using native (non-PowerPC emulated) apps like Safari. Their cpu use is probably markedly lower, perhaps HD use as well (from not swapping/using mmap()ed memory) and all of that saves power.

Cheers
-RS

 

[brudy]

I pretty much agree with everything except the battery life. I also get around 4 hours of average usage, wifi on. It does seem to drain a lot in sleep mode. If I want to save battery life, I shut it down.

The MBA is a great travel mate. I just got back from a week in Buenos Aires and it really did well and I seriously appreciate it's size and lack of weight. I'm puzzled by the core shutdown issue, as I get it with some videos and not others. I'm still hoping for a fix for that. But two months on, I still don't have buyers remorse.