Macbook Battery Life?

[WabeWalker]

I must be blind or something, because I've searched all over the Apple website and have been unable to find out how long the battery on the new Macbook will last.

I mean, seriously, what is this, some sort of a cover-up or something?

All right, then, so I'm forced to come to a forum such as this to find out the information that Apple really should've provided for me.

And I know what's going to happen. Some smart guy is going to come along and tell me that the life of the battery all depends on what you're using your computer for. Yeah, yeah - like, I get it that if you're a NASA scientist and you're using your Macbook to track Hailey's comet so that you can shoot a rocket at it in attempt to alter its trajectory and save humanity from some horrible fate worse than death that the battery life on the Macbook is probably going to suck.

Sigh.

Well, guess what, smart guy, I'm not a NASA scientist. All I do is basic word processing, maybe play the odd DVD movie or two, sometimes I'm on the internet. Just give me a rough estimate as to how long the battery will last and cut the smart guy talk.

Thank you.

 

[Benjamindaines]

Apple lists the MacBooks battery at up to 6 hours (yes it is a little hard to find but it's there). The battery life is listed HERE

 

[WabeWalker]

Wow, six hours. That's awesome. My old Titanium powerbook would go for four hours, when new, and I though that that was outstanding.

 

[Benjamindaines]

Wow, six hours. That's awesome. My old Titanium powerbook would go for four hours, when new, and I though that that was outstanding.

But do know that this is with the display turned all the way down, no USB devices plugged it and the MacBook just sitting there. Under normal use you will probably get 4 hours.

 

[Makosuke]

With the brightenss fairly high doing not-particularly-demanding work on my 17" MBP, I'm getting something like 3.5 hours. I could easily kick that up higher by cranking down the brightness a bit.

The one unfortunate thing is that 10.4 does not seem to ever turn the Core Duo below 1.6GHz when idle, where it can apparently go all the way down to 1GHz if you want to save extra power. Actually, I was reading that maybe the OS isn't controlling the throttling at all, and just letting Intel's internal system do it, but I may have been misunderstanding that.

Anyway, right now you've got either 1.6Ghz or 2.16GHz, nothing lower and nothing in between. If 10.5 (or perhaps even an interim Tiger or firmware update) introduces more fine control of this, or adds a user option like exists with the G5 towers, then I expect battery life under low-load use will go up. How much, I don't know, but I wanna be able to throttle that thing back to 1GHz when I need to squeeze the life.

Say, does turning off one core save power, or is it just ignored by the OS when you do that? I'll have to test that with the Dev tools.

 

[Makosuke]

And, nope. Killing one of the cores in software doesn't seem to do anything for the estimated battery life in a quick test, so I assume it draws the same power either way.

And interestingly, I noticed it does occasionally drop down to 1.5GHz when on battery, but only for brief periods--that's why I hadn't noticed it before. Also interestingly, when you kill a core with the dev tools, it cranks up to the max speed regardless of load. Not sure why that would be, or maybe it's just a misinterpretation by the CoreDuoTemp app of what's going on.

 

[Abstract]

I've read of battery life tests that report anything between 3 hours during intensive use, and over 5 hours when just leaving the MB on at the "Best Battery Life" setting (or whatever it's called) and not doing anything with it while it's on.