Core i7 15" MBP battery life far below advertised

I'm curious what kind of battery life other 15" i7 MBP users are seeing.
Mine is just two weeks old, I calibrated the battery on the first day. Reproducing Apple's supposed "Wireless productivity" scenario, (50% brightness, optimal Energy Saver settings, surfing basic web sites with Chrome and lightweight apps), I get around 5 hours of life. The system used the onboard Intel graphics chip almost exclusively during that time.
Coconut Battery reports that max capacity for my battery is 6900 mAh, with current capacity at 98% of maximum after 10 load cycles.
5 hours is less than 60% of the "8-9 hours" so loudly advertised. So, I guess Apple earns a D- on battery life compared to what they are marketing. I'm pretty disappointed and this seems like a bait-and-switch deal.
Other Core i7 15" owners: what is your "original battery capacity" (find out with Coconut Battery), and, how much life are you getting?

Raduga,
a couple of thoughts.
Battery life really does vary very greatly depending on usage and the type of web browsing you are doing in particular can have a major impact. If, for example, you are visiting any websites which make use of "Flash" (even if they are just sites using Flash for integrated advertisements or You Tube videos etc) then the battery life will be reduced substantially. Keeping more than one or two tabs or windows open can make a big difference, too.
You can very substantially improve the situation with respect to Flash by using ClickToFlash and, if you use YouTube, by signing up for their h.264 beta program - see http://www.youtube.com/html5 and http://www.macworld.com/article/145828/2010/01/youtube_html5.html
You don't mention whether you have turned off Bluetooth. Leaving Bluetooth running when its not needed can impose a 15% to 20% penalty on battery run times in my experience.
Another thing that can have a major effect is a "back ground process" hogging cpu cycles. You can check for this using Activity Monitor (see http://support.apple.com/kb/TS1473 for basic instructions) . Some common causes here involve hung up print jobs, virus checkers, out of date scanner "button scanners", etc. Corrupted "spotlight" databases can also cause Apples own "mdimport" processes to become very processor intensive, chewing up CPU cycles with a major effect on battery life. Similarly, corrupt or duplicated fonts can result in Apple's "fontworker" process running overtime.
Cheers
Rod

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2010 MBP battery life (and hot power pack)

Hi All.
2010 MBP here and I am finally getting around to troubleshooting very short - like 2 hour - battery life. The battery pack gets /very/ hot as well. I do let it run down to nothing once in awhile.
Supposedly (acconrding to experts on the list) the fact that the MBP gets /very/ hot to the touch on the bottom is not an issue based on the specs I posted (I forget the name of the software I used to generate these specs).
Can anyone help me with whether I should bring this in or if there is anything I can do to troubleshoot this further? I basically can't take if from my office to the living room without bringing the charger which is sort of annoying.
Can anyone offer this new mac user any help while I reasearch this further...?
- Jon

best bet is apple store. they will help you fix the problems you are having with your mac. It may also help if you don't run intens applications which use a lot of CPU and RAM. also running a lot of apps at once drains battery and strains the computer. Macs tend to get hot because of the aluminum, but it keeps the internal components cool. Battery life, I cannot help you there. Let me know if that was helpful

Is MBP battery life affected by rEFIt?

Folks:
Things have generally not needed any attention on my MBP, recently I started the process of partitioning the HD to try to get a Linux OS going along with the OSX side. There is the recommend to download a boot app "rEFIt" ??? as part of that process, when I did that the instruction was to reboot a couple times, and not knowing the ins and outs of it after I rebooted and it loaded the rEFIt boot window, I closed the clamshell for a few days. When I tried to start up a few days later the battery had almost completely discharged, so I had to plug it in to get it to work at all. I then discharged the battery completely and let it sit over night before recalibrating it. A second interval of a few days of not using the MBP again showed the hazy screen with a few dots like the volume control showed as I tried to start from sleep, this time logged into the OSX login window . . . battery down to 18% . . . .
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e.e.p.

Hi w,
willingfoe wrote:
i'm looking at a new MBP 17" and assume that the extra power of the i7 processor places some additional demand on the battery life of the machine ...
Compared to what?
does anyone know for sure or have any kind of data?
Compared to your current MBP, it actually has longer batt life (more advanced batt technology).

Red light flashing twice indicates that battery life was below 20%

By the way, I was using my Playbook down to 10% battery life. I plugged it into the wall to charge it after shutting it down and it wouldn't come back up. Your Playbook will die!! Then you can reload the OS and start all over. So, RIM doesn't feel the need to let you know that sometime between 20% and 10% you will be screwed. This is not only a product defect, it's also a ridiculous oversight in the user manual, or lack thereof, that is sent to you when you buy it. At the very least, the screen pop-up ought to say, I'm gonna erase your book if you don't plug me in!!!!
So aggravated, reloading everything now. Be sure to plug in to your pc/mac and back-up now! And watch those batteries and your behind.
AGGRAVATION!!!!!!!
P.S why does it take so long for this thing to boot up? i think my dinosaur PC is faster.

The advice in the title of this thread is wrong, of course, and can safely be ignored. I don't know what occurred in the specific situation described here, but I've repeatedly drained my PlayBook to the point where it shut itself off, at 0%, with no such negative outcome.
That said, there do seem to be some issues with getting it back on sometimes when it's very low. I've never had much issue myself, but I'm a patient sort. If it doesn't turn on immediately, I assume some mysterious software problem is involved, wait a few minutes, and try again. I also find that sometimes a brief press on the power button isn't recognized or responded to, and feel like I need to hold it down for a second before the thing notices and responds. Maybe that's required in some cases, maybe not. Lastly, I've read (but never seen this myself) that it may be necessary to recharge it for an hour or so after a complete discharge, before it will come on. Not sure where people got that one, but possibly it is required.
Sorry for your aggravation, but if you are willing to actually try to work through the issue here, whatever it is, you could probably get some good advice from others here. This is a community forum, "staffed" pretty much solely by other RIM customers who are volunteering here to help people out, so please keep that in mind when venting.
As for the boot up, in case you seriously wanted an answer: it's probably because the flash storage with the operating system image on it is being scanned and checked against a cryptographic signature, to ensure that it hasn't been tampered with. If your dinosaur PC, which may well be faster, would do that, we'd have a lot fewer viruses and other security breaches in this world.
Most people only rarely cycle power on their tablet, and if you merely put it in standby (I realize that wasn't possible in this case... just talking in general terms here) you'll find it comes on effectively instantly, which is way better than your PC, or even a modern one, can do.
Peter Hansen -- (BB10 and dev-related blog posts at http://peterhansen.ca.)
Author of White Noise and Battery Guru for BB10 and for PlayBook | Get more from your battery!

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I have the display turned down. and the keyboard backlight off. I do have wifi on and bluetooth on but why is it not reading higher?

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http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?path=Mac/10.6/en/9036.html
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How long of battery life can you actually get on your U410/U300?

Hi --
I got my U410 Ultrabook today and thus far have been extremely happy. The internet isn't spotty, the touchpad and keyboard work great, and it looks beautiful. The only concern I have is the battery life. Lenovo advertises 8 hours but I expected five or six realistcally.
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milwaukeephil wrote:
I was the one who reported 5.5 hours of battery.
On the first day, when the battery was dying pretty quickly, I went into Resource Monitor (quickest way to get there is to start Task Manager, go to the Performance tab, and click Resource Monitor at the bottom of that window.)
You can sort that list by the CPU column.
Anyway, I saw Quick Update eating up a large amount of CPU time.... like 25% or more. Quick Update is bloatware, designed to update email and social media in the background. Do people still even use local email clients??? ;-)
After uninstalling Lenovo Quick Update my CPU usage dropped dramatically and battery life went up 2x.
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I've been experiencing a problem with my MacBook Core 2 Duo's battery life, and I have only owned if for 2 days. When I have it plugged it to the power adapter, it will charge only up to 97% instead of 100% (even if I turn it off and leave it for a few hours). Then when I turn it on and disconnect it from the power adapter, the 97% drops to 95% within a minute or two.
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MacBook Core 2 Duo (2.0GHz, 1GB RAM) Mac OS X (10.4.8) Basically brand new.

that happen to me. i don´t know if you keep always plug in AC power to you MB?, but I do and my Batt never reach 100%. Please check http://www.batteryuniversity.com/parttwo-34.htm and you will find information about it. In brief, you MUST keep your batt charge between 20 and 80% to extend you battery life even amazing 500 cycles!!!, avoiding extreme charge and discharges (never 0%, never 100%) but also soft events.

W520 - Battery Life Under 2 Hours!

Hello there!
I've been experiencing the problem where my Nvidia Graphics card does not automatically switch to the Intel Graphics card --- or if it does --- it does not allow me to have the 5 hours + of battery life that I use to have when I was using Windows 7 (right now I am using Windows 8).
I also don't have the Lenovo Power Manager program installed because I can't seem to find it anywhere on the installation pages for my particular laptop with Windows 8. I wonder if this is the problem since its using Windows Power Manager -- even though I have installed the Power Driver multiple times.
Even when I get it so I make sure that no applications are using the Nvidia Graphics card (confirmed by the Nvidia GPU Activity icon), I still get the under 2 hours battery life. I am using the 9v battery -- the larger one.
Any help would be greatly appriciated so I can get the full battery life out of this laptop, as when I had Windows 7 installed. Thank you :-)

Hi brooklotzkar
1. Go to Control Panel (Small icons)> Lenovo - Update and Drivers > Install all critical and recommended updates. Optional - Up to you to decide as you may not be using all the functions. If this options is not available, Download here and install.
2. Go to Control Panel > Power Options > Check Power saver. Power Plan make a big difference on both battery life and performance.
From what I tested on my W520 - Core i7 2720QM
Maximum Battery Life or Power saver: CPU clock speed at 800MHz constantly, but performance decrease. You wouldn't want to multitask too much when on battery.
Maximum Performance or High Performance: CPU clock speed will go up from 3 - 3.2GHz (Depending on how many core / thread the program will utilize)
3. Battery will vary depend on how many / what kind of apps are opened. I have tried using 5+h on 6-cell battery without any problem. (Battery Stretch, only running Microsoft Word and 1 tab of Internet Explorer) It is recommended to run Internet Explorer on battery as it requires less resource, hence battery life will not run out as fast.
http://lifehacker.com/5566020/how-to-maximize-the-battery-life-of-your-windows-laptop
Hope this helps.
Peter
W520 (4284-A99)
Give kudos to reward people for their assistance | Mark the thread solved if the solution works | Direct e-mail regarding technical problems will be ignored
=====================================
Dolby ; IdeaPad Slate Tablet ; Equalizer APO

Leopard battery life impact on 15-inch 2.4GHz Santa Rosa?

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In general I'm not too worried about installing Leopard, but if anyone has any good or bad experiences to share with respect to MBP battery life, I'd appreciate it.

You should have no trouble. The vast majority of the "+Leopard killed my battery+" posts (and the "+10.4.11 update...+ and +10.4.10 update killed my battery+" posts that preceded those) resulted from one of three things:
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Quad Core MBP saving battery life by only using two cores

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This whole thread reminds me of some of the nutty ideas American carmakers came up with during one of the first gasoline shocks back in the 70's. Don't remember whether it was Chrysler or GM, hellbent on keeping their huge gas guzzler engines, came up with the idea of disabling one or more cylinders when "not needed". A totally Rube Goldberg-ian contraption ensued, more prone to failure than any potential gas it may have saved.
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2010 MBP Core i7 Running very hot, short battery life..

So my 2010 MBP has been running hot for the last couple of months.. all the time.. every time I pick it up its hot.. Even under very light load (IE: only safari, and mail open..)
At about the same time, my battery life is very short.. using only the integrated gfx card (I have an app that shows me what is in use) I only get 2-2.5 hours of run time.. My estimated time never climbs up any more. Using cocoanut battery I am showing 96% capacity over all..
The sad part is I just let my applecare lapse, and this has been doing it since before it lapsed.
Any ideas? I checked the fans and vents, they are working and are clear..

Model Information:
Serial Number:          9G015053UDN5A
Manufacturer:          DP
Device Name:          bq20z951
Pack Lot Code:          0
PCB Lot Code:          0
Firmware Version:          301
Hardware Revision:          1
Cell Revision:          119
Charge Information:
Charge Remaining (mAh):          12538
Fully Charged:          Yes
Charging:          No
Full Charge Capacity (mAh):          12538
Health Information:
Cycle Count:          82
Condition:          Normal
Battery Installed:          Yes
Amperage (mA):          550
Voltage (mV):          8370
As to temp.. it is uncomfortable to hold... much hotter then it used to be.. I don't have a good thermometer to get.. but the bottom is hot.. it would keep my coffee warm.. not hot mind you but certainly it is hot enough to keep my coffee from cooling.. doesn't burn my hand but would make my legs or whatever else very wam.. sweaty even..
To summerize it is running very hot

Reduced battery life for high-end MBP 15 2011?

I just bought a new MBP 15" 2011 model (2.2 GHz), an upgrade from my previous MBP 2009 (MacBookPro5,3; Intel Core 2 Duo, 2.66GHz)). I have noticed that the real world battery life is significantly worse than the previous model (3-4 hours vs. 6-7 hours). This doesn't seem due to the actual full charge capacity, since the MBP 2009 still has over 6000 mAh, whereas the new MBP 2011 shows around 7000mAh. Rather, it seems my MBP 2011 draws a lot more power from the battery than the MBP 2009. Could it be that the high-resolution matte screen is the culprit? FYI, the spec of my MBP 2011 is as follows (old specs in the parentheses):
1. 512GB SSD (256GB)
2. 8GB memory (4GB)
3. high resolution matte screen (1680x1050) (glossy standard screen)

If I remember rightly the 2009 units didn't have on the fly graphics switching?
The new ones do. That means sometimes you can be on the more powerful graphics card with out realising - this will kill your battery life. Wrote about it here for the 2010 models: http://www.markc.me.uk/MarkC/Blog/Entries/2010/4/21Early_2010_Macbook_Pro_-_Battery_LifePoor.html
There's a great piece of software that will allow you to control & see which graphics card you're on - I bet if you stick to the integrated graphics you'll see your battery life improve significantly.
You can get that here: http://codykrieger.com/gfxCardStatus

MBP early 2011 battery life

I have the early 2011 release of the 17" MBP (8gig ram, 2.2ghz quad i7, 500 gig harddrive) and it seems like the battery life has just been cut inhalf. It lasts me about 3 and a half hours from just general use. Is my battery faulty? Really appriciate any feed back

That battery looks pretty good, capacity is really strong for so many charge cycles, but the voltage looks low, would expect it to be in the 11.5 to 12.5 volt range and you are showing 11.27 volts. A little low but not critical.
How have you been handling that battery with respect to discharge/charge? While Apple has a lot of material talking about periodic deep discharge to shutdown and charge as a means of calibrating the battery, in reality that does not calibrate the battery itself. That only serves to calibrate the charge reporting circuitry built in to Lithium-technology batteries. In fact, the Battery University, an independent group testing batteries, has shown that repeated deep discharge behavior significantly shortens Lithium battery lifetimes. The optimum balance of use (discharge) and line-connection seems to be around 50% discharge before charge. Deeper reduces cycle life very fast, lower discharge makes for a very high cycle life but why buy a portable?
Anyway, just some thoughts. Use of high intensity applications, including other operating systems, looks like it is degrading the charge time but the battery itself looks healthy.
Just keep using it, perhaps try not discharging below 50% for a while and see how it behaves for your.

Core i7 15" MBP battery life far below advertised

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