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- heyThere, on 10/12/2007, -1/+10I guess this topic would be a more appropriate location for a post I made on the day of the keynote.
// In response to the reply I got from rderveloy, I am not biased towards the computer. In fact I like a lot about it's design. That being said I have an electrical engineering background myself and while there are no 'round numbers' there are distinct trends that allow you to make assumptions. The biggest variable will be in how you use the laptop. I of course assume this laptop will do no better or worse than other similarly powered laptops (with the important specs being processor, hard drive speed, battery size, screen power consumption.)
If you do rely on doing work away from a power cord, you'll likely have a second battery as a safety. While the projected battery life isn't phenomenal, it is more than enough for half a day's worth of "office work" (word processing, excel, web browsing), especially on conservative power saving settings where it would jump up a few hours.
---
If you look up Intel's spec sheet for the Core Duo you will see the TDP (Thermal Design Power, the maximum heat the processor should be expected to output) and it is 31 W for 1.66 - 2.16 GHz.
You can't get more power (heat in this case) than you put in (in the electrical form of battery power). The battery is rated by Apple at 60 Watt-hours.
So if you were running only the processor but at it's maximum consumption you would have less than 2 hours of battery life. Then you must consider all of the components. Moving parts like the HD and DVD drives will consume a lot of power relatively speaking. The biggest power drain should be the LCD screen. At 15.4 inches diagonal and wide-screen + promises of a very bright back-light this can put a bite into the battery life.
The good news is that Intel's Core Duo is very good at stepping down the power needs of the CPU when it's full power is not needed and you most likely will be able to still use the screen with the brightness turned way down when not plugged in to save further power. The battery life will overall be rated at something like 3-4 hours depending on how they choose to define it. - jayhawk88, on 10/19/2007, -0/+9Performance
Battery Life
Weight
Choose two. - breakneckridge, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4#1) As stated by the sales person, this is a pre production model so things can change significantly in the model that actually ships.
#2) The power setting was likely set to highest performance for a floor model and that will use the battery much quicker.
#3) This was a reading from the estimated remaining battery life which is usually short by at least 10 minutes and sometimes short by up to an hour.
#4) That is a real world number and not a highly idealized number that you see when you read manufacture battery life statements, so any comparison is useless.
#5) 4 to 5 hours of battery life is about what most laptops get anyway. - _skin_, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1The engineers over at Apple are probably pulling some Apollo 13 type sh*t as week speak. Trying to squeeze every last amp, to get back to 6 hours.
- ajcannon, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I get 7 hours of battery life on my Inspiron 600m. Of course that is with two batteries and no optical drives and while surfing the web during classes, but still, I've done this on more than one occasion. I would consider 4 hours to be quite good for that laptop considering it has only one battery, an optical drive, bright screen, etc...I don't know what this guy is complaining about.
- kungfustickman, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1@quartzisahog
Well yes you can when you consider that the new Thinkpads are probably going to get around 5 hours of battery life. I guess it boils down to the fact that Yonah was supposed to give us improved performance with equal battery savings. I guess we just expected a lot more out of Apple and Intel. - jediboytj, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2what the hell is wrong with 4 hours of battery life? my PowerBook does a little less than that... im sure they are working on improving the battery life.
also, did you happen to turn the brightness all the way down? turn off bluetooth? turn off airport? that always squeezes over an hour and a half or so of extra battery life for me. - dmron, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Reported as lame. Gimme a break. First, the "time left" indicator is never that accurate. Second, four hours is damn good. I've never seen a laptop that gets over 3:30 max, this includes my iBook, dell laptop, girlfriends laptop, and friends PowerBook. Four hours would be a frikkin dream. Anyone who says they get their "5 hours" of life from their apple powerbook is either a complete liar or does nothing for five hours while keeping the display on dimmest possible and sound turned off - yah, now that's a fun way to use a computer.
- Guspaz, on 10/12/2007, -0/+04 hours is EXTREMELY GOOD battery life considering the powerful processor. Heck, it's good in any notebook.
- _skin_, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Oh, and to you Dell guys comparing your machine... Save your breath... Apple products are not comparable. Apple is up here... And Dell is down here.
- Sal42, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0unplugging my 1 year old PowerBook it says 1:41. that's with wifi on, the screen mid-brightness, bluetooth off, and performance set to automatic. this is also a new battery as my old one was recalled and apple just released a battery firmware update thing. so if less than 2 hours is all i can get i would love a notebook that could do 4 hours. but we need real world testing that says how long the laptop can last in real world situations. i know battery life is going to suck on just about any laptop, but if i am getting more performance without a noticible difference in battery life then i am very happy.
- macattacks10, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Macs tend to have pretty good battery life, 3 hours with AirPort and normal use on a PowerBook G4 is about the worse you can get. On my iBook G4, with about 30% brightness, AirPort on, bluetooth on, it gets about 4 and a half hours. Although my 1.5 gb of ram really has helped push that number up... The earlier PowerBook G3's tended to get more than the current PowerBooks, so that is why everyone complains about it, we are used to having it good.
- chrisrosa, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0A little premature to start bashing the battery life on this model, no?
- Gundam, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0The great irony is that is MORE battery life than a Powerbook G4 gets with the monitor dimmed and the processor slowed.
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0The Desktop Replacement "laptops" that everyone was pushing for the last 2 years or so get under an hour of battery life. My Inspiron 4150 only gets 2. I'd LOVE 4 hours, and am buying a MacBook as soon as I get my tax return.
- idean360, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0What is this, a guy who just came from 30 years in the future, 4 hours is very good for what the MBP specs look like...and that not even the final number! Apple will make this guy feel stupid in about two weeks.
- akira117, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0 For a high end laptop like this its not that bad. Its actually pretty good!
I think the reason why this got to the home page is all the M$ whores
out there reading the title and digging it. - embraceware, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0With all this power - 4 hours is great - and an Apple rep said that the prototype MacBooks do not have the new batteries they are going to be using and also - some hardware and OS software will be tweaked by February. Knowing that it is a 4hour min is awesome- it could be as much as 5 or 6.
- r©ain, on 10/12/2007, -1/+14 hours battery life and this an issue?
If it was say.. 2 hours battery life, ok... then there'd be an issue.
Reported as lame for, well... being lame and not being news.
I probably would have dugg it if the headline was "Clueless Asshat Whines About Nothing At All." Just because. - navster15, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0hell, my ibook gets about 4 hours in normal use, up to 6 hours in powersave mode, so i don't understand what the big deal is. for a high end machine like the macbook, 4 hours is pretty damn good. just look at those alienware laptops and complain about the battery life.
- MoeB, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0when it says 4 hours, its really 3 hours. 3 hours is not really that bad.but the way they kept hyping up the intel chips in terms of power/performance i was expecting a bit more bAattery life. then again they put a extra bright lcd so that is probably why its 4 hours.
- ahmerhussain, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0better than most notebooks.
- 8^)Jung, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1Why are people worried about 4 hours? My HP Pavilion XH555 only gets 1.5 hours of battery life.
- manfesto, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1The current Powerbooks IIRC are rated at 4.5 hours of battery life and get in the range of 3-4 hours.
Nine out of ten laptops I see sold at the local bigbox are rated at 2-3 hours.
Four hours is actually about an hour longer than I was expecting from the MacBook.
Either way, I can't afford it, and I'm getting five hours on my iBook. - The_Decryptor, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Our Acer laptop has a 1 hour battery life, so 4 hours is fine (and that's about the normal range anyway)
- tifosiv122, on 10/12/2007, -0/+02 hours is a minimum, anything above that is good. Above three is better...over 4 and you can't really expect more then that from a typical notebook. Specialty ones, that's different, but for a run of the mill...4 hours is fine.
- shooby, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0when I tried out the macbook at macworld, the thing was HOTTER than the powerbook G4's...like REALLY hot
- JasonPrini, on 10/12/2007, -0/+04 hours seems to be pretty good to me.
I hope that the 12" MacBook {maybe 12.1" widescreen 1280x768 this time round?} will offer about an hour more, with the 17" {having a 60-70W/h battery} still hovering around 4 hours.
I also would have chosen 1.1-2" thick with a DL writer and an hour more battery over 1" thin and fewer features.
Weight is more important than size when we're talking 0.2". - iobuffa, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Too early to tell. Wait until people get their hands on them and do some proper tweaking of power settings. So that'll be around March. Until then, keep staring at the specs and speculate.
- Vektuz, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0I think 4 hours is plenty of time. Never seen a laptop IRL that gets much more than that. Most say they 'can' do it, but you watch a movie or something and that drops to 2 hours.
- mikeazorin, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0You guys are lucky. My iBook's battery is totalled after 2.5 years. I get about 40 minutes tops.
- boombashi, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0"People accepted the idea of switching to an arguably weaker chip (worse at vector arithmetic and floating point) because they thought that battery life would be improved." Than a G4? Ha HA HA, that's pretty funny. 4 hours of full power battery life on a sweet high-performance, small form factor, prototype is f-in GREAT!
- recursive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0"I've never seen a laptop that gets over 3:30 max, this includes my iBook, dell laptop, girlfriends laptop, and friends PowerBook. Four hours would be a frikkin dream. Anyone who says they get their "5 hours" of life from their apple powerbook is either a complete liar or does nothing for five hours while keeping the display on dimmest possible and sound turned off - yah, now that's a fun way to use a computer."
Umm.... My 600m with two batteries can easily go 5 hours under a heavy load. It can go 8 with light usage. I've seen the "time left" estimate in windows read > 10:00. - StaplesGuy, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Heh, I get 8-10 hours on my HP dv4000 if I use low power settings
- oneSaint, on 10/12/2007, -0/+04 hours of 120GB hd, brightest screen on a laptop, backlight keyboard, superfast processor....... 4 hours..... not bad.
- prosinader, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Agreed, this is much too early to tell. When people get it in their hands and real world test it, I will take note then.
Besides the first rev of any product has it's quarks and limits (see 1G iPod), I normally wait until rev2 to purchase a peice of tech. I know I'll always be behind the 'cutting edge' - on everything - but I sleep better at night thinking I spent my money wiser. - panique, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0That's funny, the best I've ever seen in the menubar on my 1.67 G4 15.2" PB is 3 hours 29 minutes, on a freshly recharged battery. But even that is somewhat dubious. I rarely have to swap in my extra battery on a flight from LA to New York (or back which is usually longer), and I fly a lot. Usually working in Xcode compiling my apps, editing, firing up the debugger, etc. Plenty of disk access. I dim the LCD a bit though because it's usually dark in the cabin.
- aluminumpork, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0My Fujitsu S2110 can pull 5 hours if I'm really careful. That is 'Max Battery' power setting, lowest screen brightness and only doing things like web browing and word processing. If I don't worry about I usually get 3:30 to 4:00, which I'm extremely happy with. This is from a 1.6Ghz AMD Turion MT-30 processor. Company battery claims are never correct.
- BSniz, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0From an interview with Jobs:
Q: How is battery life with the MacBook?
A: About the same—this with a dual processor [chip]! Each processor is as fast as a G5, and the battery life will be the same as [the previous PowerBook’s] G4.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10853916/site/newsweek/page/2/ - azcn2503, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Like many have said, 4 hours battery life is very good for a 17 inch laptop. Even more so if it's running a current generation Intel CPU. Just wait til Apple get their hands on Merom. Merom is supposed to bring 30% more performance while requiring 30% less power. I also expect that Apple will add solid state disks in later revisions of the MacBook and MacBook Pro, which I expect would give up to 100% more battery life.
- vinbot, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0It's pretty funny how this guy describes himself looking at the laptop like it was some kind of top-secret covert op.
Macworld was a colossal snore - they didn't really come out with much new. The processor is different, but the computer does the same thing as before, just a bit faster. It's hard to get too excited about iLife 06, knowwhaddamean? - Nanx, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Last I checked, 4 hours is good. The best laptops out there, Windows or Mac, are at their best 6 hours. And also, Apple undervalues battery life fairly often (iPod Minis, iBooks...).
- Werdock, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0The thing is that those OS battery life predictions are not quite true. Normally it is quite less than it says. So it is definitely not 4 hours but less. Maybe much less.
- terranaut, on 10/12/2007, -0/+04 Hours of battery life, WOW, my HP zd8000 laptop only gets a little over an hour on a fully charged battery.
Oh, wait, I am running an Intel P4 HT @ 3.06GHz in this one. - terranaut, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Actually, it's 30% more performance OR 30% less power.
- valis, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0*blinks*
Boring article. No digg. - panique, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0^^^ I forgot to mention I hot rodded my PB with a 7200 rpm TravelStar
- cwcheang, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0SSuGG,
haha.. 'Mactards' .. you learn something new on digg everyday. ;-) - kabz, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0With Airport Off, power-saving set to Better Battery Life, screen at min (lit) brightness and doing fairly light work light browsing the XCode docs and maybe compiling a few files, I see about 4 Hours and change on my 12" AlBook G4 1.5.
It's pretty rare that I am anywhere that I need for than 4 hours of working without having access to mains power.
If my Mac Book gets the same I'll be pretty damn happy. -
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