oreillynet.com— A hands on look at the battery life of the MacBook Pro. I hope there is a big difference between these so called "Pre-production models" and the real thing.
Jan 16, 2006View in Crawl 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.
People aren't angry about the "absolute" battery life so much as they are because the entire point of switching to Intel was to get more performance/watt. 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.
Agreed, 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.
"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.
Macs 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.
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.
With 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.
Last 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...).
Like 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.
4 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.
breakneckridgeJan 16, 2006
#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.
strcmpJan 16, 2006
People aren't angry about the "absolute" battery life so much as they are because the entire point of switching to Intel was to get more performance/watt. 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.
prosinaderJan 16, 2006
Agreed, 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.
recursiveJan 16, 2006
"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.
macattacks10Jan 16, 2006
Macs 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.
akira117Jan 16, 2006
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.
chrisrosaJan 16, 2006
A little premature to start bashing the battery life on this model, no?
kabzJan 16, 2006
With 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.
nanxJan 17, 2006
Last 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...).
azcn2503Jun 11, 2006
Like 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.
terranautJul 2, 2006
4 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.
terranautJul 24, 2006
Actually, it's 30% more performance OR 30% less power.