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Level 1

10 points

15" MacBook Pro i7 battery life mediocre

I figured I'd post on the forums to let everyone know how I'm faring with the new MacBook pro i7. I love the machine, first off. It's fast!!!! However, the battery life is the most important aspect of a laptop to me and this particular battery leaves much to be desired as far as charge longevity is concerned. Just to give you some numbers....after about 3 hours of web browsing, I'm at fifty percent of battery charge capacity. That extrapolates to around 6 hours of total available charge. Brightness is set at 50 percent with wifi and Bluetooth on. Flash sites visited made up approximately 40 percent of the total quantity of sites visited. There was much browsing and skimming occurring and very little in depth reading. More of an aggressive approach to surfing the Internet. I just feel that the battery acts very uneven in it's discharge of energy with respect to the indicator that is given to the user in the form of the battery percentage / time remaining calculation. It seems to discharge very quickly during the first 10 - 15 percent (in a matter of 15 -25 minutes) and then evens off a bit. It seems to give a more instantaneous reading rather than a rolling average usage reading. It's definitely not 8-9 hours, that's for sure. Kind of disappointing given the advertisement.

Message was edited by: hypo luxa

MacBook pro 15" core i7, Mac OS X (10.6.3)

Posted on Apr 19, 2010 10:17 PM

157 replies

ZS5J

Level 1

8 points

Jul 10, 2010 1:35 PM in response to bitninja

@Cody
Thanks for building the app that switches graphics cards - good job, neat, small and handy to have.

bitninja

Level 1

10 points

Jul 11, 2010 11:51 AM in response to ZS5J

No problem - glad it's useful to you!

Cody

vertgo

Level 1

0 points

Aug 29, 2010 10:32 PM in response to bitninja

@cody Thanks, I just donated a small amount, but it's made inordinately happy to be able to pinpoint why my battery life was so much less than my previous old macbook pro 13"

2ez4us

Level 1

0 points

Sep 29, 2010 9:46 PM in response to ZS5J

yeah thanks amillion for the app man.. Works great.. Went from 4 hours to 6.9 hours

ebenzo

Level 1

0 points

Oct 4, 2010 9:34 AM in response to 2ez4us

I also have this laptop and am experiencing terrible battery life.
With the Nvidia card activated, I get 4 hours at most with brightness about 25%, light web-browsing, light downloading, no bluetooth and Skyping.
Using the gfxCardStatus app to switch to Intel's GPU it adds an hour at most, pushing it up to just over 5 hours but still nowhere near the 8-9 hrs advertised.

Full charge capacity: 6707
Cycle count: 34

I've had it for a month now.

srk1221

Level 1

0 points

Oct 4, 2010 4:58 PM in response to LordMerovingian

My battery on a MacBook Pro 2.53 GHz (Mid 2010) lasted 11 hours and 08 minutes.

Oct 28, 2010 2:43 PM in response to hypo luxa

I'm impressed you get so much life out of your battery. My battery usually drops from 100% to 85% within half an hour. Though, I'm in testing phase now. Cody's gfxCardStatus app is cool and it helps me force my computer into intel graphics mode. I'll gice that, plus some calibration a chance. It's 3 weeks old and already it has 21 load cycles. Is this normal? Seems like alot! It's one each day!

I have to note that I have a 7200 RPM hdd in my computer. 8GB RAM too, if that matters.

Anyway, I had the 2.53GHz model with the 9400M chips before I got this one. It was the cheapest 15" model at the start of this year. It had 4GB RAM and the same 7200 RPM hdd as I'm using right now (I bought it 1 month befor I got my new computer, which only had a 5400 RMP hdd in it, so I reused it. It's fine). That computer had way better battery life, and that's NOT expected as the new computer is almost 25% more expensive and claims the same battery life.

While I write this post, using Cody's app to force my computer to use the intel graphics I seem to be able to get 5 hours on a full charge. But I do have ful screen brightness, wifi on and some backlighting on the keyboard. Still, this isn't what I was getting from my previous computer. And before Cody's app I would probably only get up to a max of 2,5 hours with the same settings, so there's definatly with the graphics.

15" MacBook Pro i7 battery life mediocre