Degradation Battery life on late 2010 MacBook Air

Anyone have idea's on how to verify I don't have a bad battery or a problem with deep sleep mode or have seen similar battery performance issues?

Take it in for warranty service.

Sounds like your battery is bad. The battery of my iphone 3G died on my out of nowhere after just 1 year. All the sudden it couldn't hold any charged power at all. I would just take it into an Apple store to have them run a diagnostic for you. If it's broken, they'll replace for you for free.

Give http://www.coconut-flavour.com/coconutbattery/ a try. It will let you know the current capacity agains the design capacity of the battery.

I'm in exactly the same boat as the original poster.

When laptop was brand new, was getting about 7 hours battery life.

Now after about 4 weeks of usage, no massive changes to the software, no different usage style (still just internet and document editing)... and now I get 3 hours tops.

I purchased Apple Care 3 year warranty, does this extend to the battery as well?

The reason I ask is because I am in a remote place in the world and probably won't be back near an Apple Shop for about 3 months... What is the warranty scenario on batteries? Can I afford to wait?

Yes, the extended warranty extends to the battery.

My Mac Air is only about 1 month old, and I have the same problems too, and tried uninstalling several pieces of software, but to no avail; the batter life is still abysmal. I am lucky if I get about 3 hours of life too, and I ran coconut Battery, and it says that my current capacity is about 97% of the original, which means that it's draining about 1%/week...

Is this really a hardware issue, or a software issue, and it's not doing the right thing?

It's seems painful to have to bring this to service just to replace the battery on a brand new laptop....

PERHAPS I have the solution to the problem.

I just hang up with the support department of Apple here in the Netherlands. I had exactly the same issue: purchased my MBA 3 weeks ago, up and till last week no problem (7 hours battery), since this week all of a sudden only 2-3 hours battery.

They told me to do the following:

1) shut the MBA down
2) then push the following 3 buttons at the same time:
Shift Ctrl Alt and while pushing these 3 also push the ON/OFF button. Keep all pushed in for about 5 seconds.
3) after the 5 sec turn on your MBA.

For me this did the trick and now my battery gives me a calculated time of 7:44 hours again and the battery is not even fully charged (so I am happy again).

I hope this helps you guys/gals as well

Richard

p.s. I wish you all a splendid 2011

I'm having the exact same issue here and Riyo, the fix you described is very very temporary. Last Saturday Apple Care shared that reset trick for me too and then 3 days later, it was back down to just 3hrs and 25 minutes.

I even went into the Apple store last Sunday for a hardware battery diagnostic test (similar to the kind done on car batteries) and the conclusion is that this is not a hardware issue.

I also did a local diagnostic a few days ago and sent the system logs back to Apple for their product team to diagnose. I got a call back from Apple care today and it looks like there is a software issue. Somehow the Battery management software is getting disconnected with the actual capacity of the battery. The shift-ctrl-option + power button for 5 seconds only temporarily brings things back in line and then it drifts away again back to half capacity.

The big bummer here is that i had a previous MacBook Air and the main reason for the upgrade was for the improved battery life but now they are about exactly the same and of course sans backlit keyboard but on the upside, it does bootup faster.

Apple Care left me a voicemail so I hope to reconnect with them tomorrow to find out how I can go about getting this software issue fixed/resolved.

Humphrey

I have to agree with the last 2 entries .. it is a temporary solution ... I found out yesterday. Also with me the 7 hours dropped down to 2/3/4 hours within minutes.

I am going to call the Mac shop now as the Support department takes ages to get hold off

Keep you posted

Richard

I just spoke to the Mac shop and they told me that a 'common' problem with other batteries has been the plugin from Adobe Flash. They suggested me to delete that plugin to see how this would affect the battery.

I deleted the plugin and I see the time jump up from 4 hours to 6 and half hours.

Do you guys have this plugin installed or not?

Richard

and back again to 4 hours within minutes .. this *****!

Does one of you perhaps also use Carbonite? I am looking in my Activity Monitor and the CarboniteDaemon is sometimes normal low (a few %) and then all of a sudden going crazy %CPU wise: 70-90%

Richard