Degradation Battery life on late 2010 MacBook Air

As anyone else seen rapidly deteriorating battery life in their MacBook Air or is there a diagnostic utility to verify the battery is functioning correctly? For the first 3 weeks of my new 13" MBA, I was getting between 6-8 hours of battery life straight. Most of these was while writing code in Eclipse on international flights. Once I got close to 7 hrs when editing photos in Photoshop!

Now during the past few weeks, no matter what I change with the display setting, turning off wifi, etc, I'm only getting 3-4 hours battery life when the only application I am running is Eclipse with wifi/bluetooth all disabled. Its been a pretty dramatic battery life downgrade. Also, twice this past week I have shut my laptop with 40-50% battery life. Then when I've opened it back up (this would be from "deep sleep" mode) it will not come back to life. After plugging the charger back it and booting up, I'll see the battery charging at 1%, meaning its either not going to deep sleep or I've got a battery that won't hold a charge. So my suspicion is there is a battery related issue.

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?

Late 2010 13" MacBook Air, Mac OS X (10.6.5), 1.86 GHz w/4GB RAM

Posted on Dec 2, 2010 3:49 PM

32 replies

Dec 23, 2010 8:50 AM in response to TK MBAir 2010

Has anyone found a technical explanation of what the "Shift Ctrl Alt" for 5 seconds is doing? Is it re-setting some sort of batter flag?

riyo

Level 1

4 points

Dec 23, 2010 9:18 AM in response to TK MBAir 2010

I have been making notes of the last hour what the battery life was:

It went gradually down from 6:50 to roughly 6:00 but that was without me doing anything on the laptop ... As soon as I started typing it dropped down to a bit over 2 hours and now it is crawling back to 5:30 hours ... [btw this now that I have disabled my Carbonite] ... will continue posting anything I see out of the ordinary

leo0411

Level 1

0 points

Dec 26, 2010 4:59 AM in response to TK MBAir 2010

Have the same problem, just bought my MBA 11" 3 days ago, and the battery status shows me 1h37 left for 57% of the battery, my screen being dimmed to half and i currently only use it to browse the internet. I m leaving canada tomorrow (where i bought the mac) i dont have an apple care. Do u know if it s any trouble to get this problem fixed back in europe ? This issue is really annoying... my more than one year old mbp has more battery life...

Jan 5, 2011 9:29 AM in response to TK MBAir 2010

Same issue here. It's pretty silly. From 7.5 hrs to 4, seemingly overnight.

Jan 5, 2011 6:55 PM in response to TK MBAir 2010

So all apple care said is it was a software issue? and no fix on the horizon? So far haven't had the issue, i got his in mid Dec. The Air is 10 weeks old, according to coconut, and it says 99 capacity. I hope there is an update soon.

Jan 7, 2011 5:48 AM in response to TK MBAir 2010

Whew. Thought I was crazy. Rec'd my MBA on the 20th. During the holiday 6-7 hrs. Now with very little usage, showing 2:00 after a full charge overnight.

Argh.

lukewd

Level 1

12 points

Jan 7, 2011 6:23 AM in response to TK MBAir 2010

i have been having the same problem as well, and i have subsequently disabled flash in all of my browsers and my battery life seems to have perked back up again. not quite to the full quoted time, but a definite improvement... try it out and share your results.

flmz

Level 1

0 points

Jan 29, 2011 8:25 AM in response to lukewd

Same here. Battery life is down to ~4 hours. Has anyone tried to calibrate?

HAAlcala

Level 1

0 points

Feb 4, 2011 8:22 PM in response to flmz

4hrs is just about right I guess, or probably a bit better for the "half-true" consideration about the claims that Apple publish on their website?

Aug 27, 2011 2:25 PM in response to TK MBAir 2010

I stumbled across this thread while researching this problem with my late 2010 11" Macbook Air. I tried the PRAM and SMC resets, etc., measured the battery life with CoconutBattery, etc.

I'm running OS X 10.7.1 (Lion) and don't have Flash installed.

My expereinces were the same as with everyone else, widely varied battery life, as much as an hour or more (even within minutes). The ONLY thing I can find that wlll apparently "extend" the battery life is adjusting the screen brightness.

After a full charge with the screen brightness at 100% the battery life starts at around 5 hours and then quickly drops to 2 hours or so while using WiFi and Safari (only). However if I cut the screen brightness to 50% the battery life jumps to over 6 hours. I can repeat thesee results every time.

I don't know if that will help anyone else, but I've learned to use my Macbook Air with lower screen brightness and honestly it's not too bad. If I take it outside where I need full brightness I can expect battery life to be short, but inside I can extend it quite a bit by setting the screen brightness to something less than 100%.

FWIW I found this reveiw concerning battery life (and where I found that screen brightness has a big impact)...

http://www.everymac.com/systems/apple/macbook-air/macbook-air-faq/macbook-air-la te-2010-battery-life-real-world-tests.html

horstp

Level 1

8 points

Sep 24, 2011 3:01 PM in response to TK MBAir 2010

Same problem here - with Snow Leopard, battery life on my 13" MBA was about 8 hours even with WiFi active. After installing Lion it's something like 2 hours.

Strangely enough, charging the battery took about 2 hours with Snow Leopard, but since I installed Lion the light turns from orange to green after about 30 minutes. I guess that this might be part of the problem.

rakith

Level 1

0 points

Nov 7, 2011 12:31 PM in response to lukewd

Same problem. Mine has dropped to about 3.5 hours, down from 7-8 hours easily earlier. And my MBA-2010 is barely 5 months old. In the interim I have upgraded to Lion and also installed Google Chrome which plays flash videos, but I hardly ever use Chrome. I mostly use Safari on which I do not have flash installed.

:-(

horstp

Level 1

8 points

Nov 7, 2011 12:45 PM in response to TK MBAir 2010

One thing I noticed: Installing Lion set the screen brightness to a higher setting than I used to have - I had it set to half brightness or slightly below, and after the Lion install it was about one notch below maximum.

Setting it back to half brightness got me two extra hours of battery life under 10.7.

I also reset the SMC as described here: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3964 just to see if it would help, and I think it gave me some extra battery time. It isn't quite up to the same level as it was under 10.6.8, but it's much better than it was after the Lion install.

Mostly the problem seems to be screen brightness: with display brightness set to a very low level, I can work with active Wi-Fi(!) for almost 8 hours, which is not bad at all.

Nov 7, 2011 12:53 PM in response to horstp

Screen brightness has a very big effect on battery life (including the estimated time or percnetage left) on my Macbook Air. I've found the same to be true on my iPad. Cutting it down to 50% or 60% is still bright enough for me and adds a lot of battery life.

rakith

Level 1

0 points

Nov 7, 2011 12:54 PM in response to horstp

I mostly use my MBA-2010 in the evenings, so my brightness setting is typically 40-50% which I find adequate for my needs. My current battery life of around 3.5 hours is with this brightness setting.

My question here is if I take my MBA to the neighbourhood Apple store will they replace my battery? I'm still covered under warranty as it's been less than 6 months since I got the MBA.

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Degradation Battery life on late 2010 MacBook Air