MacBook Air 11" Battery Problem

HI Gary,

Do you have any thing plugged into the computer?
When you say your browsing the web, are you listening to online music and or playing video?
Do you have any other programs open, such as itunes open? How many programs do you have open?
Did you install flash?
Do you have bluetooth enabled?
What do you have the screen brightness set to?

If you want to verify the battery has the physical capacity it should; you can check that in system profiler. (menu bar, apple menu, about this mac, more info button, when system profiler opens chose power from the list on the left) On the right side you should see a value called " Full charge capacity (mAh):"
From what i've read it seems any number above 4800 is just just icing on the cake. This number will slowly drop over the moths as you use the battery and go through cycle counts.

http://www.apple.com/macbookair/specs.html if you look at the bottom it notes the test was performed with just safari opened, and at 50% brightness. If you want similar battery life I would try setting the brightness lower; and make sure no other application is open. Also I would assume this test was done without flash installed.

Having flash installed will negatively effect battery life. http://www.geekosystem.com/flash-decreases-air-battery/ "reviews of the MacBook Air over at Ars Technica indicate that having Flash installed can cut the battery life by a third"
Apple actually posted a whole press statement why they chose not to include flash by default. http://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/

I also have the 11" model. The biggest issue has been Flash. With flash disabled and making heavy use of Office 2011 and Safari I get around 7.5 hours battery life if I have the screen on brightness 2 or 3. I opened a page with heavy flash content (www.peugeot.com) and after an hour, despite a full initial charge, I had 90min of battery life left.

My solution is to only surf flash content with the power lead in and install two programs:
FlashFrozen from the App Store
Click to Flash

Since installing both these I am getting much better battery life.

Hope this helps.

M

My battery life is similar to Marcus1969, as long as I am not using Flash I have been easily getting 6+ hours with moderate internet use (with very little video) and Office 2011. ClickToFlash works great with Safari, and I use it most of the time to avoid the battery drain.

A couple of other things you can try are to download the latest beta of Flash and set Youtube to default to HTML5 whenever possible. These may help you get more time out of your battery.

I downloaded "Click to Flash" from the website and the installation was successful. Works great. My battery range meter jumped up. Tripled!

Sly