Macbook pro (Early 2011) battery.

I own 17" 2.3ghz model with 7200rpm disk and had the same feeling about battery life. Today I performed test on my MBP on battery with 2 cycles. Firefox and uTorrent (forced encrypton) was running all the time. Firefox has 5 windows open with approx. 40 tabs. Through WiFi I uploaded cca 3GB of data to another Mac, downloaded 2GB. I burned one DVD and XCode was running for approx 1.5h (coding and compiling small project). I started running on battery 4 hours ago and still have 1:30 to go. That means 5:30 runtime on battery, but under havier conditions than Apple is measuring.

I run gfxCardStatus set to "Integrated only" if running on battery, fan-control-modded to have second on battery profile, Flash block and AdBlock for Firefox installed as well. Display at "one dot" below the 50%.

I think, that the runtime is just fine, as promised. It's highly dependent on the running applications - cpu power demand. I still have my older MBP mid-2010 17" i5 2.53ghz model, and MBA. I have never had higher battery uptime than 7.5h on the other models as well. And you have to understand, that running four cores at turbo boost is a different story, than running older C2D or dual cored i5. If an application asks the cpu for its incredible power, cpu will eat the battery literraly in a minute.

mk

This is just an update...I just want to praise Apple tech support, because I phoned in about my poor battery life and they VERY patiently worked through it until we resolved my problem. I likely spent over 2 hrs on the phone with them. Now my battery is functioning perfectly normal...the culprit??? It appears like it was the "Menu Meters" app.

If you are still under tech support coverage, its worth the call...

If you are running Menu Meters, try uninstalling it and test your battery!

I use Chrome as well. Even when I am not using Chrome and I am using Safari, I still have the same issues. I did not have these issues on my previous MBP that was only a year and a half old.

interesting, i'm gonna try to remove Menu Meters and see if that helps. turning off that along with Synk and Dropbox and then not using Twitter, Chrome, or other apps that force me into using the discrete graphics should help. as i type this, i'm on a "full" battery (of 96%) with just Safari open, connected via WiFi, and am showing 7+ hours of remaining battery life. if this works, getting rid of Menu Meters is a great tip!!! (but i'll miss its functionality and oddly soothing graphical blips)

Dan, maybe it's time for you to switch over to iStat Menus. I was using it during my test and found no issues.

Yes - I'm getting about 2-3 hours real life usage as well.

The only time I've ever seen the battery indicator hit 7.00 was fully charged doing some non-Flash browsing in Safari. Almost anything else I do (Media Browsing, Pages, Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Garageband or XCode) brings the time down to 2-3 hours.

It's all very well to say: if you only do *this* or if you turn off *this* then your battery life will be 7 hours. I don't want to constantly think about how to optimize my battery life while working. In real terms, this seems like a significant step back from my previous MacBook Pro which got 3-4 hours in real world tasks.

I've owned 5 other Mac portables and have not experienced such a dramatic drop off between the 'very light browsing' battery life and the actual battery life.

If the GPU is the culprit then Apple seriously needs to offer some simple way to manage it.

This is hilarious. This reminds of Apple's suggestions for improving the battery life on an iPhone - http://www.apple.com/batteries/iphone.html - which is essentially saying turn your smartphone into a brick and you will have great battery life.

I'm seriously considering buying a MacBook Pro 13" - it will be my first Mac but the battery nonsense is annoying me. The big reason to get MBP is the "great" battery life but if I have to turn off all the good stuff - no Adobe flash, everytime you see a flash video, open it in Chrome, remove this app, turnoff that app.

Wow, what a laundry list. Why don't I just buy a Windows PC and run Ubuntu on it and save major $s too?

Apple claims how superior their products are but if everything comes with a caveat, it's useless. I really want to try a Mac but someone please convince me money spent on Mac is actually worth something. Without superior hardware, Mac is just as good or bad as Windows. I can also "hackintosh" my PC.

This is frustrating me as well. I bought my MacBook Pro on launch day, got it at the beginning of March, and have loved it, except for this **** battery life. I have reset my laptop's SMC (which helps for a day or so, but then reverts back to regular) several times, calibrated the battery at least four times, and even got the battery replaced! After all of this I still have this battery issue. At 100%, it only will give me about 1:50, and that's at half brightness, with nothing running. I've been reading the rest of the posts, and I'm using Safari, and have a high-res screen, if that makes a difference. I use this for school, and can't possibly charge my laptop in every single class, most of which I don't even sit by a plug. Can anyone help me, or should I just see if Apple will send me a new computer, and see if I can get a laptop from the "good" battery shipment?

I've not added anything, didn't download Google chrome, mainly doing paperwork, emails, bit of web, mainly on this forum! I'm amazed how many people are having problems with the new MBP, One of the reasons I switched from PC to Mac was for the battery life. But I'm having a lot of problems.... Yes Windows was C**p but, it kind of worked fine. Someone please give me some hope with this machine that freezes up and I can't shut down without pressing the off button, has a very disappointing battery life, yes all manufacturers quote times for a machine that is on and does nothing else, but still wanted more. A lot of squinting because I can't be bothered to enlarge every single email that comes in, instead of one setting to enlarge all, but most are unreadable,

But anyway, staying on topic, Where did I read 10 hours battery, not 7? Anyway, 7 would do!!