MacbOok Air 11: is i7 drawing much more battery then i5?

Hello,

In response to your post, there can be many different factors contributing to your experience with what seems like low battery. I am not sure what settings you have currently configured but perhaps you can set the following things to possibly increase battery life:

-decrease screen brightness to half of below half. (I found with my macbook pro that by doing this, gave me about an hour or two of battery life.)

-turn off bluetooth if not being used.

-check out what programs are running in the background. (if there are programs in the background constantly doing different things like checking the internet or downloading or streaming etc... this could affect battery)

-application usage: be aware that the kinds of apps you use cause the system to estimate the amount of battery you have left.

-After researching over the net and through apple, it does not seem to have any information anywhere stating that the i7 will take more battery. on apple, it simply claims that "web browsing" will give you 5 hrs of battery for 11" and 7hrs for 13".. anything else like watching movies or looking at pictures or reading or editing things etc... may again cause the system to estimate lower than 5 or 7 hrs of life.

-Finally, in the end, you may be correct, because the i7 is more powerful, may take more juice than the i5... Yet, both the i5 and i7 are low voltage.... so if 2:30 min was the max for the i7.... ... many people will be complaining in the next few days/weeks about this. We will just have to wait (that is if any of the above does not actually change your experience with the battery)

**I am currently waiting to receive the i7 13", will hopefully arrive aug 1-3...

Hope this helps,

Macboy

I am seeing the same issue with my new 11" i7.

Cheers

T

Both the i5 and i7 processors have the same (17W) power rating, so not likely.

MacWorld's battery life test indicates that the i7 will indeed draw more power .

It's not about max power, it's about real world use power consumption. The i7 has a higher clock speed, and will likely perform calculations a tad faster, hence using more power at a given continuous task in a equivalent interval.

Is it possible to underclock my MBA

My i7 Air with 256 MB SSD drinks power like a drunken sailor. I get perhaps 1 hour of battery doing nothing much, and it even appears to leak a fair amount of power in sleep mode. When I first got it I used Migration Assitant to port over from a MacPro 8 core Nehalem machine. After doing that, the MB Air got very hot, and the fan (yes, these have fans) cranked out warm air like a hair dryer. I could just see the battery meter start to bleed downward in real time. Under the hypothesis that somehow Migration Assistant copied over the SMC settings (does it?), I did the following:

1) ran through the battery calibration procedure

2) reset the SMC

After doing this, there was no longer the conspicuous overheating, and no audible fan noise either. So I thought the problem was solved. But now I see fairly miserably battery life. Perhaps something was stressed when the MB Air was in high temperature mode? Anyway, nothing I did varied from any official advise or instruction from Apple, so this baby is probably going back to Cupertino to be traded for either another i7, or possible an i5 version - since it is fairly useless as a sub-notebook if I need a power cord attached to this all the time.

its obvious that the i7 would drain more power......but go for an i5 processor...it doesnt make any difference at all

I've got the same issue with my battery!!!! it's just bad, I will ask apple to change my i7 by an i5 and happy for them to keep the money differance, i'm so disapointed!