Only six hours of battery life on my 2013 MacBook Air 13"

Please let us know how it's going with the i5 MBA 2013. I'm also having the same problem, but with an i5. At full charge it tells me I have about 9 hours of battery life, and 10 minutes later it's 6-7 hours. Yesterday I got about 7 hours of battery life while not even on 50% brightness.

@PrefabSprouter Thanks for doing this -- I can't wait to hear the results. I have a 13' i7 8/512 and hardly getting 6-7 hours. Was thinking to go buy an i5 to compare, but would like to hear what you find out.

It has been reported that DropBox has a huge impact on battery life. YMMV

Never used that though.

OK, this past couple of days I spent some time testing the battery with different scenarios, and here's what I found:

These tests were performed on MacBook Air 13", i7, 8 GB, 512 GB, with Auto Brightness turned off, Brightness level at 6 bars and Volume at 7 bars, WiFi on & connected, and Keyboard Light off.

Scenario #1 -- surfing/downloading: I drained the battery entirely, until it died completely and shut down the system. When I booted it up and logged in to my desktop, I let it charge to 100%. Once the MBA was fully charged, I unplugged the charger, the battery meter of course showed 100% and it estimated 10:08 hours remaining, which was at 2:30 PM. So I immediately started downloading 1-6 GB of files back-to-back and surfed the web. By 6:11 PM the battery was at 50% with estimated remaining time of 4:07 hours. Then by 7:56 PM the battery was at 25% with estimated remaining time of 1:45 hour. So I continued until it was down to 1%, and that was at 9:30 PM with estimated remaining time of 0:04. So the conclusion for this test was that I got about 7 hours with continuous web surfing and downloading of huge files.

Scenario #2 -- watching movies: Similar to the previous test, I drained and fully charged the battery and unplugged it from the charger after it was fully charged. At 10:50 AM the battery was 100% with estimated remaining time of 12:00 hours. At 11:05 AM (battery=100%) I started playing the movie Cloud Atlas, which is 2:51:55 hours long. As soon as the movie was over, I started playing it for the 2nd time, at 2:01 PM when the battery was down to 78%. Once it was over, I played it for the 3rd time, at 5:00 PM when the battery was at 53%. Once over, I played it for the 4th time, at 7:52 PM, when the battery was at 28%. When the 4th session was over, the time was 10:47 PM and the battery meter was at 3% (estimated remaining time 0:24). After that, I did some surfing until the battery was down to 1%, and that was at 11:10 PM with estimated remaining time of 0:12. So that means I unlike Scenario #1, I got 12 hours and 5 minutes!

Apple's website says (http://www.apple.com/macbook-air/specs.html) that the 13" will last up to 10 hours withiTunes movie playback, and up to 12 hours of wireless web. My findings seem to be inconsistent with Apple's numbers, but I'm very pleased with Scenario #2 results. I think in Scenario #1, the i7 processor contributed in draining the battery faster during the back-to-back downloads. So I'm curios to see a similar test done by someone who has an 13" i5.

Well, I hope this was helpful to anyone who had questions regarding the 13" i7 battery life. And feel free to ask any questions which you might have regarding my experience.

@PrefabSprouter, you're most welcome! Just to confirm, with Internet surfing and downloading, I only got 7 hours, which is similar to yours. The 12 hours was from the video playback, and was very surprising to me, since I was expecting the exact opposite outcome.

I'm running another test, this time by just surfing the web, without running any apps in the background or downloading files in the background. I will check back in with the result.

By the way, the 'estimated remaining' indication, IMHO is flawed, because at times it estimates 20 hours at 100%, other times 6 hours, 8 hours, 12 hours and 17 hours. That's why I don't ever rely or go by those numbers.

So what conclusions do we have here, guys? I have i7 version and get same results. On internet browsing it's about 7 hours, but with WiFi turned off it's much more. I still don't know how does it compare to i5 - if i5 is going to be better, there's no reason to get i7, really. Performance improvement is only about 16% in hard usage and close to 0% in normal usage.

I'm confused, tomorrow is my last day of 14 days return period. I expected great battery life. Apple claimed that the battery stays alive for 12 hours, which is just a lie. How did they measure that? On everything turned off? Do they think their clients are idiots? This kind of advertising should not be accepted!

So any i5 users here? What real time web browsing times are you getting?

Eurodance stated----

Apple's website says (http://www.apple.com/macbook-air/specs.html) that the 13" will last up to 10 hours withiTunes movie playback, and up to 12 hours of wireless web

True and untrue.....Apples website on BATT LIFE has a footnote #4 , indicating (at bottom) that, that is with the I5 PROCESSOR, not the I7.......see the small print at bottom

from apple.com, see after power there is a #4 for FOOTNOTE

Powelski said -- Apple claimed that the battery stays alive for 12 hours.......

Apple.com states battery life at 12 hours is WITH I5 PROCESSOR not I7, read footnote #4 from apple.com posted pic of same here:

I have a 13" I5 new AIR, and am getting at or near 12 hours batt life on typing, and playing youtube in the background, and periodic PDF opens. I am extremely impressed by my I5 batt. life.

Did you measure your battery time? It seems that the difference between i5 and i7 is not that huge. If I believed my battery counter, mine would be 12 hours as well. Too bad I just measured it and it turned out that it's just 7 hours. How could the difference be so huge between similar CPUs?

It does seem to me that the i7 in combination to my preference for a bright screen somewhat mars the battery life. But on the other hand, it still lasts longer than my 2010.

@PlotinusVeritas,

Eurodance stated----

Apple's website says (http://www.apple.com/macbook-air/specs.html) that the 13" will last up to 10 hours withiTunes movie playback, and up to 12 hours of wireless web

That's true -- but I never said/claimed Apple's number were based off of i7. But keep in mind that my test concluded that my 13-inch i7 lasted 12 hours by playing back-to-back videos. Which is significantly longer than Apple's estimated/claimed 10 hours on 13-inch i5.

 Eurodance

Who cares about playing videos for 12 hours? What we do care about is standard usage, which is web browsing. Now I'm totally confused about the difference between i5 and i7. I'm afraid most of people claiming "yeah, I'm getting 13 hours!" are just saying what they see on the estimation counter.