I should supposedly be getting 12 hours out of my brand new 2013 MacBook Air 13", but instead I'm getting about half of that. My configuration is 1.7GHz i7, 8GB of RAM, 512GB. I'm not doing anything that is processor intensive; mostly just web browsing and e-mail.
Are there any battery tests I can perform? Any advice? Thanks in advance!
MacBook Air, OS X Mountain Lion (10.8.4)
youtube vids are a type of web browsing with flash
im getting between 11+. and at 12 hrs.
@Powelski,
I'm afraid most of people claiming "yeah, I'm getting 13 hours!" are just saying what they see on the estimation counter.
I doubt that's the case, at least I hope they're not! If I go by the estimated counter, then I could claim that mine is lasting 20 hours!
Who cares about playing videos for 12 hours?
Apple, Inc. is using 3 factors to benchmark the MBA's battery life, and those are: "Wireless Web", "iTunes Movie Playback" and "Stand By Time". Thus it's one of the 3 factors -- an important factor for others, as surfacing it is to you.
Eurodance
So I need to make a decision. What do you guys suggest to do - as I said, I get around 7 hours of battery life during lightweight web browsing. Is that normal? I thought that battery life is going to be the deal for my Macbook Air, but now I see it's not. For not much more I can have MBP Retina 13", which in fact has not much worse battery life.
@Powelski, if you're willing to invest little more time and deal with little more hassle, my suggestion would be to return it and wait until the issue is addressed or as you suggested, get a MBP. Specially, since getting around 7 hours from "lightweight" web browsing does not seem to be normal to me. Just like you, the battery life and the portability aspect was the key requirement for me.
Or, may be you can speak to Apple Sales Support, and see if they can extend your 14 day return period to 30 days. That's what they did for me, and that's why I'm not freaking out yet -- as I don't want to get stuck with a defective system, regardless how great of Apple Care it comes with.
Eurodance
@Eurodance, it seems like we are on the same boat, so what was your decision about your MBA with i7?
@Powelski, agreed! Since this is my 2nd one, and since I have 30 days to return it, I'm willing to wait a little longer before I return. First I've been thinking to get an i5 thinking that will eliminate the issue, but thanks to some of the members here, now I'm confident that these issues have nothing to do with the chipset. As I mentioned above, I would try to see if you can get a 30 day and hope for the best! It's very frustrating!
@Eurodance - I will do so, tomorrow I'll call Apple and ask for 30 days trial period. Frustrating fact is that it's difficult to measure, as this counter is so unreasonably random.
So you think it's not about i5 / i7, I hope you're right. I've seen many different opinions, one claiming oposite that the others. I'd like to keep my i7, because I like faster CPU and I don't want to wait for the new one + install everything again. I think that version with i5, as it's underclocked compared to i7, may be showing longer times in estimations and that's the difference. I really doubt the real difference is that big. i7 is claimed to be more power saving, isn't it?
OK, so I purchased an i5 MacBook Air (2013) two days ago, and ran a side-by-side battery test with my i7 MBAir (2013).
Before I began the test, I restored the new i5 from the i7 backup via Time Capsule, as I wanted to make sure the test was run with the exact same settings and hard drive content on both machines. I then waited for the new machine to be done with all the spotlight indexing. I set the brightness to 10 (out of 16) on both machines, and disabled sleep, screen saver and 'adjust for brightness'. I then proceeded to open two programs on each machine; Mail, and Safari (with four tabs open). I then unplugged the cord oh both Airs and left them idle for the entire time, except for about hour each, when I was browing and watching YouTube videos.
Here are the results of the test. These are *actual* times (not estimates); the time from unplugging the laptops until they went dark:
i7 MB Air: Battery lasted for 10:05
i5 MB Air: Battery lasted for 12:07
The test was followed by a visit to the Apple store to return the i7 Air.
This was an interesting test in that it measures the battery effect of the processor when it is mostly idle. I had heard that the i5 and i7 processors consumption when idle is the same. However, as you can see from the test, that was not my experience.
In my original post on this thread I posted how I was getting 6-8 hours on my i7 MB Air. I obviously got more running time during this last test because the machine was mostly idle and I was also not running about 10 programs in the background. It will be interesting to see the 'real life' running time I get with my new i5 and how it compares to my experience with the i7, but things are looking up.
FWIW, I too am having trouble on my new i7 air. Tested it out by running Netflix in Chrome nonstop. Dropbox is installed but there was very little Dropbox activity on my account during the time of the test; still figured I'd mention it since I've read that Dropbox is a battery hog. Battery lasted about four and a half hours. Definitely not what I was expecting. Called Apple and they walked me through resetting the SMC. That does not appear to have helped at all. The Apple technician was very nice and tried to be helpful, but he also made it sound like he hadn't heard about any complaints about battery life. Maybe next time I call, I can point the technician to this thread. ;-)
A return is probably in order. I bought this machine primarily for its purported battery life.
Update: I've spent some time enabling and disabling various programs to see if software might be the cause. As far as I can tell, any significant use of Flash or Silverlight whatsoever (i.e. any video watching on the web) will cause battery life on my MBA to plummet from just over 9 hours to somewhere between 4 and 5 hours. This is true in both Chrome and Safari (I thought it might be just a Chrome thing, so I checked both.)
Contrary to some claims I've read, Dropbox does not appear to be one of the programs that impacts my battery life. I have many large shared folders but the number of changes per day in those folders is relatively small, so I can only conclude that folks who experienced issues with Dropbox were uploading/downloading huge numbers of files (or just huge files) at the time they were performing their tests.
Anyway, I'd read reviews from people saying that they'd tested the MBA's battery life in part by watching movies on Netflix, so I'm really not sure how Flash & Silverlight can be the culprits here, but I've tested this several times to be absolutely sure and there's just no question about it: as long as I'm browsing the web my battery life is fine. Even having Skype, Dropbox and Tweetdeck running at the same time doesn't hurt battery life too much. The instant I start playing a flash game or watching a movie on Netflix, things go south fast.
Hope that info helps.
check your activity monitor and see if you have any sneaky stuff running in the background draining your battery
Oh, I've been checking it constantly. Nothing obvious has presented itself as a culprit. Flash and Silverlight make the CPU go hog wild; everything else seems pretty reasonable. Skype is the next-worst offender but like I said, I've checked and it doesn't seem to push my battery life below 9 hours.
Foxpapa, you have an I7, youre NOT supposed to expect 12 hours out of your AIR, ....that rating is only for the I5 processor, .....if youre getting 9 hours, thats about right.
See apple.com footnote #4 on same:
I know that 9 hours is about right. That's not why I first posted here. I first posted here because I was getting *four* hours. The cause of which, I think I may have determined, is Flash and/or Silverlight. I've seen a lot of folks complaining about their MBA's battery life... hopefully this information will be of use to them. What confuses me is that I've read at least a couple of accounts of people testing their battery life by watching online videos, and they did not experience the battery shortfall that I did. Not sure what's up with that discrepancy but I've been pretty methodical about the testing I've done. The culprit really seems to be Flash/Silverlight.
Hmmmm, obviously Silverlight is a processor power hog apparently NOT designed for mobile users as pertains to quality battery drainage. Interesting report there
Only six hours of battery life on my 2013 MacBook Air 13"
