MacBook Air 13 Inch (Mid 2013) Battery Life?

I am having the exact same problem. I got a brand new June 2013 Macbook Air with all of the hardware upgrades available (8gb memory, i7 1.7 ghz processor, 500gb storage). I get around 5 hours of battery life tops, after 1 week of "leveling out", no improvement. I called apple and they sent me a new Macbook Air. The new one has the same exact problem. I find this absolutely ridiculous. When i go to best buy and unplug their display macbook air, the display says 10 hours of battery.

I did a test, on both of my macbooks, The original one they sent, as well as the replacement. After one hour, the original was at 85% and the replacement was at 75%. That is not okay....i don't know what to do at this point. I guess I just have to accept that I'm only going to get 5 hours of battery life. It doesn't make sense why the one at Best Buy clearly gets 10 hours. I feel cheated and confused.

Send them both back as defective.

That's probably what I'll have to do. They're going to think I'm insane though. What are the odds of getting 2 defective MacBooks?

Noname14,

It's a waste of time to send it back, that's not a good long term solution. Go to an applestore and have them do a battery diagnosis. If the diagnosis passes then the new one they send will be the same. It might just be that at Best buy their display model wasn't an i7 or that it literally had NO APPS on it and no memory was being used.

That's probably what I'll have to do. The nearest apple store is 2 hours away. The display model at bestbuy was definitely not at i7. I checked. If this is really the case, and i7's get half as much battery life, I feel like that should be a pretty big disclaimer on their website. I'm probably going to have to go to the apple store and after 4 hours of drivin there and back they will likely tell me that it is what it is. I still feel like its false advertising though. The MacBook Air I got in 2010 has better battery life than the brand new one they just sent me...that's pretty depressing.

Honestly if you're really getting that poor of a battery life then I'd just downgrade lol. But I'm having issues like this too man... Like I just got something funny telling me it can't even charge:

If youve got an I7 processor, there is NO WAY EVER youre gonna get even CLOSE to 12 hours

that 12 hours is for I5 processor.

its not defective, its a FASTER processor, running HOTTER and gobbling a LOT more batt juice.....

NONAME said--- "and i7's get half as much battery life" BINGO!!!!

thats what it seems nobody knows, the 12 hour magic life does NOT apply to the I7 processor, period. Love apple, but dont think the AIr should be made with this battery vampire.

That CANNOT be true dude! you gotta be kidding me!! it's the Haswell that gives it the battery life, is it not?!

Haswell DOES cause long (insane long) battery life, I have one…..but that’s ONLY on the I5 processor NOT the I7 processor

Hawell drastically HELPS batt life.......but a HOTTER processor eating MORE POWER........obviously, is not going to get close to what the I5 eats.

Look at Apple.com website HERES THE PROOF:::

you see that number 4 after "Power".........? well, lets see what 4 says.........

The FINE PRINT of 4 basically says -- "this is for I5 processors!"

Badda bing , badda boom.

That **** Cray dude! Wait so I have the i5 with 8 gb. 8gb doesn't matter right?

the additional 4gb of mem is opperating at 1.35volts, .....that 4gb additional is nibbling very little batt.

Also, unless youve got tonnage of apps and vids running, that additional 4GB of memory is often taking a snooze, power-wise.

Also, when MAVERICKS comes out, batt life on the Airs will increase further due to the change it how it forces background programs to use drastically less power

a REAL BIG GREAT thing there to wait for!

Finally this explains it! Because I bought the 4gb RAM first and returned it and got the 8gb ram and this one has less battery. So that's why!

you got rid of all the confusion dude! thanks so much!!

I don't see a 'this solved your question' link somewhere?! I would totally click that if there was.

I had posted earlier that I was just getting 5-6 hrs, and saw a post by someone that the new MacBooks do a lot of indexing etc. and could contribute to battery drain. This might be correct because I've had mine since June 26th, and monitored the Activity Log as others suggested, and I just shut down for a restart and now suddenly the meter reads 11:36 hrs at 100% charge. I am surfing the net now, nothing major running and I will watc how the battery decreases.

I have good news. I left my macbook air on (disabled sleep mode), with automatic brightness, no programs running so that I could time the fully charged battery life. it got exactly 5 hours of battery life before it died. after it died i let it sit there for a few hours.

then i plugged it back in, without turning it on, until it was fully charged and the light was green. when i finally turned it on, the battery meter said I had 13 hours of battery life left. this was higher than anything i had ever seen before.

thinking it was a fluke, i left it on again (disabled sleep, no program etc), and after 5 hours of sitting on, it still had 65% battery life left! i'm not sure what happened here. i assume the battery was recallibrated (even though i have been numerous times that macbook airs come pre-callibrated and that this would be a waste of time).

Needless to say, I am extremely satisfied that I found the solution to this dilemma. If anyone else is having a similar problem I suggest you do what I did. I wish someone from apple supprort would have told me to do this. Clearing the p-ram did nothing. turning it off and restarting did nothing. I had to let the battery fully deplete, sit for a few hours, then charge it completely before turning it on.