Comments
Comment by Brad J:
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I have both an early 2009 MacBook (13” aluminum unibody) and late-2009 13” MacBook Pro - practically identical machines except the MBP has the non-user-serviceable battery. While I haven’t done serious testing to see how long it lasts, the MBP definitely lasts a lot longer than the MacBook - 5+ hours vs. 3 hours. I suspect something’s up with your friend’s battery, to be honest.
Comment by ssp:
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@Brad J:
I suspect something’s up with your friend’s battery, to be honest.
Exactly my first thought: Faulty battery, no big deal, easily fixed.
Yet, the Mac dealer who checked the machine claimed everything was OK. And now my mum has pretty much the same issue on her new machine, so I’m wondering what’s going on there, particularly as I played with the thought of getting one of these machines for myself.
Comment by michael:
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You don’t have to trust your Mac dealer’s assessment. Just calculate how much capacity is left. My 60Wh/10.8V MBP (late 2007) battery should have a theoretical capacity of 5555mAh, System Profiler reports a full charge capacity of 3264mAh. That’s just 59% of the theoretical maximum. With numbers like that and only 86 charge cycles my battery should be exchanged (and will be exchanged — I already made that happen three times) by every Mac dealer out there. They are looking at the exact same numbers, that’s what they base their decisions on. You might have to do a bit of talking (especially if you are in your third year of AppleCare like I was when I exchanged my battery for a third time) but with numbers as pathetic as that your battery will be exchanged.
That reminds me: I have to get my battery exchanged a fourth time before my warranty runs out. I don’t know why but mine consistently break after 60 or so cycles. Only one way to teach Apple, and that is to get my fourth free battery replacement :)
Comment by ssp:
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@michael:
Just calculate how much capacity is left.
In fact that’s what I did – as I tried to indicate with the numbers in the text. The numbers seem fine, e.g. 5508mAh capacity for one of the batteries, which I consider pretty much exactly what it should be. Yet, that battery only works for three hours in what I consider very moderate usage.
I also had my mum check whether there might be some rogue process consuming a lot of power. But the machine wasn’t hot and it only used 1% CPU or so when idling, just as it should.
Puzzling.
Comment by dan:
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Not having the luxury of a MBP I can only hand wave a guess, but don’t the new machines have two graphics chipsets? A high performance one and a lower performance one. Could your Mum and friend be running in ‘high performance’ and thus draining battery life?
Just my 2p!
Comment by ssp:
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@dan
Could your Mum and friend be running in ‘high performance’ and thus draining battery life?
I doubt that should be significant. My friend would know about it as he had a dual graphics machine before and my mum doesn’t do anything that’d stress the graphics (playing Snood or a video tops). As far as I can tell the current machines switch between the graphics cards automagically anyway. So there’s nothing they could do.
Comment by Nicholas Riley:
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The automatic graphics card switching is not terribly effective on the new MBPs. For example, my alarm app Pester causes it to be stuck on the NVIDIA display. I recommend switching manually with http://codykrieger.com/gfxCardStatus/ - since I don’t do anything graphically intensive, I just switch to Intel when I’m on battery and NVIDIA when I’m plugged into an external monitor at work.
Since I was upgrading from a late-2006 15” MBP which could barely manage 3 hours on a brand new battery, the 5+ hours of actual use I’m getting on my new MBP is terrific (even better than my old iBook). No complaints here, but I haven’t tried the 13” ones.
Comment by ssp:
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@Nicholas Riley:
Thanks for the hint. But I think the 13″ MacBook Pro only has a single graphics chip, so the switching shouldn’t be an issue.
Comment by Fredrik Motin:
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I just bought a MB Pro, with one of the reasons being that the claimed up to 10h of battery life, and now I have it fully charged recently and it now says “2:14 - 94%”
Not really 10h… Have you found out anything further about this? :S
