To Aluminium Macbook 13" Owners (Not MBP)


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I own the short-lived Aluminum Macbook 13", and while I am pleased with it for the most part, I feel like I have horrible battery life. Apple says we can expect 4-5 hours, 4 being realistic, but I've only ever been able to last 3 hours some. How about you guys? I don't want to invest in a new battery if I can't expect better results.

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I own the short-lived Aluminum Macbook 13", and while I am pleased with it for the most part, I feel like I have horrible battery life. Apple says we can expect 4-5 hours, 4 being realistic, but I've only ever been able to last 3 hours some. How about you guys? I don't want to invest in a new battery if I can't expect better results.

I get in the 3-4hr range, if I only do web browsing on wifi then I get 4.5-4.8ish. I never tried to see how long it lasted with the battery new.

My settings:

Bluetooth - off (never use it)

Screen - 1/2 bright or less when on battery

Keyboard backlight - at 3-4 dots or less depending on the rooms light

Browser - Safari/webkit nightly

Apps - some iTunes, Adium

I get about 4.5hrs out of that on a full charge using Neowin, coding horror, last.fm, lifehacker, deviantArt, smashing magazine. and a little itunes MP3 playing (30-40min).

If MAY be able to hit 5 if I turned off the wifi(use NIC), the keyboard backlight, no heavy flash sites, and did no music or messaging.

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Thanks for the replies! For me its:

Bluetooth: OFF

Brightness: Medium or less

Wifi: ON

Keyboard Lighting: OFF

Usual Running Apps: Adium, Mail, Firefox, Skype, iTunes, Word

Am I doing anything wrong? Should I consider getting a new battery?

My dad uses an older White Macbook and that lasts much longer than mine.

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Do you calibrate your battery? I don't know if helps a battery charge last longer or just increases the battery life, but it's worth a shot. You can find out how to do it by going to Help and type 'calibrating battery' and the file should come up top of the list.

With Wi-fi on and Bluetooth off I generally manage about five hours from a 100% charged battery. I turn off the apps I'm not using, so usually it's just Firefox, Mail, iCal, Pages and Preview, but I've managed to rip a DVD and then watch it (about 2h 30m long) on one charge. I don't have a back-lit keyboard, but the I usually screen brightness adjust itself unless I'm concerned about running out of battery.

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Do you calibrate your battery? I don't know if helps a battery charge last longer or just increases the battery life, but it's worth a shot. You can find out how to do it by going to Help and type 'calibrating battery' and the file should come up top of the list.

With Wi-fi on and Bluetooth off I generally manage about five hours from a 100% charged battery. I turn off the apps I'm not using, so usually it's just Firefox, Mail, iCal, Pages and Preview, but I've managed to rip a DVD and then watch it (about 2h 30m long) on one charge. I don't have a back-lit keyboard, but the I usually screen brightness adjust itself unless I'm concerned about running out of battery.

I have calibrated my battery, but it doesn't seem to do much. I think this issue might be specific to Alu Macbooks.

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Correct me if I'm wrong, but I was under the impression that Apple simply renamed the aluminum MacBooks to MacBook Pro without changing anything about the systems. I thought they did this to answer the complaints about the lack of a pro level replacement for the 12" PowerBook.

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^Apple didn't change much, right... however, what they did change was the battery system. They now use these high-quality-up-to-7-hour-batteries... :)

Best bet is to compare the current battery capacity with the original battery capacity. Mine was around 4200 (yes, more than the original value) when I got my Macbook in 2008...

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3963 mAh are still quite good (although slightly worse than mine, seeing that yours has only half the loadcycles but less capacity)

I'd say keep the battery - a new one won't significantly improve your battery life and for that, 120€ is way too much...

btw, you can make screenshots of windows very easily by holding shift-cmd-4 + space on the window:)

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  • 2 weeks later...

Apple has been known to slightly overstate battery life. My MacBook does get around 3-4 hours on regular, everyday usage, but I can get 4+ hours with the brightness turned all the way down, the keyboard backlighting turned off, Bluetooth turned off, etc. But most of the time I just keep the notebook plugged in, so battery life has never been much of an issue for me. I'm not usually unplugged for more than 1-2 hours at a time.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I was under the impression that Apple simply renamed the aluminum MacBooks to MacBook Pro without changing anything about the systems. I thought they did this to answer the complaints about the lack of a pro level replacement for the 12" PowerBook.

The unibody is virtually identical, but the rebranded 13'' MacBook Pro does feature longer-lasting, non-replaceable batteries, which in turn eliminated the battery door on the bottom, making the entire bottom a single piece. I believe there were also improvements made to the display lighting, and a SD card slot was added. Nothing earth-shattering, but it's still a better model than the one it replaced.

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  • 4 weeks later...

my current capacity is higher than my original capacity - how the ... ?

you know how sometimes, there is a little more liquid in your cola bottle than in your friends, although both are unopened before?

it doesnt happen often but sometimes, you get a tiny little bit more. its the same with batteries. ;)

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I typically get about 3 hours on mine with display brightness between 25% and 50%. I know it lasted a bit longer when it was brand new, but I don't think I've ever gotten 4 hours out of it.

1e7d4_Screen shot 2010-04-02 at 2.29.35 AM.png

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This is mine below (MacBook Pro 13.3); apparently my computer is 125months old for some reason - even though it is only 1 1/2 months old lol. As for the issue of battery life - it all depends on the applications you're using, how many are running, how much polling the do when running which can dictate whether the CPU can get into a low power state and so on. The estimations I find from vendors are wildly optimistic based on the individual running all nicely written applications when in reality all you need is just one badly written application and you'll find your battery life drops like a stone. The best thing I can suggest is maybe looking at all the applications you have that you run, check through your system monitor for applications, widget and other stuff running in the background.

post-317544-1270773246556.png

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This is mine below (MacBook Pro 13.3); apparently my computer is 125months old for some reason - even though it is only 1 1/2 months old lol. As for the issue of battery life - it all depends on the applications you're using, how many are running, how much polling the do when running which can dictate whether the CPU can get into a low power state and so on. The estimations I find from vendors are wildly optimistic based on the individual running all nicely written applications when in reality all you need is just one badly written application and you'll find your battery life drops like a stone. The best thing I can suggest is maybe looking at all the applications you have that you run, check through your system monitor for applications, widget and other stuff running in the background.

Have you had the logic board replaced by any chance?

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I'm having a hard time finding it (I may have dreamed it), but it seems like in the past few months there was an article posted on Neowin's front page that compared web browsers (specifically HTML5 and Flash usage). One thing from the article that stuck with me was that on a Mac, Safari runs a lot "cooler" (less demanding on the CPU) than other web browsers. Although other web browser are generally more "snappy" and have better features, Safari is arguably optimized for better battery life than other web browsers.

Just a thought.

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I'm having a hard time finding it (I may have dreamed it), but it seems like in the past few months there was an article posted on Neowin's front page that compared web browsers (specifically HTML5 and Flash usage). One thing from the article that stuck with me was that on a Mac, Safari runs a lot "cooler" (less demanding on the CPU) than other web browsers. Although other web browser are generally more "snappy" and have better features, Safari is arguably optimized for better battery life than other web browsers.

Just a thought.

From what I understand Safari does less polling and other background behaviour which allow the CPU to fall into lower power states; the problem is that with Firefox hardly any optimisations have been done on the Mac platform to the same degree that has happened in the Windows world.

It will be interesting to see how things play out with Webkit2 and whether spawning processes will result in higher CPU utilisation and use more battery power when in use.

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