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Cut your 13" MacBook Air battery life from 12 hours to 3 by using Dropbox

Despite not delivering a MacBook Air with a retina display, Apple users were duly pleased with the promise of all-day battery life from their laptops following the company's move to Intel's 'Haswell' processors. The 13" model achieves an impressive 12 hours of advertised battery life, although subsequent tests have shown the device can last even longer, whilst the 11" model can deliver an equally impressive 9 hours.

The lengthy battery life does, however, depend on which applications you may be using. High-demand programs like Flash, Photoshop and video-editing suites will cut down your battery significantly whilst plodding along with a simple web browser and a document editor should see you tapping away all day. Dropbox is the sort of app you wouldn't expect to drain away your power, however programmer and Qwikast founder Nico Schuele has found using it slashes the battery life from 12 hours to just three.

In his tests, Schuele found after using his Air for 20 minutes, the machine reported only 3 hours of battery life remained. Upon further investigation, Schuele found Dropbox to be the culprit, hogging 90% of his CPU through file-syncing. Even after this was over, the app continued to draw an unusual amount of energy, and pausing it only solved the problem marginally. Quitting Dropbox completely saw the battery life shoot up again to 14 hours (via iStat).

If you're an avid Dropbox user and thinking of purchasing a MacBook Air, we recommend you stick it out for a bit until this particular bug is fixed. 

Source: Nico Schuele via GeekImage via Apple

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