Will they ever design a longer-lasting battery

I mean in terms of holding a charge. I've had my MBP since November. Out of the box it could run at least 4 hours with the same brightness fairly high, WiFi and bluetooth running. Now, it barely lasts 2 hours. I guess I can expect after another 4 months it'll be down to an hour of less and I'll have to cary the brick everywhere with me and hunt for outlets. And for the price you have to pay, replacements batteries just aren't worth it. $130 gone and in a few months you're back where you started.

Maybe it's like the light-bulbs. For many, many years there has been the ability for make a light-bulb that will far outlast the standard incandescent bulb, but for some reason, they've never been mass-produced and available to the public. I guess it just wasn't considered a good profit-making move to offer such a product. Same for battery-makers. There needs to be a battery design revolution!!

Do you use Coconut Battery? What is it reporting?

Getting 4hr from a MBP with radios running and brightness high is pretty good .. I think that's better performance than Apple advertises based on lower power consumption settings.

At about 5 months, mine will run for 3 hours (3.5 if I dim the screen and turn off the radios). Coconut reports that I have 95% after 117 loadcycles.

ToddG said:

Do you use Coconut Battery? What is it reporting?

Getting 4hr from a MBP with radios running and brightness high is pretty good .. I think that's better performance than Apple advertises based on lower power consumption settings.

At about 5 months, mine will run for 3 hours (3.5 if I dim the screen and turn off the radios). Coconut reports that I have 95% after 117 loadcycles.

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About the same here. I generally get about 3:30 on a full charge, and that will vary depending on how the battery is maintained throughout the course of a few days (partial charges, etc). CoconutBattery will report different capacities as my charging habits change from week to week.

The inherent problem is that notebooks have become more and more powerful while battery technology has remained relatively stagnant. The manufacturers are making their notebooks more efficient to compensate, but unless there's a revolution in battery technology, you'll find that the only way to significantly increase battery life is to either install a larger battery (more cells, heavier, longer time needed to charge) or make the notebook more efficient.

My MacBook Pro is absolutely consistent with other notebooks I've owned, it's just an unfortunate state of affairs with battery technology.

I've owned a few laptops before, so I pretty much expected this, but it's still annoying.

I wasn't running a program, just timing while I was using it. The real annoying thing is that the OS timer will tell me I have 4 hours, but 2 hours later I will be almost dead. I suppose I need another battery monitor like you mentioned.

I really hope they push SSD's into mainstream production. That alone would be a huge power saver, not to mention all the other benefits over a spinning disk. I doubt they would, but if Apple would install an SSD, I would almost consider getting one now. What is the price on a 64GB drive right now? A lot of stuff that eats up memory can be parked on the external drive.

On my new 17 inch MBP i can get about 3.5 hours on longest battery life power setting.

fleurya said:

I've owned a few laptops before, so I pretty much expected this, but it's still annoying.

I wasn't running a program, just timing while I was using it. The real annoying thing is that the OS timer will tell me I have 4 hours, but 2 hours later I will be almost dead. I suppose I need another battery monitor like you mentioned.

I really hope they push SSD's into mainstream production. That alone would be a huge power saver, not to mention all the other benefits over a spinning disk. I doubt they would, but if Apple would install an SSD, I would almost consider getting one now. What is the price on a 64GB drive right now? A lot of stuff that eats up memory can be parked on the external drive.

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i dont see SSD as a solution at all. sure itll help, but not huge.

kgeier82 said:

i dont see SSD as a solution at all. sure itll help, but not huge.

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Are you kidding me? The hard drive is the biggest drain on the battery because it's the last component with moving parts. Get rid of spinning a platter 90 times per second and you'll save a ton of battery power. Running any sort of motor requires a lot of power.

Why do you think the Nano can hold just as long of a charge as its larger brother, despite having a much smaller battery? Simple, because it doesn't have to waste power spinning anything as everything inside the little device has no moving parts.

Even hybrid drives should significantly increase battery times as you'll reduce the number of times you have to access the platters.