AWESOME Battery Life, New MBP

I just purchased a 15" MacBook Pro over the weekend. I must say that I am astounded by the battery life. After years of using Dell laptop PCs at work, and getting 2 1/2 hours at best out of the battery when it is new (declines over time), I find I am getting an easy 4 hours of full time use out of the battery on the MBP. I bought two batteries, expecting that I wouldn't get more than 2 1/2 hours, so that I could use the MBP on long airplane trips. Now I am almost regretting buying the second battery - almost no need for it.

I haven't done anything special to get it to run for so long, just used the stock Energy Saver settings. I have completely cycled both batteries though, fully charging them, then running them completely flat and then full recharging them. I believe this is called "calibrating" your battery.

Amazing, simply amazing. Apple continues to astound me.

Pleased to hear you are getting that much battery time with your MBP, as I've been pondering getting one.

The state of the art in laptop battery life has really improved of late. I have a Thinkpad x61s at work that gives me at least 5+ hours (I haven't really pushed it yet) before I have to recharge or swap out. My wife's Thinkpad R61 has gone 6+ hours. I would hope that with the solid state HDs, we'll see even longer usage times.

I was also impressed by MBP's battery life. I had a Sony Vaio before my Mac and the best I got on the battery was 2.5 hours. I wasn't expecting better with my MBP considering it's more powerful and has the same screen size.

take the second back, youll not need it

I'm glad to hear a happy customer relating to the MBP battery. I guess the negatives always out weigh the positives on a forum like this one.

My MBP battery life is nice as well. *knock on wood*

I also have the new 2.6 GHz MBP w/200G 7200RPM drive. Like the others it also lasts well over 4 hours (I have run it 4:45 and gotten it to the point where it warns me).. The only thing that is slightly troubling is that the recovery period seems to be roughly twice as long as the drain before it shows 100% capacity again. I thought that these new batteries were a quicker recovery than that.

That is interesting Big-Foot (and sweet machine by the way. I couldn't justify buying the 2.6 GHz model, but I would have liked too!). I have two batteries, the one that came with the machine and one extra one that I bought. The recharge time of the battery that came with the machine is pretty good. I haven't timed it, but it is a few hours. The battery I purchased seems to take twice as long to reach full charge. Both deliver roughly the same 4 1/2 hours of run time.

Perhaps Apple is using more than one supplier for batteries (?) or perhaps the one that came with the machine is just of a newer type and charges more quickly? The same may be true for yours; your battery may be of the same type as the one that I purchased, and thus takes longer to charge up fully. Pure speculation of course, but I just wanted you to know that you are not alone in this.

And again, sweet machine! Congratulations!

Thanks Mac57 - The slow recovery rate hasn't presented itself as a problem to me "yet" but if it does - I'll take a cue from you and purchase a second battery..

Cheers!