MacBook Air battery issues beginning to surface: 2.5-4 hours life; 8-10 hours to recharge
I've never read a press release for a new product that touts its benefits, while also noting its weaknesses. The weaknesses are discovered by the early adopters, which is a good reason not to be one of the first to buy something new.
So a week after sales began, we're beginning to see some of the actual results of the Air. The area I'm watching most closely is how the battery life compares to the announced 5-hour life and, secondly, how long it takes for the battery to recharge. As a frequent traveler, these are the key determinants for me if I were to buy one. Reports from early buyers and a few testers are finding 2.5 to 4 hours of life. Of course, no one would care if the battery was removable.
WSJ reviewer Walt Mossberg tested battery life once and extrapolated a life of 4.5 hours.
"In my standard battery test, where I disable all power-saving features, set the screen brightness at maximum, turn on the Wi-Fi and play an endless loop of music, the MacBook Air's battery lasted 3 hours, 24 minutes. That means you could likely get 4.5 hours in a normal work pattern, almost the five hours Apple claims." ~Walt Mossberg. (Why he couldn't just have measured the life instead of extrapolating it escapes me.)
2/29 UPDATE: I am now testing a new MacBook Air on loan from Apple. I have been getting from 3 to 3:15 after the first few uses. Recharge time is a reasonable 4 hours with the machine on. My run time is while surfing the ne using WiFi, word processing and with the screen at about 70% of full brightness.
ArsTechnica, a well-regarded blog, has posted the results of their more extensive testing and report a little more than 2 1/2 hours of life between charges. That's actually quite shocking if the numbers hold up. Furthermore, they found that the battery life was not much different in the Air with solid state memory (SSD) in place of the hard drive. (The SSD model costs an additional $1300.)
We should learn more about the battery life over the next few days as more report their experiences on Apple's Website here. But it would be nice if companies didn't make us go through all this effort to learn what will eventually become widely known.
Anandtech Air analysis gets 2.4 to 4.3 hours depending on how the notebook is used.
So here's the data; you be the judge.
Comments from owners gathered from apple.com and other discussion groups:
1. I ran my battery completely out last night (to 0%, at which point the machine shut down). Plugged it in overnight. When I got up 6 hours later it was only charged to 64%. I'll see how long it takes to get to full when I get to the office this morning and plug in there.
2. I am really frustrated. My first air had serious battery problems where it took over 10 hours to charge. I tried the battery condition etc and pram resets and it didn't help. I took it to the genius bar and they also noticed when you plug it in it says it says 10 hours to charge. They agreed there was a problem and replaced the unit.
I got the second air home plugged it in and it was at about 80% After about 90 mins it charged fully. I took it off the ac power and used it until the batt ran completely down. I left it off and plugged it in about 11 pm. I woke up at 7am noticed the charge light was still amber and turned on the air and it was at 75%
3. I ran mine all the way out last night as well. After 6 hours of recharge, it was only at 45%. Now, after a total of about 9 hours, it's at 95%. This doesn't bother me too much, but it does seem to match up with your experience.
4. One thing that has pleasantly surprised me is the not too shabby battery performance. Today is the first day that I've actually used the MBA in somewhat of a normal setting (yesterday I was busy doing a clean OS install, installing apps, copying files, etc...) and I have had it running for about 4:30 so far in normal use and it is just now reaching the end of battery life. I'm defining normal use as wireless, web, music, couple of videos, played around in photoshop, lightroom, etc... Nothing very heavy and I do have the screen brightness set relatively low (just below halfway) but that is pretty decent use.
5. Ok, NOW I am seeing it too.
We ordered a few MBA's (1.8 with SSD) so I grabbed another one to confirm this; not sure what is going on but BOTH show the same symptoms (try it): - and there seems to be a way to replicate it:
From out of the package it works fine. Using it a bit, then plugging it in: Fine. Charges subjectively as fast as an MBP.
Here is the catch. I let both systems run down 100% (so that they went to force-sleep, then off completely - the way you usually condition the battery).
Hours later, I plug both in - and get this - after 6 1/2 hours or charging, both are at 61% and 64% respectively!!! So, there you are with the 10h charging time!!!
But, to top it off, once back on the desktop, the charging stabilizes. Will say, when back on the desktop it initially gave another 4h (and longer) to charge fully. After about 2-3 minutes, it went to 50 minutes - and sure enough, both seem to charge fine now, at 'normal speed' and were both over 70% within 10 minutes.
SO the conclusion, at least for the 2 systems I tried: This might be some software bug, or something with the charging circuitry. They either charge very differently depending if OFF or aSLEEP; or there is an issue if charged all the way from 0. In any case, it certainly would have taken 10hours or more on both - yet once I turned both on charging stabilized within minutes.....
Now if someone wants to speculate IF this is Hardware (ugh) related or Apple can address with a firmware or software patch...... (try it - unless both my systems were from a 'bad' batch I assume you can replicate this).
...Ok,
so RIGHT after I wrote this, one of the MBAs, now at 75%, went from 40 minutes left to charge to 2:25 !
SOmething is definitely wrong here :-(
MacWorld and Gizmodo were on to something I am afraid.....
It's almost as if they go into trickle charge mode every few minutes, right from the start (and not just at 90%)....
6. Mine has the same prob. Takes 8-10 hours to charge. On it's third cycle now with no change. Have also reset the SMC. This does not look good.....
7. I think that there is something seriously flawed here. I bought two MacBook Airs, both standard HDD models. I am getting 4-5 hours in regular usage including MS Office 2008, Mail and Safari. With light use - the machine is on but I just check mail from time to time - I get over 5 hours. Right now, just with Mail and Safari, I have been using the machine for half hour and the battery is at around 90% and it is indicating 4:23 remaining charge which is consistent with previous results. My battery shows 4871mAh as the battery capacity and 4300mAh remaining. Both my machines consistently provide 4-5 hours with Wifi (802.11n) on and moderate screen brightness. Battery is set to Better Battery Life.
8. Bad batch or not, mine is still taking forever to charge as well. Ive let it run down and charge back up about 3 times now and it is still taking around 8 hours to charge back up. Also, has anyone noticed that the power drains quite faster than the previous books when in sleep mode?
9. Seeing the same problem here. After first full conditioning charge takes 8+ hours. I concur something is very wrong here, charge times are very wrong. Also, after 48 hours and 1 charge cycle, the Air shows it's had 5 charge cycles and Battery Health is 95%. A drop of 5% health / day gives me 20 days of battery life ? Apple, please help.
10. on 6 cycles myself. hovering right around 5k mah on #5 I did the "calibration" routine. BIG MISTAKE - went from normal operation to a >10hr re-charge. It seems that just so long as you don't run it completely down in a deep-sleep it charges just fine, if you do, god help you
"With our Verizon Wireless mobile broadband modem plugged in and connected, the MacBook Air lasted 2 hours and 40 minutes on a charge. During that time we primarily worked in Google Docs, while occasionally surfing to other sites for research. We got a little more than 3.5 hours of endurance with just Wi-Fi on, which is still well short of Apple’s claim of 5 hours of wireless productivity."
Oh, battery life! Got around 4 hours last night managing the site, ordering from Amazon, playing iTunes music, and random madness. Not scientific, but I certainly wasn’t by a power supply and unless Daylight Savings hit twice and my clocks rolled back, it was a good 4 hours of battery life.
Apple claimed five hours of battery life with wireless enabled, and from my testing I think that would be possible ... under the right situation. With screen brightness at 25%, Bluetooth off, and WiFi on, the MacBook Air got 4 hours and 20 minutes of battery life with above average web activity. Half of this time was spent in Mac OS, with the other half in Vista. If you had very light internet traffic, or even had wireless disabled and were just typing on the notebook you should get five hours or more productivity from the battery.......Not only can you not swap the battery if it dies while traveling, but to make matters worse the charging speed is abysmal. Our MacBook Air from a dead state would only reach 25-30% after charging for one hour with the notebook turned off. On most notebooks, in this period of time the battery would be well above 50% if not much higher....
More comments:
I reached full charge from 0 to 100. Approx 6hrs. (third time doing this, second time after SMC fix). I then took off the charger, set screen to full bright-do not sleep, and played itunes radio channel until we reached 5% (warning of "reserve" power appears at 5%) It lasted 3:05 hours (not bad, not good)
Then plugged it in to charge. Calculated--said 3:46 till full. That is good. Moments later, 2:55 till full. That is better. I have seen a continuos discrepancy in iStat and the OS toolbar. When charging they seem 50 min apart (i stat longer) every time. At some point the sync towards the end. So, we will see how this plays out. The reality seems to be charge recharge and move on. I have used 8 cycles in 5 days. That WILL be a problem for Apple. At 300 I believe they have to swap if you are under warranty. I will be there in 5 months. I am sure that is not in their business plan. Clearly an issue, but so far it is manageable because the MBA is so nice.
Had mine for a full week. I LOVE IT!!! It's the perfect size to take everywhere/anywhere. Only issue is charged to 100% last night. Woke up this morning to a fully charged unit with 4:31 hours of charge available. Close to the 5 hours Steve J mentioned. Then immediately it dropped to 3:11...then I decided to run a movie in itunes to test remaining charge. It immediately dropped to 1:45!!! Not enough to even watch the 2 hr movie. Currently the MBA has 1:27 minutes remaining after 17 minutes into the movie. So the bottom line is there's another 1:47 hours left before the movies over, but the MBA says it only has 1:24 hours left! Let's see if I can even watch 1 movie on this (so called) 100% charge!
I haven't done any calibration. My unit charges to 100% overnight. But this morning it only lasted through 1 hr and 42 minutes of a 2 hr 6 minute movie! That's nowhere near the 5 hours Mr Jobs spoke of!
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