7-Hour MacBook Pro Battery Experiment
So you bought your new MacBook and you’re not only excited about the stunning design or the revolutionary OS, the supposed 7-hour battery really makes you giddy. Well my refurbished 13” MacBook Pro is advertised with a 7 hour battery, so I thought I’d really put it to the test. Before I jump into my experiment, let me give you some back history on my MacBook Pro.
As I said, my MacBook Pro is refurbished. I received on September 9th 2009, so 9/9/09. It has a hard drive of 160GB, 2GB of ram with a 2.26GHz processor. Since it is refurbished, that may have some effect on battery life, but I can’t say for certain.
So let’s begin with the actual experiment. In order to give my battery the full advantage, I used these controls: I made sure the battery started out with 100%. I also turned the brightness of the screen down from 2-5 clicks, I know that seems very low, but again, I wanted to give the battery every opportunity to succeed. These are some of the things I did while testing my battery life: I did simple browsing in Firefox, had Tweetie opened the whole time and regularly tweeted, and wrote notes in TextEdit. I had keyboard brightness turned up all the way and Bluetooth turned off.
I started at 4:00pm. Here are some random time intervals at which I took down the battery percentage.
- 4:02-99%
- 4:08-98%
- 4:35-90%
- 4:45-88%
- 4:54-84%
- 5:00-83%
- 5:26-74%
- 5:37-71%
- 5:45-69%
- 5:52-67%
- 6:00-65%
- 6:23-60%
- 6:36-56%
- 6:52-51%
- 7:00-50%
- 7:11-47%
- 7:17-45%
- 7:25-42%
- 7:34-40%
- *Started watching a video online at 40%
- 7:44-36%
- 7:53-32%
- 8:10-30%
- 35 minutes of inactivity
- 8:45-23%
- 8:52-21%
- 9:00-20%
Those are the results for my 7-hour battery experiment. So in conclusion, with the brightness turned down most of the way and doing simple processes, I was able to get about 5 hours. It isn’t a 7 hour battery, but it’s pretty darn close. I hope you find my extra time and extreme geekiness interesting.
Troy Parquer
Reader Comments (3)
I think the refurbished part of it maybe took no more than an hour out of it. But why did you stop at 20%? You could of gotten a bit less than an hour more out of it!
I'd do this myself, but I don't have the 7 hours of stuff to do on Twitter & simple online stuff. Great post though!
I also question why you stopped at 20%. At that point, there was an unknown amount of time left. I say this because it also looks like you failed to re-calibrate the battery. I would have done this with a new Mac Book Pro, and definitely with a refurbished one. I'd also do this once during the three month period you had it. However, to do a test like this without having first re-calibrated the battery would definitely give you flawed results...with the flaws showing up more towards the end.
i got a mbp 13 unibody for crimbo this year and i get lyk 4 hours usage never seen anyone get more than 6 its rediculus apple brag about battery being better than pc but my old pc could do 5.30 hours!!!