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On the official apple website it says that all Macbook pro batteries last for 7 hours, and 8 hours on the 17" macbook pro. However when I called my local apple retailer and asked him, he said the battery has a 'stand by' time of 7 hours, but if I were doing something like using an IDE to program and not watching videos, etc it could last upto 5-6 hours.

When I asked him about why the official site says 7 hours, he said yes but he didn't want to lie to me, and actually the battery only lasts 5-6 hours.

Does anyone who owns a macbook pro shed any light on this, such as how long the battery will actually last? I'll be buying a 15" macbook pro.

4 Answers 4

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ive got a 13 inch and mine on a full charge on full brightness lasts 4 -5 hours but yea it does depend on what you;re using it for because i went through the whole day in school and i was still on 23 by the end of the day and that was just looking at the internet and typing up on word for 180 minutes

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My 15" MacBook Pro is older. My battery's health is 90% and it has been through 27 cycles. I get about 1.5 - 2 hours of battery life from a full charge when doing heavy development, about 2.5 - 3 hours doing light web-surfing on a wired connection with lower CPU usage. Newer MacBook Pros get substantially better battery life, but exactly how much will depend very much on what you are doing. If you hit your CPU hard at all, you'll see vastly lower life. Running the hard drive will substantially reduce your time between charges. Running the optical drive or running wifi will reduce your time a bit. Dropping the brightness of the LCD backlight will increase your time.

The 7 hour quoted time is optimistic. If all you are doing is word processing and email, that's probably accurate with a slightly dimmed screen. If you are spending much of your time at 100% CPU and accessing the hard drive (regular compiles, say), it's way, way out.

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This question depends completely on your usage. I've had a macbook pro last 5-6 hours doing small webdev things but I didn't have wireless on and the brightness was decently high.

If you're doing huge compiles of objective-c and surfing the internet you're probably going to get less than that, if you're on super dim with no wireless and doing small homework assignments you'll probably get more than that.

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  • Why does the wireless / internet surfing take up so much battery? Typically I'll be running Netbeans doing web development and might be browsing some sites occasionally Nov 4, 2009 at 21:48
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    If you're using wireless, then inaddition to powering the system, the battery also to provide power to the Wireless tranmitter/receiver.
    – Sathyajith Bhat
    Nov 4, 2009 at 22:22
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I have the last (Mid 2008) revision Macbook Pro 15" before they replaced it with the original unibody models and despite having almost 200 cycles on my battery I still routinely pull ~3 hours of battery life doing casual web browsing along side my normal development stack.

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