[cdhostage]

An alarming trend is occuring - the Lombard PowerBook G3 shipped with a 55 watt-hour battery, the Pismo Powerbook G3 shipped with a 50 watt-hour battery, the original iBook came with a 47 watt-hour one. Fine and good, these all use the low-power G3 CPUs and have smaller screens than the current crop.

The current PBs have 46, 47, and 58 watt-hour batteries, but have much higher power demands for their faster G4s, larger screens, and faster HDs. The current iBooks have 46 and 55 WH batteries.

The battery on my new 15Al is quite small physically, about half the volume of my Pismo's battery.
My Pismo could run F@H and surf the Internet for about three and a half hours on a full charge. My PB does the same for about two and a half.

Why didn't Apple design the new PBs with more capable power sources?

[Fellow2000]

I don't know but it is really sad. It was one of the original reasons I wanted an apple portable, was for the battery life, but now I am thinking about switching to a centrino.

[woodsman]

15" Al battery life is REALLY, REALLY BAD !!!!!

I'm currently in a hotel in Milan, Italy. I'm a professional photographer and I use my PB as a portable darkroom.

I'm over here to shoot villas in Tuscany. I use a large professional digital back and I need to process the images, save them to Photoshop, and them burn them onto a CD or DVD.

The 15" Al PB is a replacement for my 15" Ti PB. I get MUCH LESS battery time on the new PB -- much, much less!

I have an extra battery on backorder from Apple, but that is not a solution. The new PB gets much less battery life than my older Ti PB. This is a big step BACKWARDS for me, and I have some serious issues here to use the new PB as a portable darkroom.

How can Apple go backwards on battery life ?????????

I am NOT a happy camper!

[omegahack]

i get about 3 hours 30 mins on my 15" al

[aapljack]

I get about 3hrs. of battery life, but I am not usually doing processor intensive tasks. For things like woodsman is doing, saving large Photoshop files, burning cds and dvds on the regular in one session, I am guessing he probably gets under 2hrs. battery life.

Hopefully Newer Tech will come out with some higher capacity batteries for the new ALPBs.

-b

[kentuckyfried]

Is there any problem with leaving the 15" plugged in all the time, or should I be using the battery at full charge until it runs out, and then charging it up again?

[cdhostage]

I've noticed that with PC laptops, those that are plugged in all the time whenever they are on have very very poor battery life. Now, I'm not making any statements - it may be that the power drain is enormous on said laptops and that the battery can't cut it, or that the batteries are inferior and can't do the job, or that the following situation occurs:

I've been told that lithium-ion batteries have a limited number of charge-recharge cycles. Dell, maker of extremely cheap computers, could make the power supply put electricity through the computer only when the battery was charging, and let the battery power the computer whenever it's charged. Assuming "charged" is 95%, then the plugged-in laptop goes to 100, back down to 95, 100, 95, and there's your effective useful life going down the giant hamster tube. So the question is, in the PC laptops that are plugged in constantly that have very poor battery life, is it incompetence on the part of the battery manafacturer, or the computer manafacturer?

[kentuckyfried]

Well...do mac powerbooks have that problem or not??! =P

I guess to be safe, I should only plug in the laptop when the battery is out of juice?

[ae86_16v]

Originally posted by cdhostage:
An alarming trend is occuring - the Lombard PowerBook G3 shipped with a 55 watt-hour battery, the Pismo Powerbook G3 shipped with a 50 watt-hour battery, the original iBook came with a 47 watt-hour one. Fine and good, these all use the low-power G3 CPUs and have smaller screens than the current crop.

The current PBs have 46, 47, and 58 watt-hour batteries, but have much higher power demands for their faster G4s, larger screens, and faster HDs. The current iBooks have 46 and 55 WH batteries.

Correct me if I am wrong. But Watt-Hour is only a measurement of energy requirement, but not capacity of the battery.

So the only thing we know is that the new PBs uses less energy from the battery.

Milliamps is generally the measure of capacity of a battery.

Of course let me know if I am wrong.

[cdhostage]

Originally posted by ae86_16v:
Correct me if I am wrong. But Watt-Hour is only a measurement of energy requirement, but not capacity of the battery.

So the only thing we know is that the new PBs uses less energy from the battery.

Milliamps is generally the measure of capacity of a battery.

Of course let me know if I am wrong.

Electric companies charge by the kilowatt-hour. That's a measure of energy, or work. I think you're confusing it with power, or work done in a unit time. A kilowatt-hour is equivalent to one kilowatt of work being done for an hour. Running a microwave for an hour will run the meter up about a kilowatt-hour. The volt and the amp, measures of electric potential (like gravity is gravitic potential) and current (the number of electrons passing a given point in a second).

Milliamps are an idirect indicator of the power (wattage) of an electric current (multiply the amperage by the voltage to get the wattage). Electronics components generally run at 12 volts, and saying "this battery can supply x amps" is definitely useful for figuring out the absolute most load a battery can handle, but not useful for determining the total power storage of that battery.

I get my unfortunate shivers from the fact that the 50 WH battery in my Pismo powered it for 5 hours in its heyday, and my new PB's 46 WH battery can power it for a hair under 4.

[nobitacu]

Maybe the new G5 for Powerbooks like correct all these battery problems and let us run our Powerbooks for more than 5 hours. You never know... this might be just one of the main things they are working on when building the new G5 CPU chips for the next Powerbooks.

Ming