Just got my 15" PB in the mail a few days ago, here is my report on battery life. I am getting very good life out of mine (with the stock 50Wh battery) compared to other reports I have read. As far as calibrating my battery- when I took it out of the box it had maybe 60-70% charge in it, so I ran it straight off the battery until it died by going to sleep. Then I charged it to max both while using the computer and letting it sleep while charging. After it was charged I continued to use it normally for the next day both off the battery and while plugged into the wall.
Here are the specs on my PB:
1.33GHz G4
256MB RAM
60GB 4200rpm HD
Backlit KB
64MB VRAM
15" display
I put my energy saver settings to custom- I have the system sleep after 10 mins and the display will dim after 2.5 mins and turn off after 5 mins. Processor performance I have to reduced.
I came up about 15mins shy of being able to watch the entire DVD of The Fellowship of the Rings (short version) which equates to basically 2h45m on battery power. I had the display brightness down at 1 bar because the room was dim. I did, however, move it around from time to time and sometimes the brightness would increase to 4bars because the room was brighter. (Note- when the display was at 1 bar I could still see the movie just fine. Obviously sometimes this will not be the case but it is possible to watch a movie on 1 bar) Sometimes the backlit KB would kick in and I noticed that it won't automatically turn off (I set it to do this after 30s) if a DVD is playing? I had to press the F8 key to turn it off myself. Anyways after 2h45m I noticed that Airport was on the whole time too! Airport was not active though, i.e. not connected to any network, but I bet I could get a few more mins out of it had I turned it off completely. Bluetooth was off. Oh yeah and also I was listening to the movie through the speakers which were set at halfway plus or minus a few bars depending on the scene and the ambient noise.
I'm happy with the battery life so far, I did another run-down test with just using applications life Safari and Word and ichat, etc. I believe Airport was on but not active- bluetooth was off. I was connected to the web via the modem, display was a 1bar again, I got right around 4h plus or minus 5 mins.
I'm happy about these reports- and for those of you thinking of buying but worrying about the battery life- it is fine for me. With the release of those new 71Wh batteries I could probably watch the extended version LOTR DVD on battery power!
One thing I might note is that I only have the default 256MB RAM installed. Adding more (my 1GB stick is on backorder) might impact battery life although I am not sure by how much. Also I only have the 1.33GHz Processor and the slower 4200rpm HD which would help my battery life as well but can 170MHz or 12% increase in clock speed really take you down from 4h to 3h battery life? As for the HD- the 5400rpm drives reportedly have marginally increased power usage as opposed to the slower drives. There was an article at Tomshardware which tested 4200, 5400, and even 7200rpm drives and came up with a total battery life difference of a few minutes.
So there you have it- my report on battery life. One last thing- I have been using XBattery to monitor my battery (because I don't know the terminal command- what is it?) and the capacity was initially reported as 4.467Ah after the first calibration. After the first run-down test (normal usage/applications) the capacity was reported as 4.447Ah, and after the DVD run-down it now reports 4.423Ah. Yikes I can see the capacity drop every time I run it down! But the Apple specs say it is a 4400mAh battery so my capacity is right on par with their spec.
Anyways thought I'd post my experiences to help other out like this forum helped me out.
Ruahrc
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