[Kenstee]

http://www.powerpage.org/archives/20...enchmarks.html

Doesn't sound too great. At best, it MAY be as good as the last batch of PBs.

Now it's clear why Apple has been silent on this issue. Maybe Steve should have said "And one more thing......the battery life sucks."

Ah, such is life with Rev A.

Let the flaming, defensive statements, degrading the source, accusations, etc. begin!

[Big Mac]

neat

[ruttopia]

just got my MBP today. i let it charge to full, turned screen brightness up 100% (beautiful by the way!), had power settings at normal, and pulled the plug (magsafe is fun). let it sit for a minute or two while it calculated and it came up with...

...


... 3:08 remaining.

we all know how reliable that calculation is - but hey, it's SOMETHING right??

this is for the 2.0 w/ 1gb ram and 7200rpm harddrive.

[mduell]

It will be interesting to see a test with USB devices plugged in (there were some reports that OS X has a bug similar to Windows C3-preventing USB driver bug).

[Kenstee]

Will also be interesting to see..

1. How it performs after callibration
2. How long it will hold a 100% charge until it degrades and can no longer can be charged to 100%

[uicandrew]

i'm not sure if i understand why o'grady unchecked the "let the hard drive sleep" box. i can't think of a single situation why you wouldn't let the hard drive sleep.

i can understand why you don't want the display to dim (if you're working away from the powerbook and want to glance at it occasionally, like check a sports or stock ticker)

do you guys think it was a fair assessment?

as for the usb device, i don't think i ever read anything about the error being in os X. i know i read that the problem was with windows, not intel.

[PurpleRabbit73]

My dream: A new battery comes out later free of charge for MacBook owners. Similar to the iPod problem with battery, apple will crumble under various complaints and come out with a battery twice the life of the standard one!!!!!!

[thephotodork]

Sorry PurpleRabbit, but I doubt that Apple would be so nice as to do that. Since the battery appears to be no worse than the previous PowerBook's battery. Although you never know, they did give every MacBook Pro owner an unexpected present on Valentine's Day, and word on the street is that Steve has a surprise for April Fool's Day . . . .

[Gee4orce]

What ? 2:30 with bluetooth and airport on and no hard drive sleep and 75% brightness is pretty good if you ask me...

[thephotodork]

I agree, that is a pretty non-power-conserving test. If I am trying to conserve power, I disconnect all wireless and run at 4/16 brightness . . . with processor reduced and hard disk sleep when possible, this is a good test that O'Grady ran to show how much time you get when you are actually USING the machine to surf the internet wirelessly and so on . . . it should not be taken as the max battery life by any means.

[PurpleRabbit73]

Based on the estimated battery life on the MBP, for what it offers do you think it is above, below expected life? Or just what it should be. Keep in mind this is apple we're talking about, a company famous for their innovative strides.

It says the battery features new Lithium-Polymer technology. What's the point when it has basically the battery life of a 15" PB or maybe even worse........

[iomatic]

O'Grady's lost his touch in the last few years. His posts are spurious in substance, and his grammar— well, if you're a "journalist" you should at least attempt, for posterity, to have a comprehension of syntactical errors.

That said, it's nice to see some semblance of testing. Any others?

[darcybaston]

I would want to leave the hard drive spun up while recording live audio. Ya never know when you need that sucker moving for a sudden press of 'record'.

[inkhead]

guys, please. come on... the only real-world test is browsing a full suite of porn sites for hours on end.

[John123]

Originally Posted by inkhead

guys, please. come on... the only real-world test is browsing a full suite of porn sites for hours on end.

[Chuckit]

Better than my rev-before-last (the first one with the 5400 RPM drives) PowerBook. So it sounds all right to me.

[stevekstevek]

Originally Posted by darcybaston

I would want to leave the hard drive spun up while recording live audio. Ya never know when you need that sucker moving for a sudden press of 'record'.

Why would that matter? You have 1GB of RAM, remember, so you have plenty of disk cache to hold the data till the disk spins up, and the data rates to disk are surely fast enough to catch up with your audio -- 96kHz*24bits*5 channel audio is only 1.44MByte/sec

[Gee4orce]

Posting this from my 12" G4 867MHz, which had a brand new replacement battery a couple of months ago. Currently showing 2:20, and I"ve been using it for about 10 minutes.

...oh, and at a guess, it's about 1/8th as fast as the MBP

[ll350]

Since PurpleRabbit73 asked:

I think that the purpose of the new litium polymer battery is so that it could be thinner. From what I've read about litium-polymer batteries, that is the main practical benefit. I'm not 100% sure, but I remember reading some where that there is another internal component directly above the battery bay in the MacBook Pro. It think it was the hard drive, but that wouldn't make much sense, since it would have to be right in the middle of the laptop. However, because the battery is located in the middle of the laptop, there has to be something above it, even if it is only the logic board and the Keyboard.

When you consider that along with the fact that when it's closed, the MBP is only 1 inch thick, then I think that using the polymer battery was the only way to go. In the rush to get these machines out, they probably used nearly identical logic boards in the iMac and MBP, and didn't take the time to design a smaller, dedicated logic board for the MBP that would allow for a thicker battery and Optical Drive to occupy one side of the laptop, with most of the thickness of the logic board on the other side.

[jeebus]

Originally Posted by ll350

Since PurpleRabbit73 asked:

In the rush to get these machines out, they probably used nearly identical logic boards in the iMac and MBP, and didn't take the time to design a smaller, dedicated logic board for the MBP that would allow for a thicker battery and Optical Drive to occupy one side of the laptop, with most of the thickness of the logic board on the other side.

What are you smoking and where can I get some?

Trust me, Apple did not reduce the thickness of the MacBook by 10% by throwing an iMac logic board in there. That is so ridiculous the logic board in the iMac is not even close to the right size for the MacBook. They moved the battery to the middle so they could make the laptop thinner they even took out the shielding for the trackpad ribbon. Moving the battery under the optical drive again would result in another 1.1" laptop like the alu powerbooks. It's quite evident that Apple has done everything they can to make this laptop as thin as humanly possible, not many companies would go through that much effort to shave off 0.1 inches.

Also, PurpleRabbit the Lithium-polymer battery IS a higher capacity battery than the one in the G4 powerbooks but it's quite likely that the Macbook pro uses more power with it's much faster components and extra bright screen so I don't know why you are so surprised to hear that battery life is about the same.

[galarneau]

So where is the hard drive located?

I wonder if it's going to take removing 100 screws to do a drive swap.

If those damn Apple industrial designers are so smart, they should be able to figure out how to make a hard drive that is swappable with a screwdriver in 3 minutes.

[analogika]

Originally Posted by stevekstevek

Why would that matter? You have 1GB of RAM, remember, so you have plenty of disk cache to hold the data till the disk spins up, and the data rates to disk are surely fast enough to catch up with your audio -- 96kHz*24bits*5 channel audio is only 1.44MByte/sec

That 1GB holds OS, drivers, Logic, any number of effects plug-ins and/or software instruments, and possibly/probably a device console or analysis software.

Now try recording 16 channels, which is more realistic. That's 4.6 MB per SECOND.


You do not wat to spin down your hard drive when recording audio. Period.

[jhonizzle]

Can anyone check the USB error Rumor, that pluging in a USB device messes up the battery life of a system running Core duo....please
check, i'm soo excited for my MBP my frist Mac i want this to be the best experience!

The Rumor was that plugging anything into a USB port it would cut 4 hours of battery time down to 2 hours.

[darcybaston]

Originally Posted by analogika

You do not wat to spin down your hard drive when recording audio. Period.

That's been my experience. I was recording a live performance from a mixing console into a MobilePRE USB plugged into a battery powered iBook 933MHz. It worked perfectly unless the drive spin got in the way, or I checked the battery level by clicking on the icon in the menu. There were stutters in the audio in either case.

[mduell]

Originally Posted by uicandrew

as for the usb device, i don't think i ever read anything about the error being in os X. i know i read that the problem was with windows, not intel.

It is a software problem, not a hardware problem. But I read somewhere that OSX's USB driver had the same bug with the async scheduler always running, preventing the CPU from C3ing.

[JKT]

Originally Posted by galarneau

So where is the hard drive located?

I wonder if it's going to take removing 100 screws to do a drive swap.

If those damn Apple industrial designers are so smart, they should be able to figure out how to make a hard drive that is swappable with a screwdriver in 3 minutes.

Looks as though it may be easier than the Al PowerBooks but that doesn't show how they got the upper half off. HD is in the corner under the left arm rest area. I'm trying to work out where the CPU is... can't tell from that set of shots.

[jeebus]

Originally Posted by galarneau

If those damn Apple industrial designers are so smart, they should be able to figure out how to make a hard drive that is swappable with a screwdriver in 3 minutes.

It's not that they can't do that, I'm sure if they wanted to they could. However, Apple would much rather that you buy a new laptop rather than upgrade components such as the HD, so they don't go out of their way to make it easier for you. It took iDVD like 5 versions before you could use it with an external DVD burner for the same reason.

[Wiskedjak]

Originally Posted by Kenstee

Will also be interesting to see..

1. How it performs after callibration
2. How long it will hold a 100% charge until it degrades and can no longer can be charged to 100%

It's a bit of a misconception that calibration improves performance of the battery. Calibrating your battery will not make your battery last longer. All calibration does is teach your laptop's battery life calculator what the battery's capacity is. The accuracy of this estimate will depend on whether you do a slow drain or a fast one.

Obviously, with a slow drain calibration, you will get a higher time remaining number. This number really only means something if your regular use of the laptop entails leaving it alone for several hours with the screen off. The most accurate way to calculate battery life (for you) would be to drain it (calibrate) under normal use conditions. You won't get a high time remaining number, but you will get one that is more accurate for hour you use your laptop.

[Troll]

Powerpage now has a comparison up with a PowerBook G4 showing the MBP outpacing the PB.

[tigas]

Originally Posted by galarneau

So where is the hard drive located?

I wonder if it's going to take removing 100 screws to do a drive swap.

If those damn Apple industrial designers are so smart, they should be able to figure out how to make a hard drive that is swappable with a screwdriver in 3 minutes.

What, you mean like my Pismo?

[aristobrat]

Originally Posted by PurpleRabbit73

Based on the estimated battery life on the MBP, for what it offers do you think it is above, below expected life? Or just what it should be.

The MBP battery runs a dual-core processor and a screen that's significantly brighter than any previous PB. Frankly I'm amazed that it's benchmarking even close to the last batch of PBs. I would have thought it'd be significantly less.

[chris v]

Can't someone just shove a DVD in one and let it play until the thing goes to sleep for chrissake? I got 2:15 out of my 1.25 GH AI book when it was new.

[Anand]

Gee, the new powerbook is like the old powerbook, except for being twice as fast. Talk about a none issue.