Is Five-Hour Battery life possible on a MacBook Air? Almost but not quite.
By Opal Tribble
Will the MacBook Air last for five hours? I was skeptical when I heard this claim made by Apple. I wasn’t the only one. AnandTech has run an extensive test on the MacBook Air. One of tests was testing the battery life. The results may surprise you.
Wireless internet browsing & MP3 playback - 4.27 hours
Anandtech designed this test to emulate how a MacBook Air would be used during normal web usage. The test was conducted on a series of 20 web pages that each varied in length. To make it even more stressful 20 seconds was spent on each page that was visited on each website. The test continued to loop while MP3’s were playing on iTunes.
DVD playback - 3.42 hours
Watching a movie on your MacBook Air shouldn’t be a problem as long as it’s not exceptionally long. In performing this test Anandtech played Blood Diamond until the battery ran out. Although the MacBook Air doesn’t have an internal CD/DVD drive, you still are able to watch movies with the MacBook Air. However, you will need to have them on your hard drive.
Heavy downloading, web browsing, and Xvid playback - 2.43 hours
Multitasking proved to be stressful for the MacBook Air hard drive. The battery life was noticeably shorter. To conduct this test 10GB worth of files was downloaded from the internet, web surfing was done, and two episodes of Firefly were watched. It was encoded in a 480p Xvid Format. Anand Lal Shimpi of AnandTech states…
“If I wanted to I suspect I could hit 5 hours by making the web browsing test less stressful, but my focus was on real world usage scenarios, not proving Apple correct. Regardless, 4 hours and 16 minutes doing what I consider to be the intended usage model of the Air is respectable. It’s not great, but it’s not terrible either.”
Results: How you use your MacBook Air will affect its battery life. The amount of time you have will vary depending on the activities performed. Will you get five hours out of the MacBook Air? According to the test above during normal usage this isn’t going to happen. I’ll be renting a MacBook Air within the next few weeks, and I plan to run in through its paces. I’ll definitely report my findings on Mac.Blorge.com.
MAcBook Air, Technology, Apple, MacBook Air battery
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