At first it seemed that this wasn't the best possible idea, as during the first few minutes of watching the DVD the drive was very noisy. it doesn't have a DVD drive! So I hooked up Apple's external USB Superdrive. (I think I forgot to turn off bluetooth.) Headphones were connected for the audio at a quarter volume.įirst I wanted to see how this machine handles viewing DVDs. For these tests I set the screen to half brightness and turned off Wi-Fi. I tried a few different types of video and looked at the battery percentage to evaluate the battery's performance to avoid having to spend a week running battery tests. But this computer can easily run 12 hours on the battery if it's not really doing anything, and probably as much as 24 hours. Verdict for the "wait for mail" test: it seems the battery charge percentage wasn't calibrated correctly when full. After 12 hours, I ended the test with 58% charge left in the battery, because I wanted to actually use my brand new computer for something. I checked every hour from then on, and in each case, the battery had depleted another 4%. After running for 8 hours, this had dropped to 74% and 14 hours, 45 minutes. I woke up early 6 hours later, but the battery still showed a 100% charge and 20 hours left. I had prepared the test setup before I went to bed. In this setup, clicking on the battery icon in the menu bar showed that the system expected to be able to run for 20 hours. I was still able to ping the computer even though the caps lock light on the keyboard had turned off, presumably indicating that the computer had gone to sleep.
But this can be remedied with tools like Wimoweh, that make sure the computer doesn't sleep when you don't want it to. However, this is not so great when it comes to mail and IM clients and the like that run in the background and monitor what happens over the network. Which of course helps you get even more battery life. So after removing the sleep light a few years ago, Apple took the next logical step and simply lets the entire computer sleep very soon after the display goes to sleep. (Turns out that when using the power adapter, you can keep the computer from sleeping when the display sleeps, but there's no setting for how long until the computer sleeps.) (Or click here for the one on the MacBook Pro or here for the one on the MacBook Air.) Mouse over the image to see the energy pane looks like on my mid-2011 MacBook Air that's also running OS 10.9. Did the Energy Saver pane always look like this? When I went to the System Preferences to turn off sleep, I was a bit confused.
The computer has bluetooth and Wi-Fi on, the screen is set to the lowest non-off brightness, sleep and the screensaver are turned off, and only two applications are open: Mail and Messages. This is the lightest possible workload, so it should provide an upper limit on battery life you can expect. My first test is the "wait for mail" test. Here are the results of three tests I did. So Apple's claim that this computer can work on battery power for 9 hours was one of the first things I wanted to test. The amount of time you can work on a battery charge also varies wildly with the type of use. That is not exactly the case for battery life.
Many of a computer’s features reveal themselves in only a few minutes or even seconds of use. I got middle stock model: 8 GB RAM, 256 GB SDD, 2.4 GHz CPU. Which is a good thing, because I really dislike (mis-)using the word "retina" to indicate a high resolution screen, especially when capitalized. ¹ This is of course the Intel Haswell-powered MacBook Pro "with Retina® Display", but the latter pretty much goes without saying now. This is the first one, which looks at battery life. Over the next few days, I'll publish my review of the new MacBook Pro¹ here in several installments. No more bottlenecks: the late 2013 MacBook Pro reviewed Late 2013 MacBook Pro review: battery life