The results here are comparable to what you'd see typing a document in TextEdit or reading documents.įor the 15-inch model battery life has doubled since 2008. This test represents the longest battery life you can achieve on the platform while doing minimal work.

The wireless connection is enabled and connected to a local access point less than 20 feet away. The display is kept at 50% brightness, all screen savers are disabled, but the hard drive is allowed to go to sleep if there's no disk activity. Each page forwards on to the next in the series after 20 seconds. Here we're simply listing to MP3s in iTunes on repeat while browsing through a series of webpages with no flash on them. If you use the additional performance of these systems to do more then you'll likely see even worse battery life (see the power numbers on the previous page). Video frames may decode quicker, but they'll still play back at the same 24 fps. Right now all of our tests are fixed workloads: web pages may render quicker, but you'll still be idle for the same amount of time regardless of system. The only scenario our battery life tests don't duplicate is one where workload scales with performance. Core 2 was a pretty low power architecture, beating its battery life will be difficult. Heavy usage cases however can easily be worse than last year's model, specifically with the 15 and 17-inch systems. On top of that, Sandy Bridge is a very efficient microarchitecture that manages to get work done quicker than Arrandale and get to sleep faster. Apple makes up for the higher core count of the 15-inch MBP by capping turbo speeds and being very good about allowing the CPU to go into deep sleep states under OS X. In reality it breaks down like this: light usage cases are equal if not better than last year's model. With the potential for higher power draw, battery life on these new systems has the chance to be really, really bad.

Macbook pro early 2011 15 inch battery