Apple advertises 8-9hrs battery for the 15" MBPs. My hypothosis is that even under ideal conditions, actual battery life is much shorter.<p>With a 2010 15" 2.66Ghz i7 MBP, under normal development usage (a few ruby processes, a browser, code editor, MySQL) I get about 3 hours.<p>Under a controlled "light web browsing" environment, I get 5 hours:<p>* Dim screen brightness to 50%<p>* Turn bluetooth off, Wifi on<p>* Set display to never go to sleep & turn screensaver off<p>* Use http://http://codykrieger.com/gfxCardStatus/ to set
graphics card to intel only<p>* Use itunes to play local music at a low volume through headphones only<p>* Use this script: to simulate light web browsing: http://gist.github.com/441222 . It writes a log so you know when the computer goes to sleep.<p>* Walk away from the the computer and wait for it to exhaust it's battery and go to sleep.<p>HNers -- I'd love to get your own datapoints.
I have had my 13" MBP for 12 months, 7hr battery. Generally get 6-8 hours use when doing dev/test work. With VmWare Fusion running I'm lucky to get 2 hours. On days with lots of meetings (note taking & giving presentations) I can get through a 14hr day on a single charge.<p>I suspect that disk activity has a big impact upon power consumption. But when doing heavy development (and using Fusion) I power from mains.
I don't have a 2010 but I do have a 2007 17" 2.33GHz C2D MBP and I get 3-4 hours.<p>The only problem is the old 17" batteries tend to warp and explode:<p><a href="http://imgur.com/wmoTy.jpg" rel="nofollow">http://imgur.com/wmoTy.jpg</a>