[Macpartners] MacBook Air 11" battery life

[arthur steinberg]

felix--

for what it's worth: i have an ipad 3rd generation that also ran its battery down very quickly.  i had apple run diagnostics on it and was told that it was a software problem.  they suggested i back the ipad up, and then restore all the software on the it.  i did that, and it has made a big difference.

arthur
On Nov 19, 2012, at 11:46 AM, Felix Kreisel wrote:

> Hi, 
> 
> I have a battery life problem with a new MacBook Air 11" purchased in mid-2012. The MBA came with 10.7.4, and I upgraded to 10.8.1, then to 10.8.2. Battery charge used to last 6+ hours until I upgraded to 10.8.2. Then I started to notice a dramatic decrease in actual life, down to 3-to-4 hours. My mix of programs did not change between 10.7 and now: Chrome, Dreamweaver, Mail, Calendar; I always turn Bluetooth off, and keep the screen intensity at about half.
> 
> Peculiarities that I noticed with 10.8.2: After waking the laptop from sleep by lifting the lid it indicates a 100% charge, but during the next few minutes it tells me it is "calculating time remaining". It keeps recalculating. Now at 96% it tells me I have 3:56 remaining. When connected to the charger, the battery monitor also calculates "time until full charge". This calculation is also peculiar. E.g. at 98% charge, the battery meter told me that it would take 27 minutes for a full charge". It only took about 5 minutes.
> 
> There is also the ever busy Wifi scanner. This has been an ongoing feature (bug) of the OS. The Wifi is constantly scanning for networks.
> 
> The Activity Monitor is useless since it tells me that the laptop is using 7-10% of CPU, i.e. basically, the laptop is not busy.
> 
> Apple is willing to replace the battery, if I request, but I don't think there is anything wrong with the hardware. I have read that Mountain Lion (10.8) was bad for batteries, that 10.8.1 made some fixes, but in my case 10.8.2 was a battery killer.
> 
> Does anybody have any ideas of what is going on?
> 
> Felix Kreisel - Systems Engineer,
> Plasma Science & Fusion Center, MIT
> 617-253-8625   fjk at mit.edu
> 
> 
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