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Study Shows Laptop Batteries Often Don't Last As Long As They Say (digitaltrends.com)
A new study conducted by Which? magazine has found that "the battery life claimed by laptop manufacturers rarely lives up to reality. "Although Apple's battery life claims were the closest to reality, in the case of some other manufacturers, their laptops lasted hours less than the stated time," reports Digital Trends. From the report: In its testing, Which looked at the battery life claims of 67 different laptop models from manufacturers as diverse as Asus, Apple, Acer, HP, Dell, Lenovo, and Toshiba -- some of the world's most popular laptop makers. It found that while Apple's average claim of 10 hours was proven correct -- and was even slightly better in some cases -- Dell's claims were overstated by more than four hours, and HP, close to five. The times listed in the header image are the average claimed battery life for all of the laptops Which? has tested over the past year versus the times it recorded in its internal testing. That involved charging the laptops to full, then running them down to nothing three times, using online web browsing via Wi-Fi or watching local videos to do so. Out of all laptops tested, the only manufacturer to understate battery claims was Apple. In one case, it claimed that its MacBook Pro 13 could achieve 10 hours of usage, while tests suggested it could go for as long as 12 hours. At the other end of the spectrum though, there were some really egregious overstatements. The Lenovo Yoga 510 has a claimed battery life of five hours -- it only lasted two hours and seven minutes. The HP Pavilion 14-al115na is supposed to be able to run for nine hours, but was only capable of four hours and 25 minutes. The Acer E15 claimed six hours but ran for just under three hours.
Which? doesn't say much about their methodology in their article, and their reviews of individual laptops are members-only. Does anyone know if their methods are sound? Are screens set to a specific brightness for these tests? How is that measured, etc?
The laptop companies put the things into maximum conservation mode before they test. Are they testing "out of box", or after you go to the power settings and change them.
Anyone that is technically literate knows that power savings mode are essential to conserve battery power.
Now, if the laptops were not achieving their claimed rates after power setting was set to maximize conservation, that's a different story.
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Anyone that is technically literate knows that power savings mode are essential to conserve battery power.
Not with a Mac. That's the whole point, you don't have to mess with settings to get good performance. All of the defaults around power management give you good performance without having to enter some kind of bullshit "power savings mode" to get good battery life...
It's more like, you just have to be aware of what you are running and how that impacts battery life. Obviously if you are compiling a lot battery life is going to take more of a hit.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Yeah, except that my MacBook Pro more or less hits specs, also. I say more or less, but it's a 2012, so the battery isn't new. During a typical day for me (Outlook, Word, Excel, Safari), it still lasts a full workday. No compiling, VM usage, or other intense usage, so not everyone's use case, but not absurd, either. Apple estimates are not promises, but seem to me more accurate than others.
New study shows products aren't always as great as marketers say.
If you pair down the Windows O/S, turn down the screen brightness, and surf text only websites, you might get the advertised battery life, but in the case of Windows 10, there is so much bloat behind the scenes indexing, updating, and doing whatever else makes the fan come on, it is a wonder that the battery lasts 2 hours. I can't believe the crap that randomly runs in windows 10.
My MacBook Pro 13" is the only machine that I dare leave the house with without the charger. It will actually get through a day of normal use without needing a recharge.
Windows 10 has been a huge step back in battery life. It just continually points out the tight hardware and O/S integration is key to good power management. I wonder if price pressure on hardware vendors lead to this point. I guess I can always get a surface with tight O/S and hardware integration, but I quick google search shows even this is unpredictable.
The problem is that they're accurate, but only for the sorts of things you could do just as easily on an iPad—light word processing and web browsing. As soon as you get into things that laptops really shine at—photo editing, video editing, compiling, etc., the battery life drops to maybe a third the rated power. I mean Xcode, oy, but even without adding that giant pile of CPU piggishness, Lightroom, Finale (music composition)... everything I do in a typical day other than web browsing falls into the category of things where battery life sucks, and that's being generous.
Why can't Apple make a laptop that gets more than 2.5 hours of typical battery life under load?
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I think it would be more accurate to say that Apple has aggressively throttled a lot of common power pigs (e.g. plug-ins) and tends to discourage apps from running their own updaters and other crap in the background that keep the CPU from idling. If you could actually halt all those background tasks in Windows, I'd imagine it would handle power management about as well as OS X does, give or take. The problem is that everybody's Windows laptop is so loaded up with Antivirus crapware and other background tasks that the CPU never comes close to reaching an idle state....
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
It did reveal something unexpected. The only company honest about it are Apple. It is a surprise that any company lived up to its claims.