Done for 2009: The Holiday MacBook Pro Roundup
by Anand Lal Shimpi on November 10, 2009 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Mac
Incredible Battery Life Under OS X
Over the summer I stumbled onto something interesting: the new 15-inch MacBook Pro delivered an ungodly amount of battery life. By shrinking the battery, Apple was able to cram a 73Whr battery where they used to only have a 50Whr pack:
The rest of the lineup got a similarly sizeable upgrade in 2009:
| New Lithium Polymer Battery (Integrated) |
|
Increase in Capacity | |
| MacBook Pro 13-inch | 58WHr | 45WHr | 29% |
| MacBook Pro 15-inch | 73WHr | 50WHr | 46% |
| MacBook Pro 17-inch | 95WHr | 68WHr | 40% |
I only tested the 15-inch over the summer, but recently I had the opportunity to try the entire lineup. I brewed up some new battery life test and put Apple's "up to 7 hours" claims to the test.
Light Web Browsing
Our first test is the one that yields the longest battery life: the light web browsing test. Here we're simply listening to MP3s in iTunes on repeat while browsing through a series of webpages with no flash on them. Each page forwards on to the next in the series after 20 seconds.
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. The wireless connection is enabled and connected to a local access point less than 20 feet away. This test represents the longest battery life you can achieve on the platform while doing minimal work. The results here are comparable to what you'd see typing a document in TextEdit or reading documents.
All of the new unibody MacBook Pros here get over 7 hours of battery life. This isn't idle folks, this is actual, real world battery life with real world settings. The worst was actually the 15-inch MacBook Pro at only 7.4 hours, while the 13-inch and 17-inch MacBook Pro got closer to 8 hours.
If you own a previous generation MacBook Pro (non-unibody) then the battery life is nearly double (a 76% increase). My personal 15-inch MacBook Pro is the first laptop I've owned where I was happy with both the performance and the battery life. It's what a notebook should be.
Flash Web Browsing
Our next test more closely simulates a very heavy web browsing scenario. The test here has three Safari windows open, each browsing a set of web pages with between 1 - 4 animated flash ads per page, at the same time. Each page forwards onto the next after about 20 seconds.
As always, the display is set to 50% brightness, audio at two bars, screensaver disabled and the hard drive is allowed to go to sleep if idle. The wireless connection is enabled and connected to a local access point less than 20 feet away.
Battery life drops significantly. Our 7.4+ hours now drop down to 3.7 hours on the 13-inch MacBook Pro, 4.6 hours on the 15-inch and 4.4 hours on the 17-inch. That's still not bad but between these two numbers you get a reasonable idea of how long one of these systems will last while browsing the web. The smaller capacity battery on the 13-inch appears to be really holding it back here as the 15-inch manages nearly another hour of battery life.
Here we're actually doubling the battery life of the older 15-inch MacBook Pro from early 2008. It's interesting to note that Apple's lightest notebook, the MacBook Air, offers similar battery life to the MacBook Pro from almost two years ago.
XviD Video Playback
Watching movies on your laptop is very realistic usage model, but I wanted to spice it up a bit. The DVD playback test is so done, I wanted something a little more forward looking. I ripped The Dark Knight to XviD and played it back continuously in QuickTime X with Perian installed.
For this test the display was set to full brightess and audio was set at two bars below maximum. Once more the hard drive was allowed to go to sleep if it was idle. The AirPort (wireless LAN) was enabled and connected to a local access point less than 20 feet away.
The 13-inch MacBook Pro comes in with the shortest battery life of 3.45 hours. The 15-inch is the winner at 3.83 hours, with the 17-inch close at 3.76 hours. All of the notebooks promise good enough battery life to get you through one long movie, but not quite enough for two back to back at full brightness. A couple of short ~100 minute movies is definitely doable though.
The older notebooks could only do a single long movie, the MacBook Air could barely finish one. Apple was very smart with its roadmap - when Intel could not provide significantly better performance, it delivered much better battery life to give users a reason to upgrade.
Multitasking Battery Life
Our final battery life test is the worst case scenario. In this test we have three open Safari windows, each browsing a set of web pages with between 1 - 4 flash ads per page, at the same time. We're also playing an XviD video in a window all while downloading files from a server at approximately 500KB/s.
This test proved to bring our notebooks to their knees. The 13-inch MacBook Pro managed under 2.5 hours, while the 15-inch came close to 3 and the 17-inch actual broke it with 3.1 hours.
Between these four tests you can get a general idea of how long these notebooks will last. The 13-inch will last you between 2.5 and 7.4 hours, the 15-inch is more like 3 - 7.8, and the 17-inch is fairly similar at 3 - 7.9 hours. On average expecting four to five hours of battery life while doing real work isn't unrealistic.
Which, I should mention, is freaking awesome on these notebooks. It's also worth noting that these aren't just benchmarks, these are scenarios I've created and also vetted with my own experience with the 15-inch MacBook Pro. For a writer, any of these MacBook Pros are perfect, especially when traveling. The lack of a removable battery just isn't an issue.
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Baron Fel - Wednesday, November 11, 2009 - link
Why didnt you mention the 15" HP Envy? It beats the MBP in everything but battery life...solipsism - Wednesday, November 11, 2009 - link
There is a distinct difference in these machines. For starters, these MBPS have been out many months and won’t be getting an update until after the holidays. If your focus is solely on a Clarksdale quad-core processor.Note that it doesn’t beat the nearly half-a-year old 15” MBP in a lot of areas. It’s nearly 10% thicker, only has a 6-cell battery, while not having an optical drive. I hope that the MBPs come without an optical drive in favour of the OS being installed on a SD Card, but Apple isn’t HP with dozens of machines with the same display size. Apple still runs like a boutique shop so when they commit to removing the optical drive to run a Core i7 quad-core it’ll be for all their 15” notebooks.
far327 - Wednesday, November 11, 2009 - link
Apple equals proprietary gayness!! Design is great. Quality is stellar, but Apple is GAY!!!aapocketz - Thursday, November 12, 2009 - link
I like apples line of laptops, they seem quite well built, though I don't really see a huge benefit of unibody design, I think my ancient ibm laptop is just as nice. I don't really love the glossy screens either. Overall they are nice.apple has some impressive engineering and decent innovation capabilities but their closed and protected platform and general company philosophy is disturbing to someone who relies on and enjoys the openness of hardware and software platforms.
Consider apple disabling support for Atom cpus in the newest OS updates, ostensibly to prevent homebrewers from using the OS on their own hardware like netbooks. Man I certainly don't love Microsoft, but we would be way worse off if Apple dominated the market. I am fine with them as long as they only want that single bite of the apple though.
I like choice and flexibility, and apple computers tightly integrated platform may be a good choice, as long as its not my only choice.
robco - Thursday, November 12, 2009 - link
You have to see on in person to understand why the unibody design has benefits. While still being less than an inch thin, the MacBooks are incredibly rigid. Little flex at all. They feel rock solid. I do agree that the ThinkPads are nice and solid too. If I hadn't gotten a MBP, a ThinkPad was my second choice. You can now custom order the 15 and 17" models with a matte display.I find OS X to be a nice compromise. I like Linux, but it's not always easy to find good software. A lot of FOSS runs under OS X. There's also virtualization to run Linux alongside OS X. A friend who does web development loves the fact that he can run Office, Eclipse, Apache, Tomcat and MySQL all on the same machine easily.
As for dominating the market, I don't think that's Apple's goal - unlike Microsoft. Apple seems pretty happy with their market segment overall. They're raking in a lot of money.
I like my Mac and it's a solid machine. That being said, I'm hardly a fanboy. There are certain circumstances where people should get a Windows machine. As far as Atom support, Apple never supported Atom in the first place, I don't see why they should be expected to provide it or continue providing it. AFAIK, OS X uses some of the optimizations in the Core and Core 2 Duo chips that aren't present in the Atom.
setzer - Wednesday, November 11, 2009 - link
Okay, this is just a supposition because I don't have an actual macbook to test, but I would bet the reason OSx provides so much better battery values is because Apple is running the cpus at a much lower voltage than the defaults, ie, what is here: http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Pentium_M_undervolti...">http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Pentium_M_undervolti...this does make a difference in battery longevity and by default windows doesn't undervolt processors.
blufire - Wednesday, November 11, 2009 - link
I believe it may have more to do with napping and shutting down components more frequently/aggressively..araczynski - Wednesday, November 11, 2009 - link
the macs are starting to smell like pc's now, incompatibilities all over the place.damianrobertjones - Wednesday, November 11, 2009 - link
...so you'd think that with less hardware to code for, that they'd get it right!tuskers - Wednesday, November 11, 2009 - link
At the Mac coverage at this time and place. As a long-time reader of Anandtech, this feels completely out of place from "coverage" and more non-topical than anything I've ever read here, before. We've seen the Macbook Pro reviews already.My guess is that this has to do with one (or more) of three things:
- Anand has turned into the "Mac person" who needs to justify his fanboi-ism.
- There's too little tech news in the holiday season, so this is a classic "fluff" piece, that was easy to write.
- Apple paid the site to publish said fluff piece.
Regardless, journalistically, this is one of the worst pieces I've seen here.
- Failure to analyze the market from a "competitors to Apple" sense. Dell and HP's "representatives" aren't competing with Apple with their mainstream products; instead, they're competing against each other. They're competing on low price to justify expenses with corporations. Most corporations don't care if a laptop is slightly thicker. Instead, pick laptops that are trying to out-Apple Apple, like the Envy or Adamo; Asus and MSI also offer intriguing competition and increasing market shares. Rather than looking at it as "Apple is a mainstream computer maker with 15% of the market", realize that the more true statement is "Apple is dominant in a high-priced niche market which doesn't focus on computing power, here is how it compares to other products competing for that market."
- Exaggeration of differences. The highlighted weight of the 15" MBP is within rounding error of the compared model! And in marketing specs instead of actual product weights, no less.
- Focusing on the battery so much without mentioning that other laptop brands only have to pack a replacement battery to achieve longer battery life. Yes, maintenance is a little more difficult, but you aren't making an honest comparison given that the unibody Macs discarded this functionality.
- A token "please get SSDs to work properly!" plea, without research. Does the "Mac Edition" OCZ Vertex work or not? It's true that OCZ has admitted it as marketing hype, but the least you could do is expose it. You even go so far as to say that some people might be happy to know that random combinations might work-- because people have SSDs lying around.
- I'm amazed a commenter put together the "Flash is 32-bit, so of course it runs slowly talking to 64-bit Safari" before Anand did.
- Blanket statements without truth to them. For instance, the claim that 1920x1200 screen in the 17" is not "bigger than anything else on the market". You simply need to select an Alienware model at Dell's site (a competitive price range for the MBP 17", no less). And then, Anand complains that the pixels are too dense-- a common complaint, which is why Dell offers more 1080p screens instead. I own an Inspiron with a 1920x1200 screen that I bought several years ago. They aren't an Apple monopoly because Apple's the only one that can do it. This whole scenario is worse than simple marketing hype.
I'll leave it there, I'm sure I could find more though. I expect better from this site, Anand!