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Comment by bjelkeman-again | Hacker News Reader

Apple say about 10 hour battery life on their website. Three hours seems like something is really wrong.

I get 8-10 hours easily on mine. With VSCode, Chrome, XCode and Android Studio open.

With AS? Yeesh. Mine (previous gen) will drain in about 2 hours with that or PyCharm open. IntelliJ stuff is super power-hungry unless you put it in power-save mode (and then it's not even as useful as a "plain" editor like sublime text or something).

I mean, I like all the power-hungry features, and I'm usually plugged in - I'd prefer they keep adding useful things rather than worry about my battery. But it does hurt at times :)

Maybe initial Spotlight indexing.

When have companies ever p published honest battery light estimates?

My experience with two 2015 rMBPs and an Air has shown that for light work, 10 hours is a completely reasonable estimate, which matches what Apple estimates.

Of course driving an external monitor, streaming video from the Internet, and using your computer for more than just word processing and web browsing, your system will use more power.

Ditto on the 2015 rMBP. The moment you get beyond light work you're looking at 5 hours but for light internet browsing it really does push towards 10. It's awesome.

Well, my almost an year and a half old Dell Inspiron 5558 gives me 5 to 6 hours (gave 7 to 8 when new) with just web browsing. I don't think that's all that great.

And mind you, I am the kind of person who has managed to accrue about 13 months of hard disk head flying hours according to the SMART stats so the battery isn't exactly in a good condition.

Apple advertises "up to 12 hours" battery life on the Macbook Air 13". I reliably get over 14 with work and web-browsing.

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