Does anyone use linux on a laptop and mind mentioning the battery life they get? I joke that I'm trapped by apple because it's the only way to get battery life and POSIX on the same machine.
With TLP setup, I'm able to get 8-10hrs of battery life w/o issues (I've gotten up to 13hrs if all I'm doing is editing text).
According to powertop, I can get power usage to go to over 18W on full load (100% CPU/DRAM, 100% display backlight), but under my normal setup (wifi, 30% display backlight) idle power consumption is about 4.8W - my idle states never goes below C6/pc6 even running the latest 4.8 kernels. (Did the SATA power state stuff ever get fixed?)
Mind you it doesn't have a dedicated GPU, but I would avoid that like a plague on a laptop running Linux for various reasons. Intel graphics tend to just work.
As the other comment said I get about 5W draw in powertop. All I've done is install TLP as the other comment says.
Something else you can do if you'd like to get a huge boon for battery life is get a slice battery [0]. Get both the extended and slice and you'll be able to probably go 20hr.
[0] - http://blog.lenovo.com/en/blog/all-day-long-all-day-strong-o...
I consider it the best laptop I ever had.