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Apple states 9h for a contemporary 13" MBP. Mine (two weeks old) runs for 4h max, if I do any serious work on it. If I switch Wifi off an dim the screen, I can get 6-7h out of it.

The machine is dual boot as I'm using it to develop software that targets both OS X & Linux. I run a Gentoo with all kernel- and other power saving features enabled, on a 2nd partition.

The time I get out of the battery on OS X vs Gentoo is pretty much the same.

What I do is "surf" (FF, mostly text/reading docs, flash blocked etc.) and code (I do a build roughly every 5-10mins that will probably touch 10 sources max).

Build environment matches except for compiler being used (gcc 4.1 on Linux, latest LLVM gcc frontend from XCode on OS X but I would think this is minor).

Bottom line for me: Linux is on par with OS X in terms of time you get out of a MBP, in my case specifically.

Caveat: I dunno ofc, how true this is, generally, if one ran something like a pre-configured Ubuntu kernel.



I have a shiny new MBP too, but I have no problems getting 9-10 hours from it by just browsing the web(with safari) and watching videos.

IntelliJ however eats some of my battery pwoer, but I still manage 7 hours or full work day.


Safari is less power hungry than Firefox.




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