14 DAY TRIAL // Everyone on the web has been both trash-talking and praising the MacBook Air for its features and what it stands for. The Air's battery makes up for a lot of the negative aspects surrounding it, such as the fact that Air owners need to have it sent in for a replacement, and that it doesn't last half as long as Apple said it would, not to mention debates over how long it takes to replenish. New battery tests, however, have standardized its potential. Apple's promise still falls short of reliability, but they didn't lie either.
The new standardized results, following battery tests conducted by thoughtful blokes over at Anandtech, concern the 1.8GHz MacBook Air (HDD) model. While not exactly described as terrible, the Air's battery doesn't quite last as long as Apple had us thinking, should real-world-usage scenarios be taken into consideration.
The means of establishing exactly what is the battery's life (not life-cycle) were actually 3 tasks of varying intensity with the MacBook Air's display set at just a tad over 50% brightness (not letting it enter sleep-mode), while the hard drive was allowed to spin down if able, according to macrumors.com.
Tasks and battery life times were listed as follows:
1) Use Wifi to browse 20 pages in a loop, spending 20 seconds on each page, while playing MP3s in iTunes. 4hr 16min
2) Play a DVD image (off the internal hard drive) in a loop. 3hr 25min
3) Download 10GB of files, Web browsing loop from #1, play two 480p Xvid videos in a loop. 2hr 25min
So, as you'd expect, battery life varies with use. This of course doesn't answer the ever-burning question: 'how much exactly?', but it does provide us with a clue as to what drains more energy out.
Andantech concludes that "Apple's 5 hour claim is laughable but not as much as [...] expected." Making the web browsing less stressful should have led to longer battery times, according to the same source, yet the purpose of the tests were to establish what its potential is in real-life-scenarios, which proves Apple's almost-5-working-hours wrong. Still, results for task #1 indicated 4 hours and 16 minutes of battery life. The respective task is what Andantech considers "the intended usage model of the Air."