It’s acutally no cause for concern. Starting with the most recent MacBook Airs, Apple adopted a new method for battery testing that more accurately reflects real world usage. “Wireless Web protocol testing”, as they call it, involves setting the display to about 50 per cent brightness and surfing the web’s 25 most popular sites. There, they repeat whatever they deem to be the site’s main function, sometimes involving the playback of Flash video.
Your battery life will still depend on how you use your computer, of course, but I’ll take seven hours of real world-tested battery life over 10 hours of display-all-the-way-dimmed-and-typing-in-Text Edit any day. [Tech Crunch]
Colin Asquith
Friday, February 25, 2011 at 10:03 AMThe only thing I would like to add would be, what is the wireless web hour rating of the previous MacBook Pros? How can I compare? Is the new MBP better, worse or exactly the same? Numbers would help me compare in my decision to buy.
I don’t mind the test changing, I agree it makes sense for it to be a “real” test of what people might actually do with their machines.
Dave
Friday, February 25, 2011 at 10:21 AMInterestingly, the battery on the MacBook has also been dropped back to 7 hrs, despite no change to this product!
olearymo
Friday, February 25, 2011 at 10:38 AMYes, this is because of the different testing. Did you not read the article?
olearymo
Friday, February 25, 2011 at 10:39 AMSo basically, Apple has been kinda lying all this time. And we’re all okay with it.
Same as ‘PowerPC is much more powerful than Intel!’ became ‘now with Intel! More powerful!’.
Flexible truth over there in Cupertino.
Anthony Tam
Saturday, February 26, 2011 at 12:07 AMBut “display-all-the-way-dimmed-and-typing-in-Text Edit” is all I ever do on my Mac!
Unit057
Saturday, June 25, 2011 at 9:03 AM@OLEARYMO at the time PowerPC WAS more powerful, then intel introduced i5 and i7 which were more powerful than PowerPC. The change also allowed Windows to run on a Mac. I think Apple should stay with PowerPC and forget about Windows.