 |
|
Battery Performance
|
|
Testing With Vdeo Playback
|
|
To measure the battery performance, we played back a 2GB MP4 video file
(3ivx MPEG-4) from the laptop's hard drive--the file had been transcoded
and compressed from the main feature title of a DVD movie. On Mac
laptops, the file was played back using the QuickTime Player. On Windows
laptops, the file was played back using Windows Media Player.
Brightness and volume were set to 50-percent and headphones were plugged
into the laptop's headphone jacks. The Windows systems' power settings
were set to Balanced. In those instances when the movie ended before the
the battery died, the movie was started again from the beginning.
Apple claims that this MacBook Air can last 7 hours even while surfing the Web via Wi-Fi. We saw the machine last 6 hours, 20 minutes even looping video. That's really impressive actually. We're confident that you could stretch that to 7 hours if you didn't do something as intensive as loop video. When we test Windows laptops, we typically use
Battery Eater Pro; with that test, the best we typically see is in the 3
to 4 hour range--sometimes 5 hours if we're really lucky. We can't really compare the video
playback results here to the Battery Eater Pro results, as the two
methodologies use very different workloads.
Regardless, many scoff at Apple for choosing to keep the battery sealed with the new Macbook Air, but there's not too much need for a secondary battery anyway when 7 hours of run time is within reach with the current setup.
