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| Battery Performance |
| Testing With Video Playback |
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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, headphones were plugged into the laptop's headphone jacks, and the video was playaed full-screen. The Windows systems' power settings were set to Balanced. In those instances when the movie ended before the battery died, the movie was started again from the beginning.
Apple claims that you should get up to 7 hours of battery life from the new MacBook Pro’s battery--and this estimation is based upon a relatively light workload of surfing the Web over a Wireless connection. We gave the MacBook Pro the more demanding task of continuously playing a video, and it still managed to last almost seven and a half hours. Battery life of this caliber is virtually unprecedented. That said, the MacBook Pro’s battery life with Windows was less than half what we saw with the Mac OS--the MacBook Pro is simply not optimized for Windows’ power management features anywhere near its Mac OS capabilities.
