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Battery Performance
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Testing With Vdeo 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 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.
We didn't get the 8 to 9 hours that Apple claimed, but 6 hours is still very respectable. In fact, this is more than enough time to last a full transcontinental flight. 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. We can't really compare the video playback results here to the Battery Eater Pro results, as the two methodologies use very different workloads; but consider that the video playback approach we took here is actually more taxing than Battery Eater Pro's workload.
