What about the move to Windows 7 on top of that? To find out I ran our light web browsing battery life test under Windows 7. As we already showed, simply enabling the dGPU hurts battery life. Under Windows 7 there's no option to use the iGPU, the 15 and 17-inch MacBook Pros default to their dGPU. The 13-inch MacBook Pro actually takes a step back compared to last year's model but it's still the Mac with the 3rd longest battery life. It's a great combination of a system that has performance on tap but the battery life to last you if you just need to do some writing. With 9 hours of battery life I can confirm that if you're just using the 15-inch MBP as a glorified typewriter this is what you'll see. Even compared to last year's model Apple has actually improved idle/light usage battery life by 8%. The results here are comparable to what you'd see typing a document in TextEdit or reading documents.įor the 15-inch model battery life has doubled since 2008. This test represents the longest battery life you can achieve on the platform while doing minimal work. The wireless connection is enabled and connected to a local access point less than 20 feet away. The display is kept at 50% brightness, all screen savers are disabled, but the hard drive is allowed to go to sleep if there's no disk activity. Each page forwards on to the next in the series after 20 seconds. Here we're simply listing to MP3s in iTunes on repeat while browsing through a series of webpages with no flash on them. If you use the additional performance of these systems to do more then you'll likely see even worse battery life (see the power numbers on the previous page). Video frames may decode quicker, but they'll still play back at the same 24 fps. Right now all of our tests are fixed workloads: web pages may render quicker, but you'll still be idle for the same amount of time regardless of system. The only scenario our battery life tests don't duplicate is one where workload scales with performance.

Core 2 was a pretty low power architecture, beating its battery life will be difficult. Heavy usage cases however can easily be worse than last year's model, specifically with the 15 and 17-inch systems.

On top of that, Sandy Bridge is a very efficient microarchitecture that manages to get work done quicker than Arrandale and get to sleep faster.

Apple makes up for the higher core count of the 15-inch MBP by capping turbo speeds and being very good about allowing the CPU to go into deep sleep states under OS X. In reality it breaks down like this: light usage cases are equal if not better than last year's model. With the potential for higher power draw, battery life on these new systems has the chance to be really, really bad.

Macbook pro 15 late 2011 battery