I recently purchased one of the new core i7 Macbook Airs and in most respects its amazing. The one problem is that the battery life is far less than the "up to 7 hours" Apple claims. In moderate usage, no flash or video, it lasts about 2.5 hours, maybe. I use the istat menu monitoring tool and don't see much CPU usage, the fan isn't running constantly, and poking around with the Activity Monitor doesn't show anything unusual, so I'm pretty sure I don't have any rogue processes running. I have flash disabled in Safari, so I don't think that's the culprit either.
My questions are…
What battery life do other Macbook Air owners see? I'm guessing a trip to the genius bar is in my future, has anyone seen similar problems? If you have, do the support guys give you a new laptop, replace the battery, or tell you there's nothing they can do?
Best Answer
I have the same Air as you and I am getting 5-6 hours. So not to much off of what the advertised amount is. Your battery sounds faulty to me.
The last computer I had had a faulty battery. It was replaced for free and within a couple of days. Back then they simply replaced the battery on the MB because it was removable. Chances are now they will give you a new laptop because the battery on the Air is harder to remove. You might be without a computer for a few days though. I don't know what they do in other countries, but in Spain they just took it and mailed it to Holland to get fixed and then mailed it back.