How do the IBooks Battery Life Compare

[JMoore]

I am either going to buy an IBook, or Dell PM in the next few weeks, and I was wondering how the batterylife is on the IBook. Right now I am looking for something that will give me at least a good 6 hours of battery life. Also if any of you guys have a Mac anything and comment on what you think of it, Id really appreciate it.

 

[hopejr]

the 12" iBook is the best in that department with 6 hours (screen dimmed, but even so, it's not too dark ). Laptops with P-M's in them range from about 4 hours to 6 and sometimes 8 hours (with an extra battery). I'm not sure how long the Dells would last tho.

 

[JMoore]

Right now I am pretty undecided. For some reason I want to go Apple (don't rlly know why) , but I am now hearing there LCD's are "crap" (no flmaes thats what im hearing), and they really can't compare performance wise with a similary matched P-M (unless your runnign an apple program of course). So im pretty much stuck. Also Apples are a little pricey (or at least the higher end ones im thinking about).

All I do is pretty much websurf, though, so no threats of spyware/ viruses would be a welcome relief.

 

[ChuaChua]

6 hours is a lot compared to the m6809's 1 hour and 30 mins reported by Battery Eater ( 800MHz, screen is at the brightest.)

I could pull of 2.5 hours if I don't have extensive apps running all the time. w00t.

 

[Philippine Mango]

Ibm T series is all I gotta say. Or try the X series since its small like the IBook. T series is all around good and has very good battery life. I've used/mom owns a dell laptop and they are carp, so so battery life and the feel "loose" after a while. Too cheap for my standards! Go with IBM and get a sturdy fast, long lasting machine... IMO

 

[halfadder]

A coworker has a new 1.2 GHz iBook, it feels just as fast as my PowerBook, but I haven't tried any games on it yet. He gets about 4 hours real world use out of it with the CPU throttling set to "automatic" and the screen brightness set in the middle. If he dims the screen and just types in a word processor or surfs the web while he has MP3s playing, he gets around 5 hours. But constantly working in Photoshop with brightness turned up all the way, he's lucky to get 3 hours. It all depends on the usage. There may also be some extended life batteries in the works. I recently bought such a battery from OWC for my PowerBook, it upped my life by almost an extra hour.

The 12" iBook has a great 1024x768 screen. The 14" model is still only 1024x768, but the colors are washed out and I think that's too large of a physical size for that resolution. But I love the 12" version.

Hopejr: How do you get 6 hours? Is it because you have the 1.0 GHz model? Did you enable "spin down hard drive when possible"? I think my coworker has his drive set to run all the time, he thinks it's easier on the drive rather than starting and stopping it all the time just to save a little bit of power. Do you use any other tricks?

 

[JMoore]

IBM is a little high for me so I am still not sure. I still probably would go dell if I didn't go MAC. When compared to the Apple machines im looking at, though, they are fairly similer $ wise. I think I am going to end up going to the mall and going to the Dell Store and Apple Store so I can see both notebooks for myself.

Edit: I read a lot of books online for my English class. So how do you guys think the brightness will effect reading ( would it help or hinder)?

 

[RichieZ]

its better than the battery life on my thinkpad X31, real life usage is like 3.5 hrs on the x31 the ibook gets easily more than 4 hours, both are 12" laptops. my x31 is the 1.4 Pentium M

 

[JMoore]

Whats a good screensize to get. I always though bigger was better personally (unless you wanted to fit it somewhere in a small space), but it seems like a lot of people are telling me they prefer the 12" screensize to the larger 15" or 17" screen.

 

[halfadder]

JMoore, bring along a list of things you plan on doing with your notebook after you buy it. Hopefully the Apple store will let you try applications like iMovie (or maybe even Final Cut Express, I think it's only $99 now with purchase of hardware). Keynote is also a great application if you plan on doing presentations with your PowerBook (there's a demo slideshow in /Library/Application Support/Keynote/Samples/). Konfabulator (http://www.widgetgallery.com/) might be fun to try out to see how the screen looks and if 1024x768 is enough for you.

 

[halfadder]

As far as the Apples, you don't get much choice. iBooks have 12" and 14", but both are 1024x768. The 12" model has a nice screen. Some people like more real estate to work with, though. I'm not so sure my eyes could handle 12" 1280x1024 though.

15" and 17" notebooks have nice screens, but they're much larger to carry around. You can wrap an iBook in a thin towel or put it in a little slipcover and throw it into your backback without worries.

 

[hopejr]

The 12" screen on my iBook is great.
As for my prolonged battery life, I have it on dimmest screen without turning it off (which is still quite good), and I have "Put hard disk(s) to sleep when possible" checked, with processor performance set to Automatic. I don't have an Airport card, but that can easily be turned off to save power (not that it would use much anyway). I suppose that being 1GHz instead of 1.2 might contribute slightly.
I had to run down my battery one time for calibration. Even though I was doing intensive 3D rendering with radiosity and antialiasing, had the volume turned up full with a CD playing, the screen on full brightness, and had a USB mouse plugged in, it still took 3 hours to do it. I was quite impressed.
BTW, I didn't give the hard drive a chance to spin down either

 

[hopejr]

Since my last post, I decided to do a test to see how long my battery really lasts (not how long it seemed to last, which is what I was going by before). I timed it to 4 hours 59 minutes before the message at 3% saying "Plug in your AC now or it will go to sleep in a few minutes". It had 9 minutes left on the clock (which seems to underestimate at low percentages). I'm quite impressed, considering what I was doing with it while it was on battery. I had at least 10 programs running the whole time: Finder, Safari, Mail, iCal, Terminal, Word, Excel, Entourage (which is a real hog, like Outlook is), MSN Messenger, Activity Monitor, Cisco VPN, Dreamweaver MX 2004. I had multiple windows and documents open in every program (except Mail, Activity Monitor and Cisco VPN). Was accessing the drive almost constantly (opening and closing files in dreamweaver, etc, and saving changes I made). I was accessing the internet a lot to test what I was doing, and Entourage and Mail were checking email every 10 minutes (with sounds turned on). For quite a while I also had Opera, firefox and internet explorer open and running. I also had very little performance drop (even when I minimised windows and using expose). Man I'm impressed with this thing! note tho that I had my screen dimmed and processor on automatic.

If I tried such a stunt on my old P4-M 2.2GHz, it wouldn't last 30 minutes. Wouldn't have any signigicant performance drops with that either except for what SpeedStep would do. OTOH, when I start running more programs, Windows would have problems handling it (not like OS X which is great at multitasking and memory management). I couldn't really dim the screen on it tho. But, I'm not sure about a P-M. They would probably be similar to my iBook (depending on the configuration tho). It would be cool to find out.

 

[ProCoolingKevin]

I have one of the newest iBooks with a 1.2 ghz G4 and 768mb of RAM so I can tell you all about it if you're curious. I love it. I've used macs and PCs for a long time. I'm too tired right now to break it down, but if you're curious, send me an e-mail with any questions "kev.hanson@gmail.com" and I'll be happy to talk to you about it. I consider myself a pretty neutral body as my portable is an iBook and my office PC is a home built linux box running Fedora Core 3.
-Kevin