Are Apple Mac Battery Concerns A Thing Of The Past?

After several years with no major updates to most of its computer lines, Apple Inc. AAPL is finally introducing its new Macs and MacBooks on Thursday.

It has been rumored the company will use terraced battery technology to assure longer battery life than existing MacBooks — certainly a much-needed upgrade, especially taking into account Apple batteries cannot be replaced by its users, like most other computers allow.

Current MacBooks may be pretty and fast, and even offer decent battery life, but are still lagging other computers in the latter field.

As per MacWorld tests, these are the actual battery life figures for early 2015 Mac computers:

  • 13-inch Retina MacBook Pro: 13:43 of iTunes movie playback or 5:56 of Peacekeeper web use (specs promise up to 12 and 10 hours, respectively).
  • 13-inch MacBook Air: 12:15 iTunes; 6:09 web (versus 12 hours each).
  • MacBook: 9:18 iTunes; 4:24 web (versus 10 and nine hours, correspondingly).

While these figures look quite impressive, other manufacturers are producing cheaper, smaller computers with longer battery lives.

Laptop Mag conducted another test comparing how long can diverse laptops continuously surf the web over wireless until battery is drained. Here’s the chart:

Laptop Name:

Hours/Minutes:

Starting Price:

Lenovo Thinkpad X260

17:14

$764.10

Lenovo ThinkPad T460

17:04

$809.10

Acer Aspire One Cloudbook (14-Inch)

14:43

$199

MacBook Air (13-inch)

14:00

$999

Dell Chromebook 13 - 7310

13:25

$399

Microsoft Surface Book

12:29

$1499

Macbook Pro w/ Retina Display (13-inch)

12:04

$1299

Dell XPS 13 (non-touch)

11:54

$799

Vaio Z

11:42

$1,499

Lenovo 100s Chromebook

11:19

$179

Asus Transformer Book Flip TP200A

10:56

$349

Dell Latitude 15 3570

10:25

$449

Toshiba Chromebook 2 CB35

10:05

$330

Source: Laptop Mag

Teradatariver arrived to a similar conclusion: MacBooks don’t offer the best battery life.

Source: teradatariver

Here’s another chart looking into battery life from a different perspective:

 

Disclosure: Javier Hasse holds no interest in any of the securities or entities mentioned above.

Market News and Data brought to you by Benzinga APIs
Comments
Loading...
Posted In: NewsRumorsEventsTechTrading IdeasBatteryMacMacworld
Benzinga simplifies the market for smarter investing

Trade confidently with insights and alerts from analyst ratings, free reports and breaking news that affects the stocks you care about.

Join Now: Free!