MacBook Air Battery Gauge

Working on the new 2013 MacBook Air, I noticed that the battery gauge in the menu bar had slid into red. Typically that means a scramble to find the power adapter, but then I clicked the button:

17% battery still left—with an estimated 3 hours 23 minutes of battery charge. (That’s with screen brightness set at about 50%, an adjustment I made without thinking about it when the battery level first dipped into red.)

Wow.

Apple will need to adjust its algorithm for calculating the red zone for laptops running Intel’s Haswell processors. And I wonder how that will change under the upcoming OS X Mavericks, which incorporates numerous other battery-saving technologies. (See Marco Tabini’s article “Four ways OS X Mavericks will save your MacBook’s battery” at Macworld.com.)

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Published by Jeff Carlson

Author, photographer, and late-nighter Jeff Carlson writes for outlets such as Popular Photography, DPReview, Creative Pro, and others, and is a contributing editor for TidBITS. He is the author of Take Control of Your Digital Photos; The Photographer's Guide to Luminar AI, Take Control of Apple Watch, and Take Control of Your Digital Storage, among many other titles. View all posts by Jeff Carlson