Where I live, I have around 1 hour each way to and from work, instead of taking the car, I like to be green and take the train to and from work - this also has the added advantage that I save alot of money at the same time :o)

As I am commuting to and from work so much, I wanted something to do whilst on the train, I invested in an Macbook Pro 13" for the journey. I had tried an Lenovo netbook, but the fact that it struggled to even open Firefox was enough for me to see that a Netbook wasn't what I needed.

I had an 17" laptop which I used at home, from before I bought my iMac, but it was simply too big and heavy and the battery life was terrible.

So I invested in an Macbook Pro when the new models came out back in April of this year (2010).

I am a relatively new Mac user having first made the jump back in February, after buying an iMac, so an Macbook Pro was the only option after having finally made the move to Mac.

One of the major advantages with the very latest models is the battery is extremely good!

At home on wifi I can easily get 10 hours out of the battery with just general surfing. Obviously what you do whilst running off the battery determines how many hours you get out of a single charge.

However a few months ago I noticed something on my way to work.

The browser I used to surf the internet, also determined how many hours I would get out of my Macbook Pro before I needed to recharge.

The way I used my Macbook Pro was the same everyday:

iPhone 3GS (Now iPhone 4) was internet tethered to my MBP via Bluetooth (We have had Internet Tethering here in Denmark since day 1 of the 3GS and at no extra cost).

Brightness is down to around 3-4 and sound is on mute unless I am watching a video.

I usually had an browser open, back when I first purchased my MBP, I was using Firefox - of which I had been using for years on Windows, so why change?

Then Google came with a decent version of Chrome for Mac, which I tried and loved on my iMac so I of course changed my browser on my MBP.
One thing I noticed was the amount of time between charges went up by about 40minutes.

So this made me wonder what if I changed to Safari.

Well... When I did change, I didn't notice 40 minutes, I noticed around 2 HOURS from a full charge!

Now this is of course a substantial amount which of instead of around 5 and a half hours, I was now getting upto 7 hours from a full charge, and infact I still do.

If you are running videos on YouTube or other flash based websites, the battery time drops accordingly, but I can pretty much travel to and from work for 4 days without having to charge my Macbook Pro, and all because of Safari!

Try it next time you are out and about!
I think you will be pleasantly surprised!

Tags: 3gS, apple, battery, bluetooth, charge, chrome, firefox, google, internet, iphone, More…life, macbook, pro, safari

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Comment by Gavin Roskamp on October 27, 2010 at 1:05am: It's been known that Safari is very very energy efficient for notebooks. It's also known that it is a memory whore, so you should be sure to quit Safari and restart it every now and then to clear some RAM out.

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