I’m getting 2:50 of battery use on my MacBook. The MacBook (and thus battery) was a new refurb in September, 2006. I don’t have problems with it, save for the expected, normal, gradual decay of battery session life. This is a fact of life with laptop batteries. From what I’ve read and people I’ve spoken to, if you’re getting an hour or more of session life after two years of use, you’re doing very well.

Anyway, during this gradual decline in performance, the battery’s estimates of its session life can drift. After battery calibration however, the predictive time-remaining estimate at the beginning of my current session was within 10 minutes, a margin I consider very accurate.

For this 2:50 mark, my CPU setting is on Performance, and my screen brightness is 3 ticks down from max. I’m using a MS wired optical mouse, which in my extremely non-empirical testing comes at a cost of roughly 10% battery life.

Activities include playing music w/ headphones, Web browsing, light Photoshop work and heavy file downloading.