New Apple Macbooks Get Up To 8 Hours Battery Life!
 

Eight, freakin, hours. I couldn't believe it. In my lightest test, the new 15-inch MacBook Pro lasted eight hours and eight minutes. That's with the screen at half brightness (completely usable) and no funny optimizations. The notebook is just playing music and surfing through a lot of my old reviews. There's no way this could be right. Maybe my test was too light?

The older MacBook Pro managed 3.25 hours in this test. The new one? Just under 5:
That's a 51% improvement in battery life. It's close enough to the max theoretical 46% improvement for me to think that the significant gains in wireless web browsing are due to improvements in idle power optimizations. It's possible that all of the components in the new MacBook Pro have been optimized for lower voltages at idle.

http://www.anandtech.com/mac/showdoc.aspx?i=3580&p=1

Tempting, although $1100 for a 13" laptop... meh

I got an IBM X60 here. 12", Core Duo, 4 Gb, 500 Gb, .... runs also 7 to 8 hours on one battery charge. Costed me a lot less :)

the screen size matters for power consumption


Battery life as excitement factor also upsets marketing theory