What is the 17-Inch "Early 2009/Unibody" MacBook Pro battery life in "real-world" tests? What is the difference in battery life when using the NVIDIA GeForce 9600M GT and the NVIDIA GeForce 9400M?

Please note that all Macs mentioned in this Q&A have been discontinued. The "Early 2009/Unibody" 17-Inch MacBook Pro was replaced by the "Mid-2009" 17-Inch MacBook Pro on June 8, 2009.

Apple reports that the 17-Inch "Unibody" MacBook Pro models provide "8 hours of wireless productivity" with a "Better Battery Life setting" (using the slower NVIDIA GeForce 9400M). The company further defines "wireless productivity" as "wirelessly browsing various websites and editing text in a word processing document with display brightness set to 50%".

By comparison, for the previous 17-Inch MacBook Pro model -- the MacBook Pro "Core 2 Duo" 2.5 17" (Early 2008) -- Apple estimated a mere "4.5 hours of wireless productivity" performing the same test. The "Early 2008/Penryn" MacBook Pro models have a 68 W/Hr Li-Poly battery, but the 17-Inch "Unibody" model has a larger 95 W/Hr Li-Poly battery, so one would expect the "Unibody" model to have a longer battery life.

Whether or not the 17-Inch "Unibody" MacBook Pro really provides 8 hours of battery life -- a full 3.5 hours more run time than than its predecessor -- can only be determined by "real-world" testing.

Real-World Battery Life Test Results

In a "light use" web surfing scenario, LaptopMag reported:

With integrated graphics enabled, the notebook lasted 6 hours and 53 minutes on the LAPTOP Battery Test (continuous Web surfing over Wi-Fi). While that’s short of Apple’s claim, this runtime is still more than 4 hours longer than the typical desktop replacement. With power-hungry discrete graphics enabled, the MacBook Pro lasted an equally impressive time of 6 hours and 4 minutes.

In more "day-to-day" work use, the Engadget blog found:

In our tests, under normal use (image editing, heavy web surfing, blogging all over the internet, YouTube / Viddler video watching, really serious AIM sessions), the laptop nabbed an average of 4:40 on a single charge with the low-power GPU, and, surprisingly, just under four hours (about 3:50) with the discrete chip.

In a full on "battery drain" test playing a DVD, PCMag observed:

When the system was using the Nvidia 9400M GT chipset and running a DVD movie (Titanic, in this case), the battery drained in 4 hours 14 minutes. By comparison, the previous version managed only 2 hours 25 minutes.

Battery Life Summary

Ultimately, it appears that Apple's battery life numbers for the 17-Inch "Unibody" MacBook Pro -- which is equipped with a non-swappable battery -- are fairly realistic for light usage making an effort to conserve the battery, but even when it fell short of these "aggressive" estimates in "real-world" testing, reviewers were nevertheless impressed with its battery life compared to other notebooks.

Site sponsor PowerMax has new and used MacBook and MacBook Pro systems available free of sales tax.

Also see:

• What is the 15-Inch "Unibody" MacBook Pro battery life in "real-world" tests? What is the difference in battery life when using the NVIDIA GeForce 9600M GT and the NVIDIA GeForce 9400M?
• How long is the battery life of the (Pre-Unibody) MacBook Pro in "real-world" tests?
• What is the 13-Inch "Unibody" MacBook battery life in "real-world" tests?