Surface Book Battery Life - what are you getting

Kevin.. Totally right there with you. I'm satisfied with 7 hrs but not what was advertised. I'm thinking things are quiet because they're fine tuning the firmware update, it is indeed based on the one you installed (and newer ones) an update was expected on the 19th according to Paul  Thurrott and Mary Joe Foley but nothing yet. Pauls article "surface gate" is exactly on the money too. If Ms wants to retain its customers, new SB customers too (I switched from a perfectly fine working MBP!) they should release a statement saying it is coming. Not in here, but in their general press releases. 

Are you listening, Microsoft?!!!

This is a story of ups and downs for me too.  Luckily I don't have it as bad as some people, I get 7 hours or so doing random things but also if I loop a local movie it gets about 7:20 with low volume and 50% screen light.

When I first got this SB 256GB and GPU setup, I never got the battery life advertised.  I tried a bunch of stuff recommend by several forums (drivers, resetting PC, turning off Hello and/or Cortana, etc etc etc.).  Then one night I signed up for developer builds...and voila there was build 5011 (I think that was the version anyway), downloaded it and woah...12 hrs!?!  I looped a movie overnight and after 6-7 hours of looping I was only at 48% battery!  

So I said, woah, great!  That means the battery is fixed in build 5011, little did I know, 5011 was released to the public a day or two later.  So, rather than continue to receive possibly buggy dev builds, I opted back out of the program, reset my PC, then installed the new build off of the general updates.  

Annnnnndddd....pew pew...with that, my whisp of a hope of advertised battery life was GONE.  Never again could I repeat such good results.  Since then I have NOT opted back into dev builds as I'm just hoping one day a firmware/build will come that will fix the issue because I saw it fixed right before my eyes.  Maybe it was some concoction of the order in which I installed updates or did step A B and C but....I don't know.  I'm just...hoping.  

What confuses me is Microsoft seems strangely quiet on the subject?  All I hear is about people getting replacement SB and still getting the same thing.  Isn't someone up in arms about it and Microsoft is releasing a statement about a fix?  

To be honest, I am in fact pleased with 7-8 hrs of battery life - however its still 30% less than what was advertised; which was part of the reason I was willing to pay the big price tag.  I dreamed of the day I could go traveling for a weekend and not need to worry about charging it.

I would think that the 256 chip-set would have better battery life than 512.  The CPU/GPU would be the same, of course.  

I do find that during the daylight hours the keyboard is much easier to see if I turn off the keyboard back light.  I don't use the back light unless I can't see the keyboard at night.  

With my timeouts set to 5 minutes, my SB does turn off quite frequently.  I wake up only by touching the touchpad and the instantaneous face recognition.   I'll be completely turned off during lunch, of course.  And I'm frequently turned off if I'm watching something on financial TV or reading something, (I have a large number of trading and technical books on Kindle that I read on my Android Nexus 9 which sits on an Incipio stand beside my SB).  

So when I'm doing a battery timing, I'm not timing a SB that is turned on the entire time.  I'm timing my typical workday, and that is all that really means anything to me for battery life.  The battery tests I've made, I've gone to battery at about 8 AM and gone back to the charger sometime after 8 PM.  There's my 12 hour workday test.

And, of course, my computer normally stays attached to the charger 24/7 unless I'm going out for a seminar or meeting with someone.  Although sometimes I'll take my SB to the family room for the evening and it will be on battery the entire time.

For the way I use my SB, the battery life I'm getting is way more than adequate.

I am keeping them no more than 50% and all I am doing is email and web browsing. nothing intensive at all. a few excel files. I'm getting terrible battery life. have the back light keyboard turned off, no audio or steaming anything.  This is my second surface book and apparently they're sending me a third next week but I've been plagued with issues ever since my first one.  Happy to hear you're having such good luck with it. I have a 256 gb and i'm wondering if that chipset is the issue compared to say your 512.

Robinsof, are you a MSFT employee?  I haven't read one thread or one person who has even come close to 12 hours. I can't even get 4 hours. They are sending me my third Surfacebook this week?  WE'll see. I asked if i could pay for an upgrade, perhaps the model i have is what is screwed up. we'll see!!!

If you're replying to me, no, I'm not a Microsoft employee, although before I started trading for a living 15 years ago I worked as a Microsoft Windows software developer for a large corporation.

Whenever I've tested my battery, or whenever I'm out for the day, my brightness is set to 50% and my power settings are set to both turn off the screen and sleep at 5 minutes.  I use (and love) Windows Hello Face Recognition and then all I have to do to instantly be back is to touch my touch pad and Windows Hello instantaneously recognizes me and I'm right back to where I was.  So my actual computer "on-time" wouldn't be anywhere near 12 hours, but my time using my machine certainly would be.

If you can't get even 4 hours of battery life, where on earth are you keeping your brightness and power settings?