Surface Book Battery Life - what are you getting

After February 17 update, 

3 hours 15 minutes Clipboard 

13 hours 7 minutes Laptop

Gary, you seem to be blessed because when others have issues, it seems that your machine is almost as perfect as it gets. 

Did you get an original release machine or wait a couple months before buying it?

I'd LOVE to know how it's remotely possible to get that kind of battery life.

On Clipboard, like most others, I am getting 1.5 -2 hours max.

With laptop and clipboard together, I am maxing out at 7-8 hours.

My screen is at 60-75% brightness.  I have not downloaded anything at all to this device outside of all Office Apps, GotoMeeting (doesn't run in the background), and iTunes (also doesn't run in background and I disabled it on startup and the Bonjour system app).

My work consists of nothing more than Gmail for the day, as well as Word and Excel most of the time, with the ocassional work on PPT. 

I don't watch ANY video, don't play games, and don't listen to music at all.  This is simply stated my work device and nothing else.

I use the Edge Browser for all web surfing which is used quite a bit as well for research and articles.

You get amazing over the top battery life.

I even reduced the brightness to 25% when using Clipboard only (can barely see screen well) and I can get a little over 2 hours out of it.

Sean,

It is what it is.  I really do get excellent battery life.

I do not have a Microsoft Dock and from what I'm reading I don't want one either.

After reading Paul Thurrott's article I'm thinking that it could very well have something to do with what I run.  The applications I use are limited to Interactive Brokers Trader Workstation, Microsoft Office 365  subscription (I use Outlook, OneNote, Word and Excel), Adobe Lightroom/Photoshop CC subscription, Microsoft Visual Studio 2015, and Chrome 64 bit.  I do not run any legacy Win32 apps and from what I'm reading that could explain a lot..

I office entirely in my home and have total control of my environment.  I have a fast, very reliable 100Mbps Comcast Fiber Internet connection.  I understand that a fast, reliable Internet connection can have a lot to do with good battery life.

If I'm at 50% brightness and only doing lightweight Stuff, no graphics, no Lightroom/Photoshop, I've actually gotten over 13 hours of battery life.  If I throw in a lot of heavy duty graphics stuff and move my brightness to 75% where I prefer to keep it, my battery life can drop as low as 6 hours.  For me battery life has everything to do with screen brightness and what I'm running.   Battery life for what I would normally run in a typical workday at 75% brightness would be in the range of 8 hours.

Maybe it would be better to ignore my best case testing and just write that I can average 8 hours work related battery life.

My i7/16GB SB consistently loses 11% per hour, linearly, when I have battery saver on and screen at about 50% brightness. However, if the fan kicks on AT ALL, this changes significantly. Usually just one Facebook video on Chrome will kick the fan on. Otherwise, I just have Wifi on, bluetooth on, and location off, and am just editing Office documents and such. So I can get about 8.5 hours under these "normal" work conditions. I could maybe get up to 10 hours if the brightness was at 20%, which is not realistic during the day.

I guess my bigger issue with claims from manufacturers of this and other products like it is that they are so far from reality. 

However, given that, and the fact MS talked about this being that ultimate device for serious professionals, you cannot advertise that type of battery life and expect people to just not at anything or be upset 

If I can get 10 hours under normal ordinary working conditions to me that's excellent. When you advertise 13 then MS opens themselves up to criticism.  I just feel that there's such an attempt to mislead the very consumers they hope to get and keep it is unethical  

In my company, we are straight with all of our customers and tell it like it is, even if it means there's a chance we might lose some. Better to be honest and up front, admitting your mistakes as well as being up front with the true performance of a product vs risk losing all credibility. 

Based on the fact that MS has released a half baked device and then has the gaul to tell those consumers an unrealistic set up performance metrics on battery life, which they know mobile professionals rely on and treasure over many other things, shows to me (and many of my colleagues) they don't have the best interest of their customers at heart nor do they really care.

What they advertised, and explicitly noted, is the optimal battery life of a specific task(which is video playback) and sure that is nowhere near reality where different people have different usage: Some are just doing web browsing and light email editing , while some others do heavy multitasking with a lot of things going in the background. The only way to be truthful to reality would be like "battery life varies from 2 hrs to 12 hrs, depending on usage" but no manufacturer advertises like that.