Q: Lion - Horrible MacBook Pro Battery Life

Used to get 7-8, it's down to between 4-5. its 86% already and I've only been doing light browsing for about 30mins

When I first bought MBP 20 months ago with SL, I got 6 to 7 hours

After clean install of Lion, I got 2 and half hours max. With SMC reset, it now fluctuates between 2 and half and 6 hours, but realistically, still 2 and half max.

After clean install of Mountain Lion, I got 2 hours max. With SMC reset, no difference... not even fluctuating to 6 hours anymore

That's definitely worse than what I get from my ThinkPad after 20 months of usage (at least 3 hours after 3 years of owning a T400 with clean install of Windows 7)

Hello everybody,

I'm having the same problem with battery life since I installed Lion (oh.. my lovely Snow Leopard). Esterday I've upgraded to Mountain Lion. There is no imporovement. Fully chanrged battery is expected to live four and a half hours.

I wonder if Apple works on this problem. Or may be Apple don't care any more about us - customers?

Anyawys, I hope that either Apple solves the issue or someone else develops good operating system for us to switch. Hope the first happen sooner.

Best of luck to Apple!

Specs:

  Model Name:          MacBook Pro

  Model Identifier:          MacBookPro7,1

  Processor Name:          Intel Core 2 Duo

  Processor Speed:          2.4 GHz

  Number of Processors:          1

  Total Number of Cores:          2

  L2 Cache:          3 MB

  Memory:          4 GB

  Bus Speed:          1.07 GHz

  Boot ROM Version:          MBP71.0039.B0E

  SMC Version (system):          1.62f5

  Serial Number (system):

  Hardware UUID:

  Sudden Motion Sensor:

  State:          Enabled

I'm having the same problem! I have a 13' MacBookPro with 2.4 GHz Intel Core i5 processor and 4GB of ram. Any solution yet?

has anyone upgraded to Mountain Lion yet? Have you gotten improvements on this battery issue?

Yesterday upgrated to Mountain Lion. No improvements in battery life.

Two questions:

1. Any experience with SSD vs. regular spinning drive?

2. Anyone consider re-installing Snow Leopard?

Other than full-screen, are there really any benefits to Lion/Mountain Lion?

I use Dropbox, Google Drive, and Box.net, so iCloud is moot.

6-8 hours battery vs. 2-3 hours is not moot.

I've given up on the battery.  Thankfully I don't need to be mobile most of the time.

I got an average of 4.5 hrs. and a max. of 5 hrs (rarely). on Lion and ML (with only Mail and Safari, sometimes Activity Monitor and Console on top).  After installing an SSD (only tested once so far) 5 hrs. after a clean installation (edit: nothing migrated) with only Safari and Mail open.  So maybe 1/2 an hour more, maybe not.

Did consider SL, but quite like ML, so I'm gonna stick with it, even though battery life is nothing compared to SL.

Coconut Battery shows today 88% of the design capacity of the battery. Yesterday was 90%... I don't want to buy a new battery next month... so I'm seriously considering finish with ML and downgrade to Lion but there is no "Lion" installation in AppStore... Any suggestion?

As you'd have to wipe your drive anyway to downgrade, you may as well install SL from your grey disks and after that the Lion purchase should be downloadable from the Mac AppStore.

Or if you have access to a computer/bootable partition with a lesser version (like SL), you should be able to download Lion from there, save the installer and use it on your MBP after the wipe.

Maybe you won't even want Lion any more after a test run of your original SL.

Thanks for all that options. The best for me will be reinstall SL from original disk and then download Lion and install it from zero. I'll try next week if Apple doesn't say nothing.

I use an SSD, no improvements to battery. I didn't do a clean reinstall. I won't even bother.. Based on some of the posts here, it doesn't look like a clean reinstall will do much to help with the battery issue.

I love many of the new features in ML and I've gotten so used to the short battery life issue since using Lion that I'm starting to just ignore it. I dont really need to be on the battery all the time thankfully and my iPad does a good job of sustaining good battery life when I use Wifi. I feel like having Wifi while using my MBP kills the battery.

Apple has fixed a lot of the iCloud issues in ML which is great. I am able to overlook the battery issue because of this. But I do agree that it's a little unfair that they make us go through this. Especially since these machines are quite expensive, and the fact that I used to enjoy very good battery life during the SL days.

Well it looks like people going to Mountain Lion from Snow Leopard are seeing the same problems as we've been having for over a year.

I've posted over there. They are trying all the same old garbage we've tried (and failed) for the last year. PRAM / SMC / Fresh builds and all that...

MAYBE, Apple will step up - but judging by what Apple told me, they can't fix it. It's the way the GPU now works.

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4135250?start=30&tstart=0

Yep, that's right, keepeing unnecesary programs closed helps a lot, but not enough to get back that battery performance, i've already posted this before, it was just an experiment;

But, after few weeks observing the mac behavior, I realize the problem is networking a lot (let me explain this), what i do was deactivating my iCloud account, delete gestures i'm not using at all, unregister not important email accounts and my battery now lasts more than 5 hours even with airport enabled.

So it's not the best solution, but it's usefull to get back the battery life time. Maybe i must try t configure iCloud sync propierties to avoid a real time sincronization of my files, but i'm really not using it.

Fo example tonight, I unplugged my 13" 2012 MacPro at 11pm, now is 1:30 am and i'm still getting 5 hour more (that's what battery indicator says) and it has been really accurate since my little experiment;
Display brightness les than 50% and always networking.

Not works for me.

Macbook 5,1 13", unibody alluminium, late 2008 with ML.