Macbook pro (Early 2011) battery.

I'm starting to wonder about the battery power on mine too. I just got my new macbook pro the day after it came out, and I'm already finding myself charging it every couple hours. I haven't even used it for anything except surfing the internet so far. Thinking about taking it in tomorrow to ask about it. Let me know if you find out anything and I will do the same.

Yep, having the exact same problem. Calibrating again now so hope that helps.

Let us know if you guys have heard anything from apple. Will take mine in on Saturday if no solution comes up.

I calibrated mine and get just over 2 hours. The battery health is supposedly good at 6833 mAh. Not sure what the deal is.

So I took my MBP to the Genius Bar for them to test it. Whatever test they did upfront showed my battery (and everything else) was perfectly fine. Then they suggested I leave it for 24 hours for them to run a systems diagnostic check, which I went ahead and did. I just picked up my laptop an hour ago, and they said there is absolutely nothing wrong with the battery or anything. I'm giving this thing one last run before I decide if I'm going to keep it or not. This is beyond frustrating, and I am really shocked with Apple for this. Maybe by the time they update to and come out with OS X Lion this summer, they'll realize the problem and fix it. Fingers crossed.

In your Utilities folder (that's inside the Applications folder) look for an application called "Activity Monitor". Start that, select the CPU button on the bottom, and, in the top right, select "All Processes". Once you have that, when you click the CPU column header in the middle area, you will organize everything by how much CPU it's using. You should be able to quickly spot what's using too much CPU and, as a result, what's taking your battery life down.

Also, go to your Energy Saver settings in preferences to see if you have "Automatic graphics switching" turned on or off. Right now, I've got less than 29% remaining right now and still am showing 2 hours left. If Apple didn't find anything, then one of these should help you find it.

same here. getting not much more than 3 hours battery life on average, have done two calibrations- not much doing on Activity Monitor, and all power-saving options are enabled. a bit disappointed to say the least...

ideas?

I had the same battery problem. I suspected that the computer used the wrong graphic card and that it was the dedicated one (6750m on my model) and not the more energy efficient integrated one (Intel HD Graphics 3000) that was actually used.

The checkbox to switch automatically graphic cards in my System Preferences was checked, so I tough that when I was not using applications that were intense on graphics (games in my case), the integrated graphics were used by Mac OS. Normally, it is the case, but for my part, I discovered with the application gfxCardStatus that my dedicated was used. Then, I tried to quit my applications to find if it was one of them that was triggering the dedicated graphics and I found the application "The Hit List" to be the guilty.

So, to fix that problem, I simply use gfxCardStatus to manually switch from integrated to dedicated when I play games only. Other time, I am on the integrated graphics.

Now, I can have the nice battery time of 7 hours and often more when I am just browsing with iTunes and Adium also opened.

I bought the base model 13" a few days ago, very unimpressed with the battery life, was fully charged an hour ago, only been surfing the web and listening to itunes and now its at 82%!! back lit off blue tooth off. dont have flash installed but do use youtube with google chrome. brightness just below half way, first ever laptop as been used to imac so not sure what to make of all this

zaccaz wrote:
I recently got the newer model of the macbook pro early 2011 in the mail today and was just wondering if there is something wrong with mine. I calibrated the battery but I still only get around three hours of web browsing with a full charge. It's advertised as 7. Thanks for any suggestions. Its the quad core model.

I don't know pal. I just fully charged mine from 3% to 100% and after using it for an hour it's at 96% and it's showing I have 10 hrs left so yeah...

im having the same issues. i have the new 13inch 2011 pro and after having a fully charge and then going on battery for like 10 minutes i am quickly down to 95%.

only browsing on google chrome with calendar open. middle brightness no keyboard light and wifi on. 5 hours remaining battery life with 95%. 5300 mah out of 5607 max charge capacity.. says design capacity is supposed to be 5770

Message was edited by: legerpinhead

i just don't get it. my wife's MBP (mid-2009 model) gets 5-7 hours EASILY, and she's on Chrome with a billion tabs open, plus iChat, Mail and Word + Excel usually... i run Chrome or Safari with Outlook, Skype, Adium, and Mail, and i'm LUCKY to get 3 hrs on my brand new i7 2.3 GHz. i've watched for crazy background processes - i have Synk Pro working all the time, which may have something to do with it, but i really don't think it would have THAT big of an impact. bluetooth is off... i can't think of anything else... HELP

Synk Pro is probably a large part of your problem, since it demands constant disk and processor activity. And if you're synching to a bus-powered external drive, that may double Synk's power demands.

eww wrote:
Synk Pro is probably a large part of your problem, since it demands constant disk and processor activity. And if you're synching to a bus-powered external drive, that may double Synk's power demands.

yeah, that's probably true now that i think about it. i'm syncing over Wifi to a remote computer (over MobileMe), so that's definitely using some power... i'll try turning it off and testing for a couple of days, maybe over the weekend when i don't need to be syncing

I also have the poor battery life and I found out that Google Chrome is guilty of switching the graphics over to the discrete graphics card.

I use GfxCardStatus to force-switch to the integrated graphics when running on battery power and although it does give me ~5 hours of battery at 55% brightness with music streaming over wifi to an airport express, flash in Google Chrome hangs anytime I try to play a youtube video. When I switch back to discrete and back again to integrated, it works (sometimes) but this is not a desired behaviour.

I could resort to use Safari, but I really like Chrome, so please fix this or find a workaround.

I have to put in a vote for the terrible battery life as well...I have the 13" i5...as hard as I try I can not reach 5 hrs...with everything turned off except wifi and brightness lower than half mostly typing documents, I only got 4hrs 40mins!!! Now with normal usage I can barely break 3hrs and then throw aperture into the mix, and whamo...down to under 2hrs! Battery health appears fine. It seems as if some of us got a dud battery, as there are many who do not have to try at all to get 7+ hrs!