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Lion - Horrible MacBook Pro Battery Life

After upgrading to Lion, my MacBook Pro battery life has been severly affected. After 1.5 hours of light web browsing, my battery has decreased to 40% from 100% after charging all night.


Notes: Spotlight completed indexing the hard drive over night, and the laptop remained plugged in charging. The fans seem to be running normally, not at a higher rate. The backlight is at 50% brightness.


Thoughts?

MacBook Pro, Mac OS X (10.7), 2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 4 GB Ram

Posted on Jul 21, 2011 7:02 AM

Reply
2,644 replies

Mar 27, 2012 5:57 AM in response to Courcoul

I have a MacBook5,1 with FileVault2 actived and i have 2 batteries. The first battery is a "service battery" for Lion, not for SnowLeopard. It works only for 2h; the second (new) battery is a "good battery" for Lion but it works only for 2h and 30m.


I have reinstalled Lion, cleared deamon, resetted the SMC, resetted the PRAM... but the battery life is the same.


One more thing, the charge is lost also when the MacBook is in stop! 10% after few hours of stop!



Please release a fix!

Mar 31, 2012 2:22 AM in response to Michael Empric

I just want to enlist myself in the myriad of users who seem to have this problem.


Just a couple of weeks ago I updated from SL to Lion 10.7.3, battery life of my MacBookPro Mid 2010 15" plummeted to about half of its previsous value.


I am getting paticularly worried since my MBP had the Nvidia switching problem and the Logic Board was exchanged (luckily after apple enlisted this error in the official list for warranty approval between 12 months and 24 months). So from my point of view this is the second pretty big issue with this MBP and I am not very happy about it, to put it mildly... Too bad that recognition and fixing of this issue takes so long.


Fingers crossed that the issue gets fixed...

Mar 31, 2012 6:21 PM in response to alto2

All of this sounds familiar to me -- and I am running a 2010 Macbook Pro 15" but have done no upgrades to my system -- yet. I have been following the disucssion for a while to see if I want to upgrade ---

About 3 months ago my Mac began running hot -- very hot - battery life is half of what it used to be. I have contacted Apple support twice -- both times I have gotten no resolution. I looked back at general apple updates that I received and I had two in a row that came down about a month before I noticed all of this starting. Could this heating problem be something other then or in addition to Lion?

Mar 31, 2012 7:40 PM in response to Michael Empric

Here's a question I don't think I've seen addressed here: how much fluctuation in battery time remaining is normal? I ask because mine really shifts wildly. I reset the PRAM this afternoon just for kicks and just now unplugged the MBP. I went from 6:29 to 4:04 in less than 3 minutes, with a smaller flucuation (20 minutes and back up) before then. And now it says 6:38. In previous experiments, I've had it go from 4 to 3 to 3.5 and then down to 2:45 in the space of a few minutes as well.


I don't recall anything so wild with my iBook, which was my only other Apple laptop. As a result, I just don't trust this battery to last for anything like a reasonable amount of time because I never feel like I get a good read on it. Is this sort of thing at all typical, especially with Lion, or have I been correct in assuming that it's characteristic of the problem?

Apr 1, 2012 6:56 AM in response to alexius82

Same issue as everyone else. Can't read all 163 pages. Has anyone found a solution that actually worked? What do the Apple "experts" at the Genius Bar say when you bring your Mac in? Are they aware of the issue. Do they offer a solution?


I'm wondering of iCloud has anything to do with it. All I know is I'm down to maybe 3-4 hours. Sometimes less.

Apr 1, 2012 7:12 AM in response to alto2

I have exacty the same issue with my MacBookAir after I upgraded from SL to Lion. Tried to re-condition my battery a few times. had aslight improvement but the battery life is down significantly. And it acts erratically, which I expect it to do to some exent depending on CPU usage but not this much.

Annoying. I need my battery life back!!!

Apr 9, 2012 8:29 PM in response to Michael Empric

I have had this problem for some time. Stumbled on another thread today which spoke about activity monitor. I have finder at over 100% sometimes as well as mdworker. I am not doing anything special, have all finder windows closed, etc... Force quitting finder and letting it restart seems to help battery life as it brings the finder CPU usage down to 1 or 2 % right away. And I get two hours of added battery time all of a sudden. Very annoying but helpful.

Lion - Horrible MacBook Pro Battery Life

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