Lion - Horrible MacBook Pro Battery Life

On a related note tied to this thread, installed the Battery Health app that a fellow poster recommended. Only thing I missed from CoconutBattery was the ability to save the health history, but the power consumption graph looked cute.

Then someone else recommended the gfxCardStatus utility, and I did that too. Lo and behold, much was my surprise to discover that Battery Health was forcing the Radeon GPU to come on instead of relying on the Intel integrated GPU for a lower energy footprint. So beware. BTW, CoconutBattery, with no snazzy graphs, doesn't do GPU switching.

On the thread subject, I too am saddled with the fat cat. Previous MBP, last of the non-unibodies, croaked last Dec., only way to get an antiglare MBP was to purchase a customized unit that came saddled with the beast. Might mention that I never had the chance to truly meet the snowy cat; bought the retail disk but never got a round to it before the Mac died. Current hardware does about 5 hours, tops. EFI upgrade only stabilized the max charge capability the battery reports, before it was jumping wildly all over the place.

I don't know if this has been discussed previously but my new MacbookPro 13" Late 2011 started exhibiting the same battery issue. I could not get it to keep more than a 2 to 2.5 hour battery life. This was very strange as my coworkers who had an early 2011 and a late 2011 i7 were getting 5+ hours.

You must be running something in the background they said... I kept on saying that I didn't know why.

I would search the forums and find others who like me were experiencing terrible battery life around 2 hours.

I just accepted it was what it was and I would have to either go to the genius guys or wait for a fix.

OK so now let's discusss what happened today. A colleague of mine and mysef had a business meeting on Webex and I was hosting. He said, let me look at your MAC activity monitor. See what is going on.

So we opened up activity moniter and clicked to get to the CPU. We clicked to sort by percentage with the highest shown.

All of a sudden there was an activity grabbing 99% of my CPU. Now I can't remember the full name of it but it was an HP activity which turned out to be a scanner application fom HP which I had installed about 3 months ago. I think it is just the standard HP scanner software which probably supports multiple scanners.

So we decided we would just run the uninstaller.

We got rid of the software/drivers and I let my macbookpro charge back to 100%..

Once it had charged I then went and unhooked the power... it went and calculated.....

Boom!!!!!! 5:30 hours remaining. Then 6:10 remaining..

So in my experience double check you do not have any HP scanner utiliyu installed and eating away at your CPU. This killed my mac.

Just soooo dang happy I found out why finally and pehaps this might just help some others of you out there who may be unaware!

Good luck!

Just to add to what I just wrote I just pulled this from a google serach on the HP scanner issue.

"Some of you who are using HP Scanners may already know this issue/solution but perhaps not ....

I just solved a nagging problem with my MacBook Pro and thought I'd share this info in case anyone else has similar problems.

The battery life on my MacBook Pro went way down some months ago. I thought the battery was dying and bought a new one however there was no improvement. Also another irritation has been that the heat coming off the MacBook Pro was high enough to make it uncomfortable in my lap.

Yesterday I checked out my Activity Monitor (Applications/Utilities) for the first time in a couple of years and I saw that my CPU was maxed out. The culprit was "HP Shortcut Manager Startup". I googled this program and discovered that this is a fairly common problem among Mac users worldwide. The HP programmers were sloppy in writing the code for HP Scanner software.

The HP Scanner software loads at startup and then CONTINUOUSLY checks your HP scanner to see if you've pressed any of the "shortcut buttons" on the scanner (i.e. the hardware buttons on the scanner lid). It does this whether you are using the scanner or not and even when you aren't connected to a scanner. If you have HP scanner software installed, it's constantly looking for these hardware buttons and it maxes out your CPU, draining the battery of the laptop in a couple of hours, keeping the computer hot, and generally slowing down things.

The solution for this problem is:

1- Remove (delete) "HP Shortcut Manager Startup" from your login items (System Preferences/Accounts/Administrator/Login Items)

2- Restart your computer

2- Open your hard disk and go to (Library/Application Support/ Hewlett-Packard/HP ScanJet Scanner) and delete "HP Shortcut Manager Startup".

Everything should (continue to) work normally as usual regarding using your HP Scanner.

From what I read on the internet, HP has been aware of this problem in their scanner software for Mac OS since early 2010 but have yet to fix the problem and current HP Scanners you buy today still contain this bug.

I discovered that some Mac Users won't use HP software (or HP hardware) at all because of sloppy programming for Mac OS. An alternative scanner software for HP and other scanners is VueScan, a shareware program easily found on the net.

This experience also reminds me how important it is to check out my Activity Monitor every so often to see what programs are accessing my CPU.

Anyway this solved my main issue with my MacBook Pro and I occasionally see complaints about heat and battery life on the web .... so I thought I would share this bit of trivia in case any TV members are experiencing similar problems. "

Hope this helps any that were not aware of this issue..

Now my MBR rocks.. and doesn't burn my lap... thanks HP!!!!

Process MDMT was eating 40% of my CPU 15" Early 2010 MBP 4gb 500Gb HDD. This is the local snapshot process for Time Machine. I killed it (permanently) and batt life up, heat down. Still not the 7 hours I had in SL though.

Well

I did an SMC reset. The Control+Option and Power button one DID NOT WORK so I tried shutting down, removing magsafe, and holding power button for 5 seconds and it has worked! Battery meter has returned to 6:20 remaining instead of 2:30 on a full charge. Amazing and mysterious. See https://discussions.apple.com/thread/2718879?start=0&tstart=0 for details.

same issue with my MacBook Pro (15", 2.0GHz, 8GB Ram, 750GB 7200rpm HDD & 500GB 5400rpm HDD using OWC Data Doubler).

bew1234,

My question for you is: did it STAY at that battery value? When I reset my SMC, it came up with a number similar to yours when I started up, but it didn't stay that way for too long.

alto2 wrote:

bew1234,

My question for you is: did it STAY at that battery value? When I reset my SMC, it came up with a number similar to yours when I started up, but it didn't stay that way for too long.

As many other users have pointed out in this thread, battery estimate will increase after an SMC reset, but unfortunately that will not lead to any improvement on real battery life.

The issue isn't yet solved.

There are just a bunch of workarounds (ie wise gpa's suggestions as "get some clothes on when it's cold outside") to get slight better battery life performances, but nothing compared to what used to be with SL.

As a matter of fact about what I'm saying, there is no one here who has yet solved the bad battery drain during sleep, aside of putting their laptops in hibernate mode instead of sleep mode via some third party tool.

Let's hope that 10.7.4 will solve this issue.

Checked out my HP scanner soft ware and sure enough, it keep the CPU going at a high rate. Went in to my Login Items and eleted it. Got my battery life back! Thank you handyman. What a releif. My scanner and printer still works fine.

Another observation some may find useful

I, too , have suffered poor battery life

Only a couple hours on full battery charge wtih the battery testing software indicating my battery was fine, plenty of cycles left etc although it was 3.5 years old.

BUT

My battery was not fine. It started to swell, affected my trackpad and this evening when I went to my local Apple Store believing I needed a new trackpad the Genius came back from testing to show that my battery was swollen, rocking (hence pressuring the trackpad, causing it to misbehave)

Unsolicited the Genius told me that the swelling was typical of batteries which have reached the end of their life,which have or are going bad. So much for the software indicators!

I am going to see if I get better battery life now that I have a brand new battery.

So, while i belive Lion has caused issues for many- I am NOT "poopooing that idea- I also have to ask if perhaps more persons have poorly functioning batteries but are unaware?

Nope. My battery only has 170 cyles. Prior to upgrading from SL to Lion it was fine, actually excellent. After upgrading to Lion it just went down the drain! I have done all the tweaking I have learnt from so many of you on this discussion. THANKS to you all!

Now, with the latest tweak with the HP software I am back to almost 7 hours. Another strange thing, I checked the CPU activity and yesterday and found that Outlook was using 88% of the CPU capacity. I closed Outlook and retarted it and it was donw to 6%. Go figure!

But I am happy with my almost 7 hours now. But definitely, Lion is casuing some strange stuff to happen, there is no quesiton about that. Too many folks with identical or similar issues after updating from SL to Lion. That is a clear indication of someting not being right.

Good point.

Have just pulled the magsafe out and it states 4:10. That's not great on a battery with 115 cycles but better than the 2:30 of two days ago. Brightness 100%, Firefox running and MDMT disabled. And, oddly, the number is going up - now 4:21. Now, 4:31. I don't understand but I do believe that Lion, for whatever reason, has deceased battery life. Acceptable? Probably. Clever engineering? Probably not. Good marketing? Definitely not. Apple should have pointed out that Lion would decease battery life as many folk rely on that 6-8 hour functionality. Now, 4:37.

It's a long list of Apple users that, to be fair, may have to settle for the status quo. Don't get me started on the magsafe bricks. I`m on my third.

Barbara Passman3 wrote:

Another observation some may find useful

I, too , have suffered poor battery life

Only a couple hours on full battery charge wtih the battery testing software indicating my battery was fine, plenty of cycles left etc although it was 3.5 years old.

BUT

My battery was not fine. It started to swell, affected my trackpad and this evening when I went to my local Apple Store believing I needed a new trackpad the Genius came back from testing to show that my battery was swollen, rocking (hence pressuring the trackpad, causing it to misbehave)

Unsolicited the Genius told me that the swelling was typical of batteries which have reached the end of their life,which have or are going bad. So much for the software indicators!

I am going to see if I get better battery life now that I have a brand new battery.

So, while i belive Lion has caused issues for many- I am NOT "poopooing that idea- I also have to ask if perhaps more persons have poorly functioning batteries but are unaware?

Well my model is an early 2011 and problem with battery drain has started since I've installed Lion.

Many users with newer laptops than mine —which ship with Lion pre-installed— have the battery drain issue.

I think tjastro has explained it better than I did.

Good luck with your new battery.

Rayced wrote:

Well my model is an early 2011 and problem with battery drain has started since I've installed Lion.

Many users with newer laptops than mine —which ship with Lion pre-installed— have the battery drain issue.

I think tjastro has explained it better than I did.

Good luck with your new battery.

Yes. Barbara's issue certainly may apply to someone with an older MBP, but mine was brand new in November, came with Lion, and has never had the proper battery life--I completely wiped everything and started over after less than a week, thinking that something in my migration caused the problem. Made little, if any, difference. There's definitely an issue with Lion, even fresh out of the box.

I am not doubting something fishy about Lion and I have not yet tested the charge holding of the new battery.

All I want to point out is that my battery, too, showed low cycle count and tests indicated battery life was still good.

But yesterday I learned that my battery was not good, It was swollen = defective=was rocking and pressuring other things inside the MBP, such the track pad pressure screw.

Many of us questioned wny our a apparently still fresh batteries with low cyle counts showed have such poor charge-holding performance.(i.e. Tjastro reporting today that his battery shows only 115 cycles)

Maybe the cyle count is immaterial or is irrelevant to identifying the problem?Maybe a battery can be "bad" in some ways but still register ok on the kind of tests wer ran on them?

Lion is doing something .

Maybe it is indirectly damaging batteries (?heat? or ?) so that despite good measurements via software battery tests, the batteries are NOT working well and hence the poor performance.

I , like all of you,had downloaed software to "test" my battery recently and the tests checked out well.Yet my battery was not healthy.