Lion - Horrible MacBook Pro Battery Life

Being on my first unibody, since my Early'08 MBP fried its board last Dec., was taken aback on learning the new "lifetime" of 1000 cycles w/85% capacity. Especially since the old removables had a lifetime of around 300 cycles/3-4 years and no earthshaking battery technology announcement has appeared in the trade journals to justify a 300% increase. Since my current, Late'11, practically comes hardwired for the Fat Cat, didn't even try how it would fare with the previous feline.

However, being that it is a full 64-bit OS, I can envision at least one or two paths to greater energy consumption. With the stock 4GB default RAM config., I've watched free RAM go down to zero and paging to spike with relatively modest use, as seen in Activity Monitor. Hence, full power consumption from both RAM banks and increased disk I/O in the paging areas. With an 8GB RAM upgrade, disk I/O should subside, but I don't know the power specs for the bigger sticks.

Another thing that I've watched thanks to the gfxCardStatus utility suggested here is frequent and gratuitious GPU switching from the most mundane of apps that certainly don't require the oomph of the Radeon. And that does cause a hit on the battery, cause it is one hungry chip. Battery Health is one of those switcheroo apps.

Barbara Passman3 wrote:

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.

Mh-mhhh… And your actual average battery life is?

I can report what appears to be a similar battery issue with a brand new Macbook Pro 15" (obviously shipped with Lion). A couple hours of light surfing with the screen brightness up fairly high has killed about 70% of the battery. The battery appears to continue draining quite rapidly even after the screen brightness was reduced to less than half. This is shockingly bad performance, which led me to this thread.

Unfortunately, I think I owe Apple a call and will likely be sending this machine back. I'd like to run a Macbook Pro, but I can't tolerate such poor battery life and can't spend much more time setting up additional machines.

OK, maybe I don't share this battery problem. Things appear more normal now that I've taken care of an unholy interaction between Spotlight and a virus scanning program. I hope the others here find some satisfaction soon.

Hi Dwayne,

can you provide us more details about "taking care of unholy interaction between Spotlight and a virus scanning program"?

Have you just uninstalled the virus scanning program? Which virus scanning program are you talking about? How come Spotlight was interacting with it?

Thanks.

wayne111 wrote:

OK, maybe I don't share this battery problem. Things appear more normal now that I've taken care of an unholy interaction between Spotlight and a virus scanning program. I hope the others here find some satisfaction soon.

wayne111 wrote:

an unholy interaction between Spotlight and a virus scanning program. I hope the others here find some satisfaction soon.

Getting real hard to shut out Granny's voice ringing in the brain, "I told you so, you had it coming...".

But unfortunately all the Windoze emigres have this unholy addiction to virus scanning programs.

Perusing and participating in this unholy long thread, it seems to me that we are progressively losing more and more control over what we allow to run in our computers and that is the root cause of this ongoing battery performance thread. Be it unneeded code, excessive code or miscoded code, but is evident that it is not the computer's fault. It is being pushed to do lots of stuff, much unbeknown to us, and just presenting us with the tab.

Thus satisfaction remains as wishful thinking.

Courcoul wrote:

Getting real hard to shut out Granny's voice ringing in the brain, "I told you so, you had it coming...".

But unfortunately all the Windoze emigres have this unholy addiction to virus scanning programs.

So you know him/her personally to know he's migrated from Win? And you guys have rejoined here on this discussion board? Isn't that incredible or what?

I know for sure that those of us who have been using Macs since 1984 have never installed or needed an antivirus scanning program...

Rayced wrote:

Courcoul wrote:

Getting real hard to shut out Granny's voice ringing in the brain, "I told you so, you had it coming...".

But unfortunately all the Windoze emigres have this unholy addiction to virus scanning programs.

So you know him/her personally to know he's migrated from Win? And you guys have rejoined here on this discussion board? Isn't that incredible or what?

Yes, we are prescient here (especially when it comes to Ex Windows users)

Courcoul wrote:

I know for sure that those of us who have been using Macs since 1984 have never installed or needed an antivirus scanning program...

Well many other mac users have started to install anti-malware/virus software since latest crap happened with Flashback and others.

BTW I'm still curious to understand what Dwayne has done in details…

Csound1 wrote:

Yes, we are prescient here (especially when it comes to Ex Windows users)

I always knew you were a precock.

Rayced wrote:

Csound1 wrote:

Yes, we are prescient here (especially when it comes to Ex Windows users)

I always knew you were a precock.

No such word, but that is no surprise, back to your flying sheep futzak.

No, not really a recent Windows emigre. Been using variants of OS X for about a decade, almost exclusively. While I haven't *needed* a virus scanner per se (except to catch some Windows viruses in emails), some work environments are more security minded than others. I originally switched for malware immunity and have converted quite a few others. So you all are not so prescient in this case.

As for the earlier question, the virus software is Sophos and I just had to disable the on-access scanning. I hadn't been carefully paying attention, but on-access scanning made spotlight indexing take something on the order of 30 hours. I disabled on-access scanning and rebooted. Spotlight then finished indexing in about 5 hours. I still might have trouble hitting 7 hours of battery doing wireless browsing and other light tasks. I haven't had the chance to test directly, but with screen at half brightness I could probably get about 5 hours under such light use.

Csound1 wrote:

Rayced wrote:

Csound1 wrote:

Yes, we are prescient here (especially when it comes to Ex Windows users)

I always knew you were a precock.

No such word, but that is no surprise, back to your flying sheep futzak.

Isn't that the name for those weird bald people in the movie "Minority Report", who able to see crimes before they were committed?

wayne111 wrote:

As for the earlier question, the virus software is Sophos and I just had to disable the on-access scanning. I hadn't been carefully paying attention, but on-access scanning made spotlight indexing take something on the order of 30 hours. I disabled on-access scanning and rebooted. Spotlight then finished indexing in about 5 hours. I still might have trouble hitting 7 hours of battery doing wireless browsing and other light tasks. I haven't had the chance to test directly, but with screen at half brightness I could probably get about 5 hours under such light use.

Here we are, back to "flying cows" 😉 (that's for the troll CSound1)

Those are average and good results for a system which also runs a something else than a "vanilla" OS X fresh install.

Have you reported this problem to Sophos developers? Probably they should get fixed this issue.

BTW I'm too experiencing some problems with Spotlight in Lion: sometime I cannot eject esternal disks cause they're still used by mds process. This never happened to me in Snow Leopard.

EDIT: I forgot to say thank you for explaining further the issue you had experienced.