Lion - Horrible MacBook Pro Battery Life

alto2 wrote:

Csound1 wrote:

Unlike you I understand that 2 contradictory posts add no contribution. Toss a coin.

If you have nothing to contribute, why are you still here? Two contradictory posts DO contribute to the discussion, as they offer two possibilities to consider. One may be true. Neither may be true. Or each may be true for some, especially in this case where we see people reporting differing phenomena and potential solutions.

So I ask again: if you have nothing to contribute, why are you still here? If you can't add anything, don't. (Also? Aassuming what I do and don't comprehend is further proof that you're only here to cause trouble, so thanks for clearing up any remaining doubt.)

Cheese it's awesome trick to trap rats…

petermac87 wrote:

Careful Csound1 or Heckle and Jeckle will attack you with cheese! This is their thread as you can tell by they alone keeping this thread going while most have gone out and actually done something about their problem and numbers in these threads have fallen away dramatically. But they can't see through the cheese (whatever that means in their part of the world). This comment will no doubt be followed by a page and a half of more immature rantings.

Good Luck

Pete

Oh, the Cheese is back to accuse everyone else of doing what he does. I thought you'd found someone else to bully, Pete. Kindly refrain from deciding what I have and haven't tried to solve my problem, especially when you know there's no current solution. Of course, if you were to do that, it'd be a little more difficult to stay up there on your high horse where you can judge everyone else but be blameless yourself.

petermac87 wrote:

This comment will no doubt be followed by a page and a half of more immature rantings.

Good Luck

Pete

Told you! lol Here they go. Cannot help themselves (nor anybody else by their record of helpful answers).

Pete

For the record, for those who are coming here to find a solution, I bought three brand new MacBook Pros last year. The two with Lion pre-installed had significantly lower battery life using just the built-in software. The third MacBook Pro had Snow Leopard (it was manufactured early 2011). After a year's use, I am getting 6-8 hours battery life, depending on what I'm doing. Adobe software halves that time fairly quickly. Also, gfxCardStatus is a nifty little program that switches your internal video card to Integrated while on battery, which saves a lot of battery life.

Finally, Apple knows this is a problem as they contacted me directly to join a beta-testing group to test, in part, this issue. However, I declined since I knew that it would harm the battery life of the computer.

So if you've noticed your battery life decreasing, you're not crazy... unless your avatar starts with a "p".

😉

marysplacestudio wrote:

For the record, for those who are coming here to find a solution, I bought three brand new MacBook Pros last year. The two with Lion pre-installed had significantly lower battery life using just the built-in software. The third MacBook Pro had Snow Leopard (it was manufactured early 2011). After a year's use, I am getting 6-8 hours battery life, depending on what I'm doing. Adobe software halves that time fairly quickly. Also, gfxCardStatus is a nifty little program that switches your internal video card to Integrated while on battery, which saves a lot of battery life.

Finally, Apple knows this is a problem as they contacted me directly to join a beta-testing group to test, in part, this issue. However, I declined since I knew that it would harm the battery life of the computer.

So if you've noticed your battery life decreasing, you're not crazy... unless your avatar starts with a "p".

😉

Note: it is the Snow Leopard laptop that's getting the 6-8 hours above.

I did not read through all 170 pages of posts, but would like to share my own observations:

I bought my MacBook Pro 15" back in mid-April 2012. It runs OS X 10.7.3. I can hardly get more than 3 hours doing nothing but browsing the web and email. On my old Thinkpad T60, I could easily get 5-6 hours with a 9cell battery even after 3 years of using the replacement battery with full screen brightness.

I managed to find gfxCardStatus and notice that for some reason even when I am just browsing regular web pages (with Adblock and Flashblock) it will swap over to the discrete graphics card. Forcing the laptop to use the integrated Intel HD Graphics 3000 GPU instead of the discrete ATI GPU is the only way that the battery lasts anywhere beyond 3 hours.

I do not understand why Apple does not have a smarter algorithm for switching between the Intel GPU and the discrete GPU. Even running something as silly X11 with only an xterm window will sometime trigger the discrete GPU. In the meantime, gfxCardStatus is an adequate workaround.

I installed 10.7.4 last night, and I'm noticing a difference. The estimated time remaining in the menubar (I know some of you will get up in arms about how this is not a valid test, etc. I don't want to get into that. I'm just telling you what I'm seeing) has jumped up from usually around 3 hours to about 6 hours. That's at idle time, and it's a big jump for me. Right now, as I'm typing, I see 3:43 in the menubar, which isn't wonderful (far less than the 8 hours or so that was advertized), but is better than the 2-3 hours I was seeing previous. Obviously I haven't had time to see if this makes any difference, but I'm just putting it out there.

Has anyone else made the jump to 10.7.4? Any changes?

After installing 10.7.4, recharging fully and sitting the MBP with nothing running at all the battery showed 9:48 of remaining time. Again, I accept it's not real world blah blah but I have not seen such a high figure since SL. So maybe some improvements were made.

I got about 4.5 hours before it died. That's not great, but is a lot better than the 3 hours I was getting before.

Considering the relatively low burden* I put on my machine, I'm noticing a decrease in battery life since upgrading to Lion as well. I would like to say that I've seen at least an hour less battery life since upgrading to Lion but I cannot possibly quantify that now. Very disappointing since I now have to carry a power brick with me when as before I did not.

*Pages, Endnote X5, Chrome, and usually iTunes or Spotify.

same problem - down to 25% after 2 hours

435 cycles 86% - time to think about new battery?

Hi All,

OK, I am on a MBP 15" mid 2010 Lion 10.7.4. Been running fine until a few weeks ago.

I have been working on my sisters website so have the following open on my machine:

MS Word 2011

Terminal

Evernote

Safari

Firefox

SKEdit

GFX Card Status

Apple Mail

I have a weird funny going on with my MBP. If I use it until it forces sleep from dead battery, I then leave it charging for a few hours, then take it off charge and use it, then I will get about 6 hours out of it. If put it to sleep when it is still at about 50% capacity, when I wake it, I will have an hour left. If I then put it to sleep and charge it, I get 2 hours 15 out of a full battery and it will run hot in front of the fn and ctrl keys.

If I repeat this cycle, it works the same - full charge cycle, 6 hours, half way cycle, reduces it to 2 hours.

I have also noticed that if I load up VMWare Fusion 4.x then battery life tanks big style. As in a 75% full battery will go to an hour remaining.

Doesnt help but at least I know if I need to get extra life out of battery I can "arrange it". As I sit here writing, the battery has lost 7% charge in about 5 minutes!

The real issue here is that this issue really hasn't raised any interest from Apple. I can only assume that they really don't care. I don't mean this in a "I`m important" sort of way but more a "we're too big to notice" way. They sell so many of these machines that even 200-300 people being disappointed really does not offset the 10000+ who don't care about battery life.

I care enough to consider leaving the Apple eco-system but more because I think the quality issues with the MBP have been less than impressive. It's a shame (for me) as it has been a good 12 years with Apple products and being generally happy.

Anyway, I`m over it. WIll stop complaining, put up with it, and get on with life.

bew1234 wrote:

The real issue here is that this issue really hasn't raised any interest from Apple. I can only assume that they really don't care. I don't mean this in a "I`m important" sort of way but more a "we're too big to notice" way...

Well, Apple did contact me last year and ask if I could help them resolve this battery issue, specifically by testing system software. So, they are aware. I'm just shocked that this hasn't been fixed yet. I need a piece of Lion-only software, but won't dare upgrade from SL until this is fixed. Lion cut my battery life by well over 50% running the exact same software. (I consequently returned the Lion MBP and bought the last SL version in stock....)

According to Apple's site, it has to do with OpenGL-enabled apps...

http://support.apple.com/kb/TS4044?viewlocale=en_US&locale=en_US

While I love the concept of dual-GPUs, this will be my last machine with this type of setup until there is a hard-switch (metaphorically) that allows me to choose, specifically, which GPU I want to run and for how long. The problem I have with the setup Apple has decided on is it automatically and manually gives preference to the discrete card despite any other preference I might have (e.g. battery life vs. performance).