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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

Jun 23, 2012 6:55 AM in response to Lazinator

Ugh... I feel like Apple is hanging a giant carrot in front of me except I can never reach...


After SMC reset, for the very first time, I saw 7 hours and 30 some minutes left after unplugging from outlet!! And then, as soon as I launched Firefox, the hours just pluments all the way to 2 hours and 27 minutes.... >_<


This ... can't be happening.. must be twilight zone!

Jul 9, 2012 9:16 PM in response to TobiasKruse

From all I can gather, the issue has to do with some sort of bug in the 10.7.4 code for controlling automatic graphics switching. -Particularly after installing any program that makes use of the graphics switching capabilities.


In my case, resetting the SMC wasn't enough. -I also had to (re)toggle the Graphics Switching setting in the Energy Saver section of System Preferences. -The box should be un-checked, then re-checked, then system restarted.


User uploaded file


I've been consistently getting my usual 6 - 7 hours of battery life for the past 2.5 weeks now.


I also did install GFX Card Status and hard-switched the graphics mode to internal only, and it immediately lengthened the battery life... So that's when I realized that Lion was switching to the high performance graphics processor, even when running on batteries. Note: I am not currently using gfxcardstatus... and still getting the normal battery life. -I just installed it for trouble-shooting purposes.


Again, this may not work for every one, but it's worked for me.


-L

Jul 11, 2012 9:00 PM in response to Michael Empric

It seems to be a problem related to the new OSX,

I've got a new MacPro 2012 13" (Lion), and when I began to install my favourite apps, battery decreased too much, having less than 3:30 hours average battery life.

So i tried delete the most things I don't use (some email accounts, gestures, some automatic adjustments, apps with background services) and battery life get better, now i'm getting nearly 5 hours, but this might not be the solution, it only makes OS useless o little uglier 😟 I hope there will be a update soon or I'm gonna hate my mac cause i've paid too much for a "great hardware and operative system"

Lion - Horrible MacBook Pro Battery Life

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