Lion - Horrible MacBook Pro Battery Life

Likewise, my default is 2000rpm (admittedly that's on an MBP 2009, not 2011).

Try installing smcFanControl. You can set the default yourself.

I have also had a drop in battery life after upgrading from Snow Leoprad to Mountain Lion.

My Mac...

is not indexing,

I have iCloud off,

I have any push services off,

Mail is off,

No heavy tasks which consume a good amount of battery other than Safari and Mozilla for normal internet use and some word processing with Micrsofot Office,

nothing is plugged into to any ports,

Screen brightness is around 40%,

CPU activity seems normal,

Disk activity, I don't know what normal looks like. (There is activity about every 6 to 8 seconds, spikes for both Data Read, and Data Written).

Other than that I dont know what else to look for.

My battery life meter fluctuates from 4-6 hours of remaining life.

I am not sure if others are experiencing this, but I can hear some light spinning from the hard drive. Its the lightest sound, it doesnt sound problematic, and almost unnoticable when theres alot of noise. But I compared it to my friend who is running Lion and I don't hear any hard drive spin when the computer is just sitting there doing nothing. On mine, however, its always spinning, it sounds like a really really really light fan, and I know its not the fan because the sound is coming from where the hard drive is. If this is the culprit then it must be eating away at my battery since it's spinning all the time. The only time I ever notice the hard drive stop spinning is after the Mac has gone to sleep. Other than that, it's always spinning. Is this normal?

Anyway, hopefully this all gets resolved soon.

Cheers 😎

13-inch MacBook Pro, Early 2011, 2.3GHz i5, 4GB 1333 DDR3, Intel HD 3000 384 MB.

Hi all,

I have posted on here before. I have been playing with my 2010 MBP and ML done through upgrade.

I am sat here with it on battery. What I have found (my view) is that whenever the discrete graphics card kicks in, things get hot, the fans start and the battery life tanks.

Here are a few things I have found that make it worse.

1. Connecting to an external display requires the discrete card to be active (on my machine at least)

2. iPhoto requires the discrete card

3. VMWare Fusion requires the discrete card

4. Watching movies of any kind in browser etc requires discrete card

5. 1Password needs to have the animations turned off in the preferences or it uses the discrete card

Managing my use of these and installing gfxCardStatus to monitor it has helped me get better battery life.

Once the discrete card kicks in, I am into about 2:20 out of battery. Without these and integrated graphics only (maybe even a reboot now and then to keep things clean), then I can get 5 hours out of the battery without too much trouble.

I know this is far from ideal but then if we want to use graphics acceleration then it comes at a cost I suppose - not happy but accepted now.

Well,

I have the Answer , but not the Solution

OS X Montain Lion are new Changes to Adapt the Os Lion to Retina Display

and they sold it MASKED to improvements and others

The only improvement is Tasks (Reminders) and Notes separates of the Mail and Calendar, 'incredible improvements'

and other minors bugs

And which is the problem?

To adapt to Retina Display OS Lion; at the same as iPad, it consumes a lot of RESOURCES not neccesary if you have a Macbook Normal not retina

Solution: I think returns to OS Lion and refund our MONEY cause to have separate Notes and Reminders , it is called 'Update' and no 'other O S'

But they have to cover the Expenses developments Retina Display with OS Lion

well, Solution for Apple, Increasing the Price of the Macbook Retina Display and dont waste more money on TRIAL and Lawyers against Samsung

Competence is GOOD cause it makes you IMPROVE

do repair disk permissions, and turn off all unnescessary services in the background, uncheck login items under "accounts" and turn indexing off

Same problem here... At first I thought it was my problem but after a little research it seems like I'm not the only one.

Jimmy Kats wrote:

do repair disk permissions, and turn off all unnescessary services in the background, uncheck login items under "accounts" and turn indexing off

Indexing is not an unnecessary service, it's an important one!

Alright, I now give up on 10.7 completely, and see no reason to "upgrade" to 10.8.

Can someone please give me instruction to go down to 10.6.8? Things that I'm looking at:

1. My drive has several partitions. I thought I was being smart in setting up a 20 GB root partition for 10.7 system files -- I figured that apple's stuff would go there, and my stuff would go elsewhere. HA.

10.7 won't even start unless launchd (1) can find /var/vm, /var/folders, /var/tmp, and a few other things on root before it attempts to mount stuff in /etc/fstab.

So all of that fills up my root almost immediately.

On top of that, the recovery partition is not at the end of the drive where it would make sense, but directly after the root -- suddenly I cannot resize my root bigger.

Combine the battery issue, the "multiple desktops", the lack of a true F8 style control, etc -- and the complete failure of auto-restoration, I want to go back to 10.6.

But I don't know how to reinstall it. The machine is early 2011 (so it can run 10.6), but with the new stuff ...

And the user data. I've got a partition named "/UserData", and my home is on /Volumes/UserData/Users/michael, but it turns out that a lot of apple's data files do not use /Users/michael (my $HOME, and a valid symlink), but wind up hardcoding the physical path -- so just doing a backup, format, reinstall, restore, has all sorts of potential issues.

So, has anyone done this -- wiped 10.7 off and reinstalled 10.6 -- that can tell me what to look out for, what issues, etc -- given that from what I've heard from people, once 10.7 touches the disk, the 10.6 CD can't work with it.

I've had three batteries in the 3.5 years that I've owned my 15" MBP. The first replacement was after about 18 months and it was a bad battery that swelled and was replaced (and Apple actually covered about 50% of the cost even though it was no longer under warranty). Sadly, the second replacement was about 6 months ago after spending 8 months trying to get my battery to hold a charge for longer than 2 hours. I got slightly better mileage using the graphics switcher and the fan control, but at the same time, why should I have to add anything to a supposedly top of class computer so that its battery will last. So despite the fact that my battery was still supposedly holding 90% of its charge, it was "bad" and I got a replacement. That replacement has never held a charge longer than 2:15, and I've calibrated it, run it down, shut if off and reboot so that it cycles completely, run all the other PRAM, RAM, BAM, JAM, FAM, FLIMFLAM maneuvers recommended by Apple and every expert (all of whom can come up with no other solution than it must be user error), and still no better than 2:15. I held my breath for Mountain Lion, but alas, IT IS NO BETTER. So Apple would rather jam beta testing down our throats than fix shoddy coding. And BTW, I've checked it on console and activity monitor and I've killed plenty of processes that should not have been running but were (poor uninstall setup by Apple, IMO). Oh, and lastly, I installed ML on a completely wiped HD after a DoD zeroing out of every sector. Then I installed necessary apps directly first, then some other apps after that, that I had to restore, but mostly clean installs. So I feel comfortable saying that it's a software/firmware problem, especially since I got 4-6 hours before the Lion upgrades (still crappy compared to advertised, but not bad). I'm no gamer or video person, but I use the internet constantly. The biggest commonality, though, is that use makes little difference in how poorly it holds a charge.

This battery is going back in the next few days. I'm sure it will be replaced with another battery that still won't last much more than 2 hours. And this one shows that it's potential charge is about 99% and it's working fine - except it can't hold more than a 2-hour charge. I own an android phone, and even develop some apps for android, and my silly little phone, with 3D-graphics, multiple apps, and processing with multiple reboots and partitions, as well as purposely abusing/bricking it so I can help people problem-solve their phone issues when an emulator won't replicate a problem, can last 12-13 hours on full tilt, and 15-20 hours if it's idling. And that's with a 1.2 GHz dual-core processor. I know the comparison is not truly analogous, but it does mean that my next computer won't be a Mac, when I can get superior quality at a lower price. That was once not the case, but it is now.

keybounce wrote:

Can someone please give me instruction to go down to 10.6.8?

Do a search on these forums. It is documented over a hundred times.

Cheers

pete

keybounce wrote:

Alright, I now give up on 10.7 completely, and see no reason to "upgrade" to 10.8.

Can someone please give me instruction to go down to 10.6.8? Things that I'm looking at:

1. My drive has several partitions. I thought I was being smart in setting up a 20 GB root partition for 10.7 system files -- I figured that apple's stuff would go there, and my stuff would go elsewhere. HA.

10.7 won't even start unless launchd (1) can find /var/vm, /var/folders, /var/tmp, and a few other things on root before it attempts to mount stuff in /etc/fstab.

So all of that fills up my root almost immediately.

On top of that, the recovery partition is not at the end of the drive where it would make sense, but directly after the root -- suddenly I cannot resize my root bigger.

Combine the battery issue, the "multiple desktops", the lack of a true F8 style control, etc -- and the complete failure of auto-restoration, I want to go back to 10.6.

But I don't know how to reinstall it. The machine is early 2011 (so it can run 10.6), but with the new stuff ...

And the user data. I've got a partition named "/UserData", and my home is on /Volumes/UserData/Users/michael, but it turns out that a lot of apple's data files do not use /Users/michael (my $HOME, and a valid symlink), but wind up hardcoding the physical path -- so just doing a backup, format, reinstall, restore, has all sorts of potential issues.

So, has anyone done this -- wiped 10.7 off and reinstalled 10.6 -- that can tell me what to look out for, what issues, etc -- given that from what I've heard from people, once 10.7 touches the disk, the 10.6 CD can't work with it.

Restore your backup.

i completely understand, but it does hog resources... I choose to turn mine off... I view it as pointless.. though to others, it is necessary.. it will improve battery life though 🙂

Jimmy Kats wrote:

i completely understand, but it does hog resources... I choose to turn mine off... I view it as pointless.. though to others, it is necessary.. it will improve battery life though 🙂

I have no problems with battery life, and (for me) indexing is essential, thanks

Just installed the 10.8 update, I'm seeing 7/8 hours on the battery readings for the first time since Snow Leopard!!! I have only Safari running with medium low brightness. Anyone else?

you are by far the luckiest person on this thread, how is it that you experience great battery life with mountain lion?