Lion - Horrible MacBook Pro Battery Life

I have a 13" Macbook (june,2012),with moutain lion os, I am having a very poor battery life, hardly 3-4 hrs ( just for web browsing). Is it the problem with all moutain lion users or just with my macbook?. Let me know if any settings have to be changes for improvement in battery life.

system details:

Model Identifier: MacBookPro9,2

Processor Name: Intel Core i5

Processor Speed: 2.5 GHz

Number of Processors: 1

Total Number of Cores: 2

L2 Cache (per Core): 256 KB

L3 Cache: 3 MB

Memory: 4 GB

I've got a mid 2010 15-inch MacBook Pro that dies in just under 2 hours with browser and mail active. I've just installed Battery Health and found it charges to about 98% and shows 6 and 1/2 hours left with current usage. My first step is going to be recalibrating the battery. Next step will be to come back to this blog for alternatives. Third step will be weighing whether to invest further in Apple's empire or retreat to Windows. I can get a fresh box that fits what I do for about double the cost of having Apple (100 miles away) replace the battery for me. Will let you all know the outcomes and course of action.

Update to my original reply on this. This is a mid-2010 MacBook Pro 15inch single processor dual core running OS X 10.7.5 I recalibrated the battery and still experienced the battery going away in just under 2 hours. Additional observations: even though Battery Health (free app) showed the battery at 96% the charge cord light was green. There are 153 cycles on the battery. Battery Health shows about 6 and 1/2 hours of time left, even though the battery dies in under 2. I found this fix on another blog:

Shutdown

Make sure your charger is attached

Press and hold the Shift, Control, and Option keys all at once

While holding down the other keys, press and hold the Power On/Off button for at least 10 seconds

Release all keys

Power on the laptop

Since doing this I noticed the amber/yellow light now shows on the charge cord. The battery charges to 100% as shown in Battery Health. The laptop stayed on under battery power for over 10 hours, including over 2 hours of regular use (overnight).

It looks like this is the fix and I just saved some bucks instead of having Apple put in a new battery.

Bought a new 2013 Macbook Pro Retina 15". Horrible battery life ~ 3 hours max.

As I am trying to get to the bottom of this I installed Cody Krieger's excellent gfxstatus tool - http://gfx.io. Basically it tells you when the discrete graphics chip switches on.

One thing I have noticed so far is that in Firefox when I have Gmail up it switches the discrete graphics chip on and starts burning battery like no tomorrow. I think its the Google Talk plugins that have a video rendering component. I disabled all the Google Talk plugins and this seems to slow the burn. Some articles on Yahoo still switch the graphics on - probably another plugin like flash or something.

Anyway I'm going to run with just integrated graphics on and see how much battery life I get. So far its saying I should be getting 5-6 hours on 82%. Let's see.

Hope that helps someone out.

Check how much CPU your browser and other applications are using. In particular, some websites will sit there and chew cycles in your browser even when the page/tab is just sitting idle.

I wrote App Tamer because I noticed one day that Safari was sitting in the background using 50% of one CPU while I was answering my email. App Tamer stops processes (including web browsers) in the background to keep them from doing this - you're welcome to download and try it to see if it helps: http://www.stclairsoft.com/AppTamer/index.html.

You can also just close the offending tabs in Safari, Firefox, Chrome or whatever browser you're using, of course 🙂

- Jon

anyone get apple to replace the battery? any challenges from them apart from general T&C's?

I called apple, they had me do the "Shift, Control, Option" which worked for one battery cycle. When I charged it again, it would charge to 98% and drain very quickly. I brought it to the Apple store, they looked at me like I was stupid, kept it for a day and said nothing was wrong. Still has terrible battery life, I get about 3 hours.

Donald,

You are not stupid. The geniuses at Apple stores are. You are not alone on this PROBLEM, and it has been going on for so long (since 2011). Tim Cook has done NOTHING about it. He (Tim Cook) allowed his idiot geniuses at apple stores to provide customers with incorrect, guessed, "that's what the other genius said" solutions. The fact that they don't know why it's doing it and don't know the solution, they should just say "we don't have a solution for this at the moment".

That's me venting!

Possibly because it is not a very common problem.

Cheers

Pete

Did you go in to the terminal migration assistant

Can you go through how you did it so i dont get it wrong i got mountain lion on my macbook

I'm writing this because I just upgraded to OS X Mavericks from Lion 10.7.6 and my battery life was significantly reduced. I'd upgraded once from Lion to Mountain Lion and encountered the same problem so I downgraded back to Lion.

Anyway, upgrading to Mavericks brought my battery from about 8 hours, a lot of times 9 hours after a full charge and surfing the web down to about 3.5 hours. Big reduction. THEN I tried these three things other people one this forum recommended:

1) I did the Reapir Disk Permissions thing on my hard drive through the Disk Utility App

2) I shut my computer down and did the PRAM reset: shut down then power up and press and hold option, command and the P and R keys before the gray screen appears and kept them held down until the computer restarted AGAIN.

3) Shut down computer again and pressed and held Shift, Control, Option and Power button down FOR MORE THAN 10 seconds. (I emphasize for more than 10 seconds because I'd tried it a couple times before for less than 10 seconds and it didn't seem to work).

Then when I turned on my computer the battery life showed about 6 hours which I hadn't seen since before the upgrade.

Now the percentage is at about 71% and reading about 5 hours remaining as I type this running Chrome.

Hope this helps some of ya'll. I'm greatful for those of you who took the time to list the steps you took to fixing the problem.

Godspeed.

I have had issues myself, i've done the PRAM resets and things seems to last longer. there is a good battery tool - for lack of better terms....COCONUT BATTERY APP. FREE DOWNLOAD, you can get from cnet. you can save

your current charge

I have the same issues. My battery lasts for max 2.5 hours and that is with very light usage. I am using the new Mac Book Pro 13 inch.

Funny I called Apple today and talked to one of their tech people. He seemed to be totally unaware that the 13 inch battery should last for 9 hours... very strange indeed. Anyway went through a number of things with him but did not solve the problem. Will call again tomorrow.