Lion - Horrible MacBook Pro Battery Life

Mbp 13", inetl 2.3 i5, 4 gb, 10.7 upgrade from SL 10.6.8 and had same battery issues - 50% reduction in battery life. Re Ali rated battery under Lion and did the SMC reset also under Lion. Battery powered up and showing 12 hours charge on full charge. After about 10 minutes operating back to about 8.5 hrs runtime.

Guys, don't use the amount of time the mac say for measure how long the battery is performing. If a MBP 13" i5 is performing 8 hours is a miracle. Very good is 5 to 6 hours. If Apple did 7 hours on the test, this means you will never go after 7 hours. (at least with the display on and wifi).

Please measure with your clock, otherwhise is not a valuable data.

And another thing. For how that downgreaded to SL, you should wait a couple of days before measure your battery performance. Every OS has to run a couple of days before it's stabilized. A lot of process are running at the beginning, spotlight, statistic thing, backup going creasy and one other million stuff the we don't know.

Thanks,

Ivan

I grant you your points but the battery is supposed to have built-in microprocessors that I think feed into the logic board. That is what feeds into the OS. The OS reads the data and that is what gives us the runtime. Under SL the OS read correctly. Under Lion the OS is reading wrong. Regardless, something is Lion is malfunctioning when it comes to the battery runtime. Only hope Apples gets a patch soon

I didnt try that because in MBP the battery is alread recalibrated.

*calibrated.

Having the same prob with my new MBP 15" 2.2 ghz/8GB. 24 cycle count on battery. Before Lion, the machine would last about 5.5 hrs on battery (tested not by looking at the estimated time, but by literally running until it shuts down). Now it lasts a bit less than 3- tested the same way. This is under the same workload, same circumstances- just browsing and/or playing a DVD. Not exactly the most CPU intensive tasks.

It can't be spotlight indexing, unless that takes over 2 weeks. There's very little installed software since this machine is new. I don't see anything eating up tons of RAM or CPU in activity monitor.

SMC reset, as far as I can tell, did absolutely nothing.

The weird thing is that nothing seems to be putting load on the hardware, which is of course the same as before. So I'm thinking it must be an OS bug of some sort where it's incorrectly interfacing with the chip in the battery. Fortunately, I don't go without AC power very often so it's not a huge problem for me. Must be horrible for those that do, though- that's about a 50% reduction.

I tried SMC. It did absolutely nothing. Could this problem be because Lion is not reading the microprocessor in the battery correctly? I mean the battery is not empty but Lion reads that it is? This means that people who keep Lion now might actually damage their batteries because of too much charging when the battery is half full for example. Apple screwed up big time. With every product, they have something wrong. Remember when iPhone 4 first came out, you couldn't make a call because the coverage disappears suddenly.

I rolled back to SL. I miss some of the stuff that came with Lion especially the full-screen apps. I miss reading PDF files in full screen and flipping through the pages with my trackpad, but battery life is more important to me.

sorry, you're right.

Noticed something else as well- it seems to charge to full from empty about twice as fast as it should too.

This could mean that the system is simply reading the battery capacity at half what it should be. The weird thing though, is that the system profiler shows capacity at 6777 mAh, which is pretty much exactly what it should be.

I have a brand new MPB from Apple that comes with Lion pre-installed. As I've said earlier, Lion has been a disaster, from random crashes, to breaking software (including Apple's own Motion and Cinema Tools), to draining the battery after 3 hours or less. Does anyone know of any way possible to put Snow Leopard on this computer? I have the SL install disc (10.6.3), but I get an error message that it cannot be installed. If I try to start from the disc, I get a kernel crash.

Thanks for any suggestions.

Try creating a start-up USB from a SL disk. Restart the MacBook and hit Option at startup. It will show you the startup disk, choose the USB and go ahead with the installation. That should help you. Don't forget to format your hard drive with a file system that is suitable for SL (journal 4). Good luck.

I'll give this a go. I did try reformatting and installing off the DVD, but it wouldn't let me. However, I haven't tried the USB/journal 4 method.

Have you heard this working for anyone with a new Apple computer?

Once I decided to put SL on a PC and had the same problem you just described. The system wouldn't install from the CD. I tried this method but because it was a PC, I used one more thing, it was called appleBoot. I used my friend's macbook to create the USB from a SL image, I booted from this AppleBoot CD and voila, everything worked smoothly.

Well, I actually have another hard drive I hooked up through the Firewire 800 port, and chose it as the startup disk. However, I get the grey Apple screen, where it sticks for, I don't know how long.... I unplugged it after half an hour.

Is my process wrong here?

i followed all the instructions here... and now i have 9 hours back on my MBP Early 2011.... first i downgrade to Snow Leopard, then i install every update, then y upgrade to Lion OS and also install the Developer's Delta Update 10.7.2 and i also install gfxCardStatus and set it to use only Integrated... and Restart the SMC i don't know what did it... but my battery is working better now!!!