Lion - Horrible MacBook Pro Battery Life

Lion fried my Air's logic board and SSD drive. I just got it back from Apple in Austin after two weeks in Mac ICU.

When I asked the shop manager if this was a common outcome to installing Lion, he said, common enough. The shop's own back-office Mini suffered some sort of internal chaos after they installed Lion and that required major redoing. He inferred that a lot of people were suffering "PLSD" (post-Lion stress disorder).

I take it we don't hear or read about it because (a) problems like these take time to emerge and (b) the press and blogs are pretty cowed by Apple's PR corps. Shade of Microsoft....

I reinstalled Snow Leopard as I cannot afford another two weeks on the road without my Air, but neither can I live in constant fear that ti's going to go belly up again.

Serious stuff.

FastTJR wrote:

....For those concerned about Apple's unreponsiveness on this (an aside: my colleague was told by Apple Care that 3 hours battery life with Lion on a 2011 MBP was normal becuase of the fast processor -- when he responded that he got 6 hours with SL on the same machine, the tech had no response), I will opine the following:

Everyone I know with an MBP running Lion has this issue.

There has to be hundreds if not thousands of Apple employees, inlcuding many senior ones, running Lion on new MBP's and they have to be seeing the same issue, so there is no way that Apple can be unaware of this.

As usuaul they won't acknowledge it as they don't want the sensationalist headlines, but I bet they are working on a fix. We just need to have patience, frustrating though it is...

Apple needs to improve in its corporate ethical practices. This should have been disclosed when releasing OS Lion. I do not think that Apple would be able to sustain good marketing without eventually being transparent to its customers/stakeholders.

I have had other laptops and desktops before. I can understand system upgrade bugs and even expect it at some length. However, I feel that developers must be forthcoming about these problems.

This is a Transparency issue for me.

2011 17 inch MBP here. Went from 6-7 hours to 2-3 hours. BLAH.

Here is something interesting:

I noticed that when I'm using Firefox (even if Activity monitor says its using a low %) I have terrible battery life. If I go to a video on youtube, my FULL battery says 2:05 hours left. This is in contrast with Safari (same video, same test) with 5:24 hours. Not sure if thats the only thing thats making it so low but this definitely helped me, hope it helps you. CLOSE that firefox and see what happens.

-Jonny

You scared the **** out of me. What did they tell you the reason was? Too much heat in the logic board? Of course they won't confess that Lion is the problem.

Five minutes after I saw your post, I rolled back again to SL. The **** with Lion's cool features, it fries stuff. One thing is "Lion" though: the fan keeps roaring.

I'm partitioning my hard drive to install windows on my Mac.

jesslorenzo wrote:

Apple needs to improve in its corporate ethical practices. This should have been disclosed when releasing OS Lion. I do not think that Apple would be able to sustain good marketing without eventually being transparent to its customers/stakeholders.

I have had other laptops and desktops before. I can understand system upgrade bugs and even expect it at some length. However, I feel that developers must be forthcoming about these problems.

This is a Transparency issue for me.

Well, Apple doesn't even claim to live by a motto like "Don't be evil." 🙂

And how much transparency, ethical behavior, and customer-friendliness do you expect from a company that recently surpassed Exxon as the most valuable corporation in America?

</ironic facetiousness>

.

Hi Shiriajin,

Hope I didn't scare you overmuch. The repairs went smoothly enough, they just took an extra week because my local Apple shop, after it replaced the SSD drive, didn't have the ability to replace the logic board. Apple Repairs HQ had to do that. Of course I received no notice from Apple per se, but the local shop manager told me when asked that there have been frequent problems with Lion affecting their customers and the shop's own Macs used for its local network.

The problem with replacing the logic board, as I see it, is that Apple turned my late 2009 Air into a neo-2011 Air -- and new Airs don't run Snow Leopard. I managed to reinstall SL but the memory handling is messed up: it reports I have virtually no free space left even though none of my documents are visible I may have to go back to Lion because it's the only system my Air will run.

My advice: if you haven't installed Lion, don't until it improves to a quality you can live with. If you have installed it, based on my own experience, you are risking minor problems (like the well documented battery shrinkage) and major problems (like my logic board blowout). Uninstall Lion and reinstall SL. If you do neither, good luck and I hope that new versions of bugless Lion soon appear. Especially now that I'm a hostage too.

Bob Jacobson wrote:

Lion fried my Air's logic board and SSD drive. I just got it back from Apple in Austin after two weeks in Mac ICU.

When I asked the shop manager if this was a common outcome to installing Lion, he said, common enough. The shop's own back-office Mini suffered some sort of internal chaos after they installed Lion and that required major redoing. He inferred that a lot of people were suffering "PLSD" (post-Lion stress disorder).

Your "shop manager" is spreading FUD.

Operating Systems do not and cannot "fry" drives, nor logic boards for that matter.

Upgrading can only expose previously existing issues, not destroy hardware.

I'm glad your system was repaired, but you cannot blame Lion for this, and your shop's manager should know better than to spew this garbage to his customers.

You misquote me.

My shop operator didn't say that Lion is creating problems. He said that since Lion appeared, there have been a lot of problems.

My Air worked fine with Snow Leopard for over a year. I remember precisely when the problem began and it was during a bootup of Lion that "stuck." I can't say why it stuck. It did. When I shut it down and then rebooted, the reboot was confused and incomplete. Then it abbreviated to merely on and off. Then off more than on.

Say what you will, it was too much a coincidence for me. I can very well construct a scenario where an OS does in fact create a system breakdown. We already know more or less that Lion affects battery life by overdriving applications. Otherwise, why is Apple replacing so many batteries and other vital hardware?

It's your dogma versus emprical expereince. Readers can decide on which to rely.

BTW, the shop manager and I have both been using and championing Macs since Day One when the Apple II became available. Between us, we've pushed hundreds of people to become Mac customers. Why would we "spread FUD"? Why the **** are you falling on your sword for an operating system?

I have had my 2.3 Quad-Core MBP, 8GB Ram for about a month and a half. First, under SL it had maybe 4-4.5 hours of battery life at most. Now under Lion, it lasts about the same, maybe slightly worse. Sometimes 2.5 hrs, sometimes closer to 4 max. Mostly web browsing, word processing, etc...

I contacted apple support and went through the normal troubleshoot, nothing out of the ordinary, so i sent it off. They replaced the battery, did a clean install of Lion, but there's no difference. It's drained about 10% in 15 minutes of use from a full charge. Not sure if its Lion or not from my end, this battery has never lasted more than 4.5 hours, and on average it's probably around 3.

Bob Jacobson wrote:

You misquote me.

My shop operator didn't say that Lion is creating problems. He said that since Lion appeared, there have been a lot of problems.

BTW, the shop manager and I have both been using and championing Macs since Day One when the Apple II became available. Between us, we've pushed hundreds of people to become Mac customers. Why would we "spread FUD"? Why the **** are you falling on your sword for an operating system?

My apologies for the misquote.

As an engineer, I know what is and isn't possible, and even if you wanted to maliciously code an operating system to cause the issues you reported, you couldn't, so to claim Lion is responsible even due to bugs is just silly.

As I mentioned, operating systems can only expose previously hidden weaknesses, not "destroy" hardware.

Apology accepted.

Would you agree, OSs can invoke processes that create conditions that overstress hardware? For example, that exhaust batteries prematurely? Or that jazz some components, thus resulting in electrical pulses that fry others?

E=mc2. Elemental. Science.

(Engineers missed that one.)

Lion caused parts of the logic board to heat up. This affects parts of the circut, certainly not the CPU or anything big like that, but still some minor parts of the logic board, when affected, could cause a large scale damage. I believe the reason that Apple chose aluminum for the unibody is because it is a good cooling element. It was heating up like **** in the first couple of weeks after suing Lion. It felt like putting a hot plate on my lap (and this is extremely not a good feeling here in Saudi Arabia).

I am new to MaBooks. I used SL for a couple of months before Lion came out. I liked the cool features but now that Im back on SL, I noticed that the battery was really negatively affected by Lion. It doesn't last more than four hours (before it used to be around 7:30). So here is a piece of hardware that got "fried".

Bob Jacobson wrote:

Or that jazz some components, thus resulting in electrical pulses that fry others?

E=mc2. Elemental. Science.

(Engineers missed that one.)

Bob, please explain how to Jazz some components, a tech term I'm unfamilier with.

Must have taken the wrong Jazz classes I guess

All circuits heat up when power is applied, this is not new.

@ WK Well, I think it depends how close the component is to the CPU, mate. I could fry an egg on the top left of my MBP 17" and it's sitting on top of a gizmo which gives it 2" of air flow underneath and the fan is ALWAYS on. I rarely ever heard the fan under SL, so infrequently that I would instinctively feel around to find if it was hot - and it was never anything like as hot as it is almost always now.

So, whilst Lion may not be able to fry anything with rogue data, it may well cause damage by overheating.

I don't know how close the SSD is to the CPU on a MacBook Air...

@ Csound1 Maybe Bob is using the word 'jazz' in one of its original, pre-musical definitions, in order to circumvent the apparent autocensorship in these discussions.

😎

Anyway, on top of the battery issue, it is now 24 days since I first installed Lion and have done so about 8-10 times in various ways using various hints and tips posted in these discussions and applied 27 years of Mac experience and from the list of issues I submitted to Apple, not a single one has shown any sign of improvement.

Should be rebranded Mac OS X 10.VIIsta Lyin' (about the World's most advanced desktop operating system having advanced even further).