Lion - Horrible MacBook Pro Battery Life

I'll tell you what I did, but it's not guaranteed to work for you.

My late 2009 MacBook Air's logic board was destroyed. We figure, my cronies and me, that perhaps the CPU overheated per the reports here and knocked out other components before dying itself. Anyway, Apple replaced the board. Although others here say it was just a straight out replacement, I suspect it somehow kicked me into Lion-installed space, because the new logic board had never known Snow Leopard, only Lion.

What I did -- and it required a lot of work to fix up -- was log on using Safe command. I then used Disk Utility to wipe out Lion: effectively, a clean install from scratch. I then logged in again, this time with the Air's Leopard USB recovery stick (which was for Leopard 10.5). Next I reinstalled the Snow Leopard 10.6.8 upgrade.

I had used Time Machine whle the Air was Lionized (before the logic board blowout), so I couldn't directly reimport other files. Once Lionized, always Lionized, it seems. However, I did have a TM record of the comparable file structure and files on my MacBook Pro, which had never been contaminated with Lion. I used that TM and it worked pretty well. (The Pro to Air distinction apparently didn't matter.)

I had to pick and choose folders and files to install since the Air's SSD is so much smaller capacity than a Pro's HD. (iTunes was a huge memory hog. Gone.) You won't have that problem, but it's a good idea to have a data display system at hand anyway. It breeds confidence. Invest in DaisyDisk for $10 while it's on sale in the Apple Store in order to see how your work is coming along.

I can guarantee not all will go right at first, but do things deliberately, not rashly, keep originals, and you should make out -- if it's doable at all.

So, to summarize....

1. Do not use your TM under Lion. If you used it under Snow Leopard, keep it that way until you have reinstalled SL.

2. Obtain an SL disk if you haven't one already. You will need it if you do a wipe of Lion.

3. Be prepared for anomalies, permissions changed, some file structure alterations, things missing, etc. Lion does that.

4. DO NOT DO THIS IF YOUR MACHINE RESISTS. I've read that Lion-equipped devices cannot easily be reverted to Snow Leopard, if at all. I'm not a good test case, as my logic board replacement was Lion-like but not necessarily purebred Lion.

5. Have a Mac guru on hand, someone who's been there before for him- or herself or for a client. You have a $2,000+ machine in hand. It's worth investing a hundred or a couple hundred bucks to make sure that this is (a) doable and (b) desirable.

I'm happy for having had the experience. It was grueling, but I learned a whole lot about file structures, app dependencies, how to run the right scripts to put it all together, even figuring out how to share Apple Mail en toto on two machines and then synch 'em up. I guess I should thank Apple for Lion, for getting me there. Remember, get a guru! And good luck!

Are you really sure it's 'fixed' or is the time remaining just gone up? Did you actually try running the battery down?

The big prob with what you're saying is that with Snow Leopard you didn't have to 'cut those items off.' There's no reason you should have to either, as those are really not power intensive functions. I can understand if you're doing something like, say, playing Starcraft II on ultra and the battery gets eaten alive, but slide shows? Web browsing? Bluetooth? Low end smartphones can do that without eating their battery. I also don't see how it's possible that the developers didn't notice this, and it should not have been released in such a state.

As for buying a new hard drive to fix problems... I sincerely hope that was a joke.

Bob, I am not a basher... I'm a member on a lot of forums and I see the sly talk all the time. My main reason for posting that statement was for everyone to get on the page of solving the problem. I'm truly sorry if I have offended anyone on here especially you. Yes I'm an optimist and I'm all willing to try and do anything to help in and everyone.

My laptop came with SL but several days after purchasing it Lion came out. I don't know what the actual problem is but I am willing to do as much research as possible to help others as well as myself. If I find something that appears to work then I share it...

Yes I ran the battery down several times, and actually before I really saw a difference it took it two times for it to appear that it helped. I was not speaking on the newer machines I was referring to the older machines when I spoke on the hard drives. I've notice this, customers come to me stating their machines are running slow... When I look on the inside I check dates on HD's, I recommend purchasing a new HD, after installing the new HD and reloading a fresh copy of the OS and transferring their file onto the new HD they state the mahine is running faster.

HD can only take so much abuse before they become worn. For those who can't get SL loaded correctly instead of stressing why not purchase a new HD and start from scratch. While you have all your back-up data on an external HD and transfer it back. I just try to solve things the best and easiest way with out stressing.

yu-jin wrote:

The big prob with what you're saying is that with Snow Leopard you didn't have to 'cut those items off.' There's no reason you should have to either, as those are really not power intensive functions. I can understand if you're doing something like, say, playing Starcraft II on ultra and the battery gets eaten alive, but slide shows? Web browsing? Bluetooth? Low end smartphones can do that without eating their battery. I also don't see how it's possible that the developers didn't notice this, and it should not have been released in such a state.

I can honestly say that these issues were not readily seen in beta, so I've no idea why they seem to be prevalent now.

One random, completely wild theory is that it could be the extra work of having scroll bars appear and disappear and fade on and off the screen could be causing MBPs with the capability to switch graphics processors automatically depending on load to switch to the faster/higher power consumption GPU more often than they did under SL; I myself have an older MBP where the choice is controlled via System Preferences, so that could be why I see no such reduction of battery life.

The point your brought up could very well be the problem... A lot of extra transitions and the launch pad could be the main reason for poor battery life.

With these items turned off my MBP has lasted for over 16 hours with no charger or being plugged in. Yes it has been asleep for maybe 6 of those hours but still going strong. Far as using a lot of battery doing slideshows, I modify my settings, convert them to HD 16:9 widescreen, and burn them thru idvd. All of these processes take a lot of power. I'm not creating a slideshow and leaving it on the computer. There are several processes after that.

William brought up a very valuable point about the additional features could also be causing the draining of the battery. SL does had launch pad, which uses a lot of processing or should I say graphics when doing the fading, and transition screen. With having an older model they come with their own separate video cards, where the new ones share memory and processing from the actual motherboard which causes us to use more power.

For me quitting skype fixed this issure.. Skyoe was running my AMD card in my MBP all the time.. I used gfxcardstatus to see ehich card was running.. now im getting 7 ot 8 hours again...

I just went back to SL today. I could not wait till my Aug 19 deadline. It is difficult for me to have a heavy laptop that lasts barely 3hrs.

I notice that SL is really faster than LION. It is less elegant but it is much more simple. While in LION, just with Safari, it would be easy for me to use up 5Gig of memory after a few hours. With SL, It seems impossible to go beyond 4Gig memory usage.

I miss the gestures and mission control... I miss mail most. But the resourse it demands is not worth it even if I have a quad core and 8Gig. In retrospect, the most inconvinient bug for me are in this order:

1. battery drain

2. Memory Leak

3. Overheating

Non related question: I still get email about this conversation. How do you unsubscribe to a thread?

On the discussion page> Look at "Actions" menu (RHS of the page) > Stop email notification

I wish I could go back to SL but I can't find my family pack cd anymore :-(

1. Battery drain

2. Memory Leak

3. Overheating

Yes, you nailed the top three right there. And I'm a little surprised that there has not yet been any kind of update from Apple yet.

I'm jealous too... there appears to be no way to go back to the stability, speed, and reliability of Snow Leopard on this new MBP. Some are confident Apple will fix this. But I'm not so sure it's going to happen as fast as people would like...

Not sure how to unsubscribe!

I found that it wasn't just Skype that did that but practically everything- Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Eclipse... pretty much everything with a UI. The only programs I've seen that don't force discrete graphics are TextEdit and LibreOffice.

But I've also noticed that it doesn't last nearly as long with the discrete graphics on as it used to. Yes, that cut battery life before- by an hour or two. Now it's more like 4 hours.

i just got my macbook pro 15 yesterday with lion and the hardware is 2.2ghz i7 cpu and 1gb video card and im getting about 5-6hrs of actaul time not going by the battery icon. im using mostly safari and itunes and a little bit of photoshop. so i guess my battery is time is about normal. if its not please let me know. the only thing i noticed was that playing a quick demo of a game my cpu hit 176 degrees farenheit. is that bad for the computer.

To summarize my results:

I have upgraded to Lion on a two-year old iMac, a spring 2010 MacBook Pro with i7 processor, a spring 2011 MacBook Pro with the 2.2 standard i7 processor (both have 8 GB of memory) and a fall 2010 MacPro (2X6 Core - 24 virtual cpus).

The 2010 MacBook Pro was a test machine for Lion and actually has Lion Server installed. The current model is my production, carry with me laptop for business usage.

My findings, the MacPro runs fine with little in the way of performance problems - no battery of course. The iMac has frozen a few times and has required re-booting. It is my wife's computer and she has complained loudly and often that she hates it. She lost her 3 favourite games, her Adobe Suite and her MS/Office suite due to Rosetta being dropped.

The test MacBook Pro runs fine -- it was updated from the last GM version of Lion when the OS was launched. To he honest, I don't think the production version of Lion even downloaded. I think it just changed the release level. Performance is about the same as the beta versions which was about the same as Snow Leopard. Waking from sleep the battery shows it is fully charged. Disconnecting the power and it shows 10+ hours on battery. Remember, it isn't doing much. With a bit of use and with the screen at full brightness the battery drops to about 9+ hours. You can't be unhappy with that. The processor runs at about 35C.

My production MacBook Pro is where my problems lie. It was upgraded the day Lion came out. It ran like the devil was after it for ages after the upgrade. It runs hot. The battery life is shocking. It has been stable. I have tried all the tricks indicated in this thread with no result. I did turn off the backup to disk option and just use TimeMachine and that made a huge difference. Fully charged, when I remove the power connector I am told I have about 4 hours of running time. That's up from the initial 2.5 hours I initially got. I do run the screen at full brightness but I did that under Snow Leopard as well and got at least 6-7 hours of battery life. At idle the process runs at about 45-50C. When it decides to index stuff (which appears to be all the time - considering it indexes the Time Machine backups as well) the cpu runs at 85-95C which I think is getting close to the processor's limits. At that point the fans are raging!! Applications are slow to launch and performance isn't much better than it's older and much slow test system. I have already had 3 problems with Time Machine and have lost several backups as it appears to start over again. Then this happens, the system goes into overload again for days - even weeks.

All-in-all I think Apple has some sever problems to fix for the MacBook Pros. At least the new ones in my tests.

I didn't see any battery problems with the beta releases but then the computer I used with them still doesn't have have a battery problem.

That's my 2¢. I am hoping a new release will fix these problems but I also understand Apple is working hard to get the next release out on schedule with iCloud support. That appears to be labeled 10.7.2 rather than 10.7.1 at this stage.

An update for OS X Lion (10.7.1) has just been released.

There is no mention whether it will fix the battery issues some of us have been experiencing (me included) but I'll download the update and give it a try.