Lion - Horrible MacBook Pro Battery Life

some macbook users? All of us!!

My Macbook pro runs hotter now and the battery drains pretty fast... they should include options to disable unecessary visual effects to help save battery life.

Activity Monitor is an application included with Mac OS X that can be used to view running processes and other system information. It is located at /Applications/Utilities/Activity Monitor.

1. Check Startup Items

2. Check Extensions, Helper Modules etc.

3. Check Location Services (yes, now in Lion)

Take a look on these articles:

[ Calibrating your computer's battery for best performance ]

[ Tips for maximizing your battery charge ]

[ Apple Batteries Life Time ]

What we should all do is take a quick visit to the OS X Feedback page.

There, one can leave a detailed report on this and other OS X related issues.

I did it. Took just a couple of minutes. Worth the effort for everyone.

i am so disappointed to see my battery going from 8-9h to 3-4h. if i use skype it's even worse. i don't get it. did anyone have this problem before with 10.6?

I can't believe it! I installed Lion on my 2010 MBP and my battery life dropped to 2 hours. I read all the forums and waited for Spotlight to finish indexing. I also did the 'complete drain battery - full charge' cycle. But still battery life was abyssmal.

THEN I noticed in Activity Monitor that 'USB PRINTER AND STORAGE CENTER' was using 100% of the processor. I quit the process and watched as my battery monitor climbed steadily from 1 hour to 5.5 hours remaining. The odd thing is that I don't use USB on the MBP. It's all wireless.

Macbook Air 13" 2010 here.

Used to get 6-7 hours on Snow Leopard. Now, I get only 4 on Lion. Already did SMC reset but problem remains.

This actually worked for me as well... Battery life went back up almost to the normal... Thanks a lot bud for sharing this information.

what exactly did you do? some say to reset smc by pressing together Control+Shift + Command + power, others say Control+Shift + Option + Power!

I used the control+shift+option+power once the laptop has been turned off. So, shut down the laptop then follow the instruction and hold it down for 10 seconds. Mine has made a tremendous change since that was down. I unplugged it about 30 minutes ago or more and I have 94% left. When I check how much time is remaining it goes between 9:12 hours left and 7:25 hours depending on what I am doing. But it worked... Hopefully it will work for you too!!! Good luck

So here's what I've found while monitoring the CPU usage in Activity Monitor...

• I restart the computer, and let the CPU settle to around < 1% usage.
• I open the App Store, browse around a little bit, CPU usage is around 1-6% most of the time. I quit the App Store and the CPU usage returns to around 1%. I also openned the Twitter and Sparrow apps. With all of those apps in "idle" state the CPU usage is still around 1%.
• Now here's where it goes haywire... As soon as I open ANY WEB BROWSER (Chrome, Safari, or Firefox) my CPU usage instantly goes up to 15% and stays there, even when I'm not interacting with the browser. Now here's what's even crazier.. when I quit these browsers the CPU usage does NOT return back to 1%. It stays around 15% and the back of my MacBook starts to get really hot and the fans start spinning like crazy.

VERY ODD! Hope it gets fixed soon.

Resetting the SMC worked for me!

Thanks to all

SMC has not worked at all for me. Are you guys sure it is working? Try opening a web browser and see what happens. Everytime I open Chrome, Firefox, or Safari my CPU starts going nuts.

I am having same problem. Please explain what happens when you use contro +shift+option + power.

I am still not clear. I tried both option and hoping that it would increase the battery life which was horribe after lion upgrade

I see 2.56 hrs with 34% battery while doing simple browsing. I hope that apple will fix this issue.

I love my MAC.

Thanks for all your suggestions/insterest in resolving this issue.

I love my MAC too!!

When you press control+shift+alt and the power button... happen... nothing. I mean no feadback.. Just make sure you are holding all buttons for more than 10 seconds. You are doing right if your mac don't power on.

Then release all button, and power your mac on. On mine I was going 2 hours to 4 hours.. so big difference (with my battery at 40%).

I have :

Model Identifier: MacBookPro8,1

Processor Name: Intel Core i7

Processor Speed: 2.7 GHz

And, no! I don't have any problem with Safari Chrome of other application.. In my normal use my processor still 3% to 30%.. like before..

I saw that is really important to keep your software updated. (if an update exist) 🙂

Good luck guys!