Lion - Horrible MacBook Pro Battery Life

Resetting SMC pulled up my battery status from 1:43h to 3:08h...thanx to everybody for suggestion

I've done it on mine and it seems to be ok at the moment, I've got 1 hour 40 mins with 30% battery. I'll wait and see what happens when I I've charged the battery.

I have just downloaded the coconutBattery app for my mac, and it shows that my battery capacity is 89% and its current charge is 22%. The current charge seems to be correct but the battery capacity surely should be 100% given that the Macbook is 3 weeks old. Does anyone have any experience with this app? I know its third party so may not be 100%, but surely this isn't great.

mac early 2011, 15' I7 2.2ghz

at 95% power, bluetooth off, integrated graphics card

the power fluctuates between 3hrs and 6hrs after reseting the power unit.

settles at 4hrs.... I'm still unsure as to the performance under Lion.

Previous to this, after Lion installation, the 100% battery at the same configuration above is only at 4:30

Same here: battery is getting low very fast since update to LION. MBP 2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 duo.

same here - macbook pro 17'' mid-2009

after upgrading to Lion, when battery is 100% charged it shows 2-3 hours. On the SL it was 4-5. SMC reset did not solve the problem.

So I just realized that my Activity Monitor was not showing all of the processes. I think I've found the culprit. Its a process called launchd. After a few minutes of using a web browser or iTunes this launchd process starts to constantly run at over 45%. Even after I quit the browsers and iTunes this process remains at 46%. I've tried to force quit that process but that does not work.

[Early 2011 MBP, Intel i5 4GBRAM]

Tried the SMC reset but didn't work. If anyone wants to try it, here is a note about how it works and how the magsafe adapter changes colors while you are pressing the keys: http://support.apple.com/kb/ht3964

After trying and trying things, I have decided to go back to Snow Leopard. I've reinstalled it and then restored all my data back from a TimeMachine backup. Now, battery lasts again between 9 and 10 hours as it was before upgrading to Lion. BTW I was using freeNAS8 to store my TimeMachine backups, but it doesn't work with Lion.

I moved from my windows laptop to my macbook pro thinking that it was going to be a different story talking about OS's... but seems that it's the same old story. So will wait until apple releases a few patches and Lion gets more stable before considering moving there.

macbook pro early 2011, charging cycles on the battery (new), using integrated graphics, bluetooth off, wifi on... screen dimmed to 50%

I've reset the power unit yesterday and the battery consumption has settled. I now have 4.5hr to 5hr max with the battery. Under 10.6.8 and with the same usage, I would go up to 7 to 8 hrs.

My theory:

I would often look at the disk write (both under ac power and battery) and see that, under Lion, there is a lot of disk activity. I think this is the cause of the heavy battery load.

jsueiro wrote:

BTW I was using freeNAS8 to store my TimeMachine backups, but it doesn't work with Lion.

You need netatalk 2.2 - it supports backups from Lions Time Machine.

@lulaz yes, thanks for the note. I know that perhaps they will be adding it on the next release of freeNas: http://support.freenas.org/ticket/483 that's why I decided to go back to Leopard, wait until apple releases a few patches and makes Lion more stable and less battery consuming, freeNas releases a new version, then I upgrade everything and hopefully will get everything working.

Macbook Pro, 2.66GHz, i7, 8GB and battery life took a big hit after Lion install. The whole computer runs hotter also. I was the guinea pig for my office full of Mac users and will be reporting back that Lion is a battery killing flop. Too bad. I will probablly go back to Snow Leopard tomorrow.

Ditto here on a MBP 5,5 (2,53 Mhz from 2009). I went from 6-7 hours normal use to about 4 hours maximum with the same usage (spotlight has finished, i've had Lion on there since it came out). SMC reset didn't help.

I went ahead and reformated HDD and instead of installing SL and then LION I installed LION alone. Since then my battery increased to almost normal usage before Lion came out. However, I do not suggest everyone to do the same. You will loose some functions that Apple was unaware of as of yet.

MBP 8.3 2.2 i7

this seems like something an update could fix...