Lion - Horrible MacBook Pro Battery Life

I had the low battery life problem with my MBP 15 inch, from June 2011, it dropped to three and a half houres.

I read in the forum about Skype, as soon as I stopped Skype, battery life changed, without reloading,

from 3 houres to 8.15.

So Skype(maybe in combination with Lion) was the problem.

bert

hmm, I'm gonna check if Skype is the issue of my poor battery life...

Same here i own a Macbook Pro 15 inch, i7, 8 gb ram, 1333 mhz DDR3. My first Mac after 2 decades of Windows....

I Loved my macbook until the "update" to Lion.

Worked this morning for 1,5 hours and battery goes from full to 12 minute remaning and gets really hot.

Please solve this or will need a downgrade to get rid of Lion, i just loved the qualities before Lion!

Anyone any ideas?

I don't use skipe at all and have the same bad battery performance.

Same here.... its my first mac after a long time. If this is not fixed soon, will have to go back to snow leapard.

Same here. With my brand new I7 MBP I never got more than 5 hours in the battery life estimation... but I never even got this 5 hours

MBP 15' I7 2011. After a few charging cycles, I noticed the average life of a full charge is barely 3hrs with normal workload. This includes a few vids in youtube, surfing, typing a document on Word.

Yep it is getting worse for me too. I wonder - did anyone try a clean install? I upgraded my 2010 15" MacBook Pro so was wonderign whether anyone with clean install has the same issue? I can't do clean install now - don't have my backups here but it is worth a try...

I'm getting better battery life with Lion than I ever saw with Snow Leopard.

At first I thought it was just a miscalculation, so I ran it down to poweroff and it was very close to the estimate, which is at least 30 minutes more than I saw with 10.6.8.

2.66 GHz Core 2 Duo MBP.

Upgrade or clean install?

Upgrade.

I also notice most people complaining of poor battery life are viewing something encoded with Flash, and Adobe has been a bit wishy-washy as to whether Flash is more processor-intensive in Lion compared to Snow Leopard.

If so, that alone may be the reason people are seeing reduced battery life.

We should indeed wait for 10.7.1.

I did some testing myself, trying to find the drain culprit...

Apart from other stuff I thought Spotlight (https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3213706?answerId=15771076022#15771076022) and Flash were causing the problem. But after the testing I have to admit it doesn't matter at all if Spotlight is off or Flash is not installed... It doesn't matter if you reset power control either.

Hopefully 10.7.1 will be out soon.

Just found this thread, and I'm (unfortunately) glad to see I'm not the only one having this issue.

This is my set up:

Model Identifier: MacBookPro4,1

Processor Name: Intel Core 2 Duo

Processor Speed: 2.5 GHz

Number of Processors: 1

Total Number of Cores: 2

L2 Cache: 6 MB

Memory: 4 GB

I haven't had a chance to monitor how quickly my battery has been dropping, but I know it's been a significant drop.

I pulled up the specs on my battery just a moment ago and this is what coconutBattery reported:

Battery Charge:

Current charge: 4382 mAh

Maximum charge: 5032 mAh

86% Battery life

Battery Capacity:
Current capacity: 5032 mAh

Design capacity: 5300 mAh

Details:

Battery loadcycles: 218

Battery temp: 87.0F

Battery power usage: 30.7 Watt

And like everyone else here, I've seen a major drop since upgrading to Lion. I can only assume it's a software issue. I know my battery (and the Mac itself) are old, but I was still seeing at least 3 hrs of life, now I'm only getting around an hour or so. Battery dies off very quickly in sleep mode too.

Yup, add me to the list. I bought a 2011 2.7 Ghz 13" Macbook Pro right before Lion came out and was enjoying at least 6 hours of battery life with normal use under Snow Leopard. Now I get less than 3 hrs after upgrading to Lion. I reset the SMC and calibrated the battery ( http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1490 ) but neither made a difference. Absolutely terrible.

For those of you still experiencing shorter battery life, I recommend the following:

1.) Re-calibrate your battery. This is done by exhausting the battery completely, then recharging it until it once again has a full charge. Full re-calibrating procedure can be found here .

2.) If re-calibrating the battery doesn't resolve the issue, go to Applications > Utilities > Activity Monitor. In the drop down menu near the top of the window, select "All Processes". From the individual columns of data, select the column title "% CPU" (this organizes your computer processes/activities based on the CPU demand of each application). Check for any unusual CPU usage.

For me, it was the dock, which for some reason was taking up 100% of my CPU, thereby shortening my battery life to roughly 2 hours. For anything, taking up an unusual amount of CPU processing, simply close the application. However, resetting something like the dock may require the use of command lines in Terminal. If you're not comfortable using Terminal, schedule a Genius Bar appointment at your nearest Apple Store to have a certified technician fix the problem for you.

In addition, due to Mac OS X Lion's "Resume" feature, some of the applications you had running when you last shut down your device may have resumed at startup, thereby taxing battery life. When shutting down, uncheck the box labeled "Reopen windows when logging back in" or just be sure to properly quit out of all your open applications before shutting down your computer.

Hope this helps... 