Q: Lion - Horrible MacBook Pro Battery Life

Franc_Iphone wrote:

 

As you all know, I brought my MACBOOK Pro from new with LION installed. After spending 10 mins at the Genius bar today, they agreed to send me a free Snow Leopard install disk. Whilst waiting (an hour past my fiex appointment time), I sat at one of their brand new MACBook Pro's (LION), running nothing of any signifcants that showed about 6 hours after I unlugged it. After 5 mins it, just surfing with Iphoto running in back ground it dropped to 4 hours. That's just SAFARI and Iphoto! When I stopped Iphoto, it went back to about 6 hours.

Franc,

once you install SL make sure you don't update to 10.6.8 otherwise you'll end up having the same battery performance! I am on 10.6.6 and battery life is as good as used to be

Since my MBP performs great, no single issue I'd like to use that as the answer to a few questions addressed to me earlier about SL 10.6.6.

Ilhan Kudeki wrote:

 

I created a new partition, installed OS X Lion on it from scratch, and now I'm browsing on Safari, having installed no flash and no applications.

 

It's now estimating 3h45m to 4 hours. On my original setup I was seeing just a bit less than that. On Snow Leopard, it's 6-7 hours.

 

Tell me there isn't a problem here.

 

Update: about 30 minutes later it's at 82% battery life, giving me 3h10m estimate.  Past experience dictates that this will be pretty spot-on.

 

I finished talking to Apple Technical Support on the phone again, and they've made me a Genius Bar appointment to swap in a new battery.  I agreed just to prove to them that it's an issue with the OS (plus, who knows how many charge cycles I've wasted with Lion's short battery life).

 

I seriously wonder what they'll do when I prove to them that with a clean install, a new battery, no applications installed, no processor-intensive apps running, it's still just getting 4 hours.  I really wonder.

I wonder that too.

BTW you are still talking about estimate times for your battery life. It would be more accurate if you actually can prove it is reflected to real battery life. That's what I'm trying to do, either.

I have spotted also another possible issue that might affect battery life under Lion. QTKitServer process.

When I try to watch some videos from youtube this process goes crazy with CPU usage. This process should be responseable for converting a video stream encoded with a codec not supported natively by QuickTime X (please correct me if I'm wrong).

Therefore it seems to me that not installing Flash Player will lead in some cases to a worst problem than installing it: this process goes really crazy as old Flash Player version, while newer ones have better performances (it also depends on the content itself). That also might explain as well why users claiming Chrome as the browser they use, also claim a longer battery life.

It also might explain as well why yesterday I was experiencing a better battery life: as mentioned I wasn't watching any video during that session.

I'll try to run some power consumption comparisons on my dual-boot iMac setup this weekend. In the limited time I was running Lion on my MBP I didn't do a great deal of QT/Flash playback.

Ric

Ric Getter wrote:

 

I'll try to run some power consumption comparisons on my dual-boot iMac setup this weekend. In the limited time I was running Lion on my MBP I didn't do a great deal of QT/Flash playback.

 

Ric

Keep in mind that on a MBPro with a dual GPU (integrated and discrete), that process (QTKitServer) always triggers a switch to the discrete GPU, and then after is closed, system will switch again to the Integrated GPU (standing on preferences the user has set about power savings).

Therefore I don't know if your test on an iMac will be a complete one.

I have been running since 8am EST (Now 2pm) with some small breaks but been keeping track. I've been running now for exactly 5 hours of REAL work time! I have 45 mins showing left.

I am / have been running most of the time, VMware (XP), Mac Mail, Safari, Skype, Iphoto, Twitter, Evernote, Dropbox and also for about an hour, running over a VPN. All the time on WFI.

What I did after a full charge and boot up was run GFXCARDSTATUS, set to INTEGRATED and then quit the program. (It has a bug where it will keep the integrated card locked out).

In the last 3 months, I have rarely got above 2 1/2 hrs with even just some of the above running.

Me too. Brand new MB Pro:

Model Name:  MacBookPro8,1

  Processor Name:          Intel Core i5

  Processor Speed:          2.3 GHz

Getting four hours battery life, tops doing very routine web browsing, word processing iTunes etc. Very disappointed, especially because it's my first Mac after years of PCs.

Franc, I sincerely ask: what's your point?  I don't think you were clear on it in your post.

Sorry if my post wasn't clear. Since I've posted so much over the last 3 months about being annoyed at battery life on my 3 month old MacBook Pro, 8GB, 512GB SSD, 15",  I thought I'd summarize;

For 3 months I rarely get about 2 1/2  - 3 hours on a full charge.

Today, after a full recharge last night AND starting GFXcardStatus after a reboot, which I then set to Integrated and "quit" out of, I went to exactly 5 hours and 24 mins before it died. With all these things running and using it pretty much constantly

VMware (XP), Mac Mail, Safari, Skype, Iphoto, Twitter, Evernote, Dropbox and also for about an hour, running over a VPN. All the time on WFI.

Why should I have to run GFXcardstatus to get decent battery life.

Since I have MPB 13" with a single graphic card should I turn off my card too? Pretty sure with no card "on" my battery will go over 30 hours!

Stay focus, it affects everyone.

Lol! Are you still using SL 10.6.6?

Here's an update of where I'm at:

I went into the Genius Bar today, and they ran another diagnostic on my MBP 13-inch's battery.  It's perfectly in good health -- 95% charge capacity -- so they wouldn't swap it out for a new one.  Since swapping it is what the AppleCare rep. on the phone said was the next step, I figured that doing so would at last prove to them that there's a definite problem.

Anyway, I asked her: "So how are we going to fix this problem?"  She checked with the other Geniuses and gave me the option of leaving my MacBook Pro with them for a couple of days so that they could run tests on it.

I decided to go home and do a Time Machine (and SuperDuper) backup of my drive and wipe all partitions clean to give them a fresh install to test it out with.  I did this, and also created a partition where I installed Snow Leopard 10.6.6 from the original DVD.

I'm actually running 10.6.6 right now and seem to be getting the exact same estimates as I used to get before I started with 10.6.8 or Lion.  At the rate it's going, I expect a comfortable 6.5 hours (half-brightness, low-lighting on keyboard, just safari running, no flash, on WIFI).

Remember, the Lion clean-install with all the latest updates was just giving me 3.5 to 4 hours of actual usage, same with 10.6.8 when I had done a clean install of SL and gone through all the updates.

I don't think there's any denying there's a problem now (or chalking it up to apps that have not been optimized for Lion).  Other things I've already tried to no avail also include resetting the PRAM and NVRAM and recalibrating the battery.  Graphics switching is not an issue on this machine since it only has an integrated GPU.

I'm very curious to see what will happen when I prove this to them by letting them experience it for themselves.

(P.S. to all the newcomers, join our Facebook group here: http://www.facebook.com/mbp.battery.life)

Message was edited by Ilhan Kudeki (for minor clarifications and corrections)

Same here, I have just finished doing a clean install after only getting 2.5hrs per charge.  No flash and no applications at all, simple use, Safari, Mail and not much else.  Its reporting 3-4hrs but when I actually monitor it I only get 2.5 - 3 hrs actual use.  Keep us updated please on Apple's investigation!

Rayced wrote:

 

Lol! Are you still using SL 10.6.6?

Not "still" but "just started"! I was on SL 10.6.7 - Lion Upgrade - Fresh Lion .10.7.1 - SL 10.6.8 - Lion 10.7.2 and back to SL 10.6.6

@Ilhan Kudeki I have battery replaced on my visit to Apple store, simply the had no answer.

Ilhan Kudeki wrote:

 

Here's an update of where I'm at:

 

I went into the Genius Bar today, and they ran another diagnostic on my MBP 13-inch's battery.  It's perfectly in good health -- 95% charge capacity -- so they wouldn't swap it out for a new one.  Since swapping it is what the AppleCare rep. on the phone said was the next step, I figured that doing so would at last prove to them that there's a definite problem.

 

Anyway, I asked her: "So how are we going to fix this problem?"  She checked with the other Geniuses and gave me the option of leaving my MacBook Pro with them for a couple of days so that they could run tests on it.

 

I decided to go home and do a Time Machine (and SuperDuper) backup of my drive and wipe all partitions clean to give them a fresh install to test it out with.  I did this, and also created a partition where I installed Snow Leopard 10.6.6 from the original DVD.

 

I'm actually running 10.6.6 right now and seem to be getting the exact same estimates as I used to get before I started with 10.6.8 or Lion.  At the rate it's going, I expect a comfortable 6.5 hours (half-brightness, low-lighting on keyboard, just safari running, no flash, on WIFI).

 

Remember, the Lion clean-install with all the latest updates was just giving me 3.5 to 4 hours of actual usage, same with 10.6.8 when I had done a clean install of SL and gone through all the updates.

 

I don't think there's any denying there's a problem now (or chalking it up to apps that have not been optimized for Lion).  Other things I've already tried to no avail also include resetting the PRAM and NVRAM and recalibrating the battery.  Graphics switching is not an issue on this machine since it only has an integrated GPU.

 

I'm very curious to see what will happen when I prove this to them by letting them experience it for themselves.

 

(P.S. to all the newcomers, join our Facebook group here: http://www.facebook.com/mbp.battery.life)

 

Message was edited by Ilhan Kudeki (for minor clarifications and corrections)

Thanks for sharing your experience.

My laptop still losing battery power during sleep mode under Lion. This is the only consistent behavior I've found so far: about 1% every two hours for a long sleep mode period of about 7 hrs and 30 minutes.

Please check that too in your upcoming tests, if you can.

My next test in Lion will cover disabling the new Lion window animation by typing in Terminal:

defaults write NSGlobalDomain NSAutomaticWindowAnimationsEnabled -bool NO

To re–enable them:

defaults write NSGlobalDomain NSAutomaticWindowAnimationsEnabled -bool YES

This because during past days I was checking in Activity Monitor the behavior of windowserver process, and it seemed to me that it uses more CPU than it used to under SL.

Hi guys,

my last entry here was a view months ago. I experienced the same battery drain. I reinstalled Snow Leopard 10.6.8 and had no battery issues at all. After following this thread for a while I decided to clean install Lion 10.7.2.

And it works for me. Last night I used my MacBook Pro early 2011 for 4 hours by surfing the web (not WiFi but 3G via USB!) for about 1 hour and thereafter watching iTunes video for 3 hours.

Afters these 4 hours my battery showed 48% charge left. That means about 7,5 hours of battery life estimated. So I am happy with that.