Q: Lion - Horrible MacBook Pro Battery Life

Hi@all,

MacBook Pro 15" early 2011

same problem, battery power sink from 7 hours to 3:50 hours after installing Lion !

But what can help? Firmware Update or Softwareupdate?

Apple plz help....one reason to buy a Mac was the long batterie running time.

But now, i can't see a different to some Windows Books!

On the 8th November, I wrote, via email to a senior exec at Apple. I pointed them to my 3 month battery life issue and this thread. Within 4 hours, I had a call back from the executive office. Within 30 mins of that call it had been escalated to engineering and I had a call back from that team.

Within 72 hours and I had 3 additional call backs collecting detailed logs, before and after analysis and had a chance to tell my full story, soup to nuts (that I've documented many times in this thread). They are also aware of the "sleep" pattern draining battery separate to the issue of the run time drain of certain apps etc., They are also aware that GFXcardstatus make the battery life a lot better - something in itself that clearly reproduces part of the problem/solution.

Last contact for me was last week BUT I have seen that Apple engineers have been reaching out to more and more of you. They are obviously either searching for a common demoninator, that will allow them to reproduce the problem OR have found the common denominator and are verifying it. I suspect until we hear anything from them, we won't know they have the fix!

The GREAT news is that APPLE are well and truly on this thread (that's how they are contacting you) and they are working on it.

Fingers CROSSED. In a couple of weeks I will be reaching out to the original exec that esacalted this for me.

MBP 15", Mid 2010. Battery life went from around 7 hours with SL down to 2 hours with lion.

It has now been many months without a fix and the problem seems to be permanent.

Considering all the problems with lion, it is time to change the name to OS X Vista.

/Per

DrChandra wrote:

 

 

@Rayced in the early days before I released that problem is result of the OS flaw I did check fan speed (2011 MBP 13") and every time it would be at the minimum, around 2000 rpm.

 

I understand. My fans are now at 2700 RPM due to a spotlight re-index of a Time Machine backup. I've had no clue till I read iStat Pro report. Now 2700RPM is about 1/3 higher than 2000. I don't know in which proportion it'll affect battery drain, but it will for sure.

If people will not monitor things with something, than their reports based on their own "sensations" aren't going to help, IMHO.

I got my MacBook Pro in April this year. 13 inch with 2.4 core2duo. Came with Leopard, and I could work on it for about 9h working with text. Now I get around 4. Did all sorts of resets, SMC and PRAM and VRAM, but like in other people's case didn't work.

Waiting for that SMC update like probably all of you here

Same here, on a MacBook Pro Intel Core 2 Duo (Mid 2009).

I also tried disabling Flash (using "ClickToFlash"), but it didn't change that much.

Apple, please fix this as soon as possible!

Franc_Iphone wrote:

 

On the 8th November, I wrote, via email to a senior exec at Apple. I pointed them to my 3 month battery life issue and this thread. Within 4 hours, I had a call back from the executive office. Within 30 mins of that call it had been escalated to engineering and I had a call back from that team.

 

Within 72 hours and I had 3 additional call backs collecting detailed logs, before and after analysis and had a chance to tell my full story, soup to nuts (that I've documented many times in this thread). They are also aware of the "sleep" pattern draining battery separate to the issue of the run time drain of certain apps etc., They are also aware that GFXcardstatus make the battery life a lot better - something in itself that clearly reproduces part of the problem/solution.

 

Last contact for me was last week BUT I have seen that Apple engineers have been reaching out to more and more of you. They are obviously either searching for a common demoninator, that will allow them to reproduce the problem OR have found the common denominator and are verifying it. I suspect until we hear anything from them, we won't know they have the fix!

 

The GREAT news is that APPLE are well and truly on this thread (that's how they are contacting you) and they are working on it.

 

Fingers CROSSED. In a couple of weeks I will be reaching out to the original exec that esacalted this for me.

Well done Franc

Franc_Iphone wrote:

 

 

 

Within 72 hours and I had 3 additional call backs collecting detailed logs, before and after analysis and had a chance to tell my full story, soup to nuts (that I've documented many times in this thread). They are also aware of the "sleep" pattern draining battery separate to the issue of the run time drain of certain apps etc., They are also aware that GFXcardstatus make the battery life a lot better - something in itself that clearly reproduces part of the problem/solution.

 

 

Good to know they're also aware of the battery drain during sleep and working on it. That issue is very annoying.

I still doubt the cause of this issue is related to the GPU switch. But an improvement in battery drain of discrete GPUs in general would be more than welcome by everyone.

BTW today I've had a very bad system hog which lead me to a restart. My battery was litteraly suckd up: I've lost almost 30% of battery life in less than one hour. Discrete GPU was switched off. The problem —I think— was related with a spotlight hog (mdworker) onto a Time Machine backup indexing. Fans were going at 2700 RPM, something I wouldn't notice just by hearing noise.

same problem here, mid-2010 mac book pro, after lion install less than half battery.

fan's cleaned, but still always running. hope apple fixes this soon.

Battery life for me isn't as bad as some of you are stating. And it seems to be improving. I've had Lion for a while now and am getting about 5-6 hours using Safari and occasionally Mail. Software like Logic Pro drain the battery in about 3 hours, but i think that's quite normal. I am however seeing the drain whilst sleeping etc.

The thing i'm scared about is the actual damage to my battery.

I took it to Apple store - far away from where i live - (after being told to by AppleCare) and he ran his tests on it and said there was nothing wrong with it. I then got very frustrated because it had 83% capacity after 300 cycles. Apple claim that it should stay above 80% capacity up to 1000 cycles and yet only claim that the battery needs replacing when it reaches 80%. Even though i'd gone a very long way to get there, AND my warranty runs out this Friday.

The next day it dropped to 82%.

Really am not happy with this.

Same problem.  Brand new Late 2011 Macbook Pro 2.2 GHz i7 8 GB memory (I used Migration Assistant to go from my old MBP (SL) to the new one).  May get 3 hours if I'm lucky. 

tim

Well ... glad I found the article in Appleinsider (below) and this thread.  I was getting ready to move to Lion but will now delay.  How annoying, but hopefully there is a fix in the works.

http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/11/11/15/apple_still_working_to_fix_lion_ba ttery_life_issues_on_older_macbooks.html

Don't know if this helps everyone, but since yesterday I found a workaround for the sleep drain issue.

The little app - DeepSleep - you have to buy it for just a couple of quid in the app store and then go to the developers website to download a Lion compatible version afterwards.  Do this at your own risk....  etc. etc...

Basically, all I have the app doing is go into Hibernate Mode rather than Normal Sleep Mode. So when I shut the lid of my MBP at the end of the day it now loses maybe 1% charge overnight - acceptable.  

Over simplifying I know but Hibernate, I gather, writes your machine's current state to a file on your HDD rather than hold it in RAM which is does with a regular Sleep.  The disadvantage is it takes longer to wake up - as I use a fast SSD it is still pretty quick - perhaps 3 seconds to awaken - not sure what it would be like on a regular HDD.

Still - not perfect and holding out for the real fix from Apple (plus of course the general poor battery performance fix!)....   I think a fair few of us have been contacted now....

I, too, am bothered by the sleep drain issue - an element of Lion's tendency to leech power from your MBP. I tried DeepSleep, and it's an agreeable application if you have an SSD.

However, I have a 2009 MBP with a standard 250GB HD. Wake up from deep sleep takes about twenty seconds or so. I'm certain that some will find this application useful, and twenty seconds isn't that long, really. But I'm so accustomed to instant-on performance that I've opted for a twin strategy of simple sleep and using my wall plug to keep my battery in good shape.

Nobody from Apple has contacted me about a software fix, but at least somebody's working on it.

adetri wrote:

 

Don't know if this helps everyone, but since yesterday I found a workaround for the sleep drain issue.

 

The little app - DeepSleep - you have to buy it for just a couple of quid in the app store and then go to the developers website to download a Lion compatible version afterwards.  Do this at your own risk....  etc. etc...

 

Basically, all I have the app doing is go into Hibernate Mode rather than Normal Sleep Mode. So when I shut the lid of my MBP at the end of the day it now loses maybe 1% charge overnight - acceptable.  

 

Over simplifying I know but Hibernate, I gather, writes your machine's current state to a file on your HDD rather than hold it in RAM which is does with a regular Sleep.  The disadvantage is it takes longer to wake up - as I use a fast SSD it is still pretty quick - perhaps 3 seconds to awaken - not sure what it would be like on a regular HDD.

 

Still - not perfect and holding out for the real fix from Apple (plus of course the general poor battery performance fix!)....   I think a fair few of us have been contacted now....

The drawback is speed for regualar hard disks.

That application can be very handy to do exactly the opposite you're talking about, and don't let the laptop store a snapshot when battery level is at a certain level (high), speeding up the going to sleep process; while when the battery is at certain low level, the snapshot process will be performed.

The use you're suggesting, will make people with a regular HD wait much longer for awake operations even when they put to sleep their laptop just for few minutes: it's not practical at all.

It seems this thread (since is so popular) is becoming a huge advertisement billboard for third party apps; more and more everyday.

PS for the sake of "underline the obvius" people, all of the above is intended IMHO.