Q: Lion - Horrible MacBook Pro Battery Life

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... 

i4pple's advice makes sense.

Unfortunately, many (myself included) have taken all of the suggested steps without realizing benefit.

Am sitting tight, trying to remain hopeful that the next release will address this issue.

It's not so simple.

CPU idle states arent being cycled correctly. This, is complete speculation but the finely tuned sensor that is my lap says so. Top shows the CPU idle, but XRG and my lap show the CPU temp in the 120s. The bottom sensor corroborating my lap in reporting temp in the 90s.

Wait for the next patch and I'm sure they'll figure it out.

I am seeing the same.  120F seems to be the new idle temp, up from mid 90's - low 100's.

I have same problem on my brand new (about a month) old MBP 13" 4GB RAM...tried the ctrl-option-shift-power thing and closed all my apps..seems to help a bit but still 50% below what I was with Snow...I am now wishing I did not upgrade...I hope I don't have to go back to my Lenovo tablet since I think I forgot how to use a mouse...this is annoying....Apple please FIX!

Same here. Keep posting and they are bound to address it. I hope!

are you still under waranty? might want to see if you can't get that battery replaced before then... and let us know if it changed anything.

no no no :-) this is the support, to try to fix the issue or see what's causing it (aside from installing lion of course). you send your complaints/feedback to http://www.apple.com/feedback/

SmokeMonster is right!

Send your feedback directly to apple: http://www.apple.com/feedback/macosx.html

Hi guys

I'm new to the forum - I've been using it for years but have never actually posted anything. This battery issue is the biggest problem I have ever had in 9 years as a Mac user.

I went to the Apple Store in the Arndale Centre in Manchester yesterday with MBP 13" 2.4 C2D 4GB and Seagate XT 500GB hybrid HDD, which used to give me about 12.6 hours on Snow Leopard, but I'm now only getting 2.4 hours on Lion.

They just told me that Apple are aware of the issue and a fix is on the way, and to be patient - very little help.

Did they give any indication when?  My battery is aging fast...

Na no time frame.

it the battery life or health. iStat sayes my battery is very healthy 94% keep an eye on this if it starts falling this is when we need to start talking to Apple about a free or minimal cost battery replacement scheme.

the best way is to use Grab and take a shot of the battrey stats every week or so.

mine is Full Charge Capacity (mAh):          5465 at the moment then when you speak to Apple you have a catlgue that Lion is eating your battery.

Same here: 6 hours reduced to 3 hours under Lion

Another observation:

- Full battery charge and a followed sleep of 8 hours results in only 90 % remaining charge.

- Full battery charge and 48 hours sleep results in 13 % battery charge.

Something drains the battery although the guy should sleep (and is sleeping, blinking light in front of unibody Mac)

Downgraded back to Snow Leopard. My battery life is back to normal. I'm not going back up to Lion until they fix this.

Seriously, have those of you experiencing this checked for programs unexpectedly running in the background?

I get at least an extra 30 minutes to hour of battery life out of my MBP running Lion as compared to Snow Leopard and am perplexed at the difference in our experiences, though note I view Flash content rather sparingly.