Q: Lion - Horrible MacBook Pro Battery Life

I observed on my MBP early 2011 15" that the system never uses the Intel HD 3000 graphic card. It's using the AMD card also when no app is running. So that might be a reason for decreasing battery life. I experienced the same symptoms with battery life.

Completely dissatified with the battery life in LION.  Running mbp 8.3, even with screen dimmed and two apps running the battery will not last past 3hrs.  SMC reset does nothing as well.

The app gfxCardStatus is helpful with allowing a quick gander at the video card in use as well as changing which one you use.

Yes I use that one. But shouldn't Mac OS change the card to the integrated one by itself when in idle?

It depends on what programs are you running. I found, that Skype even it's not in call mod, just running in backround using the AMD card. When I quit him, Macbook automaticly switch to Intel. And as anybody wrote down on page gfxCardNotifier is good solution to view what card is being used. Also supports growl notification.

Sorry it is gfxcardstatus. But anywhere I also observe same symptoms as all of you. Before Lion upgrade my Macbook PRO 15" 2.2 late 2011 battery life was about 8hours with internet browsing, skype and adium icq online, mail online. Now with Lion it is about 5hours. So that is horrible apple because I bought Mac with dedicated 8hours battery and now I have standard expensive PC laptop.

Day two after installing Lion: I have my MBP sitting in front of me open. Started off with 3:57 battery time (low for just waking from sleep after charged overnight). Only Safari and Spped Download were the open apps and I wasn't using them - just desktop screen showing. In twenty minutes went to 2:01 remaining. Opened Activity Monitor and the only significant process shown is kernel_task at 22% and mds which ranges 0 to 88%. Don't understand enough to know what that means except to share it so help can come from Apple for a fix!

I had installed Lion on my 2011 MBP 13" i7 yesterday. 

Left it charge to 100% then disconnected shut down and

went to bed.  This morning I spent 2 to 3 hrs messing with it

on battery, some web surfing, some internet JAVA based

games for a while, and browsing and commenting on this forum

while I was cleaning up my iMac and installing Lion on it.

Battery went from 100% to 73%.  Also as a side note, CPU ran

at around 38C with fans at 2000.

As some of the other users have suggested, try grabbing gfxCardStatus 2.1. I was initially worried at the battery life I was getting and started to dig into things.

Launching Chrome, Firefox, Keynote, or Skype triggered a change to the discrete graphics card. I have an early 2011 MacBook Pro 15" 2.2GHz i7.

Right now I am working in InDesign CS4 (which oddly does not trigger the change, Illustrator and Photoshop however do.), Word 2011, Safari, and running iTunes in a fullscreen mode off to the side. With 40% of the battery remaining, I have @ 3 hours of charge left, however it does fluctuate down to 2:30 depending on how much I switch between Word and InDesign.

I colleuge was having the same issue and was able to replicate the graphic switching issues on his 2011 MacBook as well ( 2.0GHz i7 15"). I am not sure if this is an OS issue or application one, but hopefully this narrows it down for some people.

I am getting slightly better battery life with the integrated graphics, average when the discrete is turned on and using an application, slightly less when the discrete graphics is under a heavy load (World of Warcraft or Starcraft II)

macbook pro ,2.3 Ghz, 4gb ram 320 hdd, was on SL, battery life gone in 4 hours from the earlier 7 hours after upgrading to Lion

I think this issue is coming up enough people need to keep posting so Apple sees it all to address it. And post on websites dealing with Lion reviews/news and issues so everyone knows this is an issue occurring for more than a few.

Same issue here. I have a 2010 15" MBP w/2.4GHz Core i5 and 4GB RAM. Display is set to less than half brightness, using gfxCardStatus with integrated graphics when using the battery, WiFi enabled, not doing anything particularly power-intensive, but the battery is depleting much more rapidly than with Snow Leopard. I usually get about 6-8 hours depending on what i'm doing, but after an hour of web surfing I'm down to 60%. Laaaaaame.

I just called Apple support and they talked me through resetting the power manager, the battery now seems to be fine. I can give you the steps the gentleman over the phone gave me, it might just help.

1. Turn off the computer.

2. Hold down Ctrl+Option+shift

3. While holding down these button, press and hold the power button as well.

4. Hold all buttons for at least ten seconds.

5. power back on the computer.

For me that worked, i don't know how it will work for everyone else but immediately my power estimation jumped up to around 9:30 and 10 hours. Which is two hours more than i started with.