Q: Lion - Horrible MacBook Pro Battery Life

Hi,

normally you have to use you SL disc who was delivered with your MBP.

I did the downgrade for 5 days now, and it´s not so simple as usual. I had to erase everything, and at the end it still show you this ugly Linen background and ask you if you want to download Lion. It´s a little bit scary, because the HDD supposed to be empty. But i took the Time Machine option and after 2 hours i had my old SL on it, but the Account wasn´t working anymore.

My advice is take the time, a six pack of good beer, maybe a good movie and make the change.

For the Battery issue i´m back to my old 8 hours for internet and 3-4 hours when i work on it. And it´s  not an helicopter anymore.

TrexGroove

Enabling "Always Show Scroll Bars" does appear have benefited my battery life. I stress the word "appear." Very hard to determine cause and effect. Also, disabled iStatPro--my favorite widget, and disconnected my external mouse.

Having said that, did not experience this battery weirdness with SL--even with all of the above enabled. Was getting roughtly twice the battery life.

My MacBook Pro has the same battery life as in SL, the only difference is that Lion is running a little hotter than before...

Okay, I did a recondition on my battery the other day, let it die off completely, let it sit in sleep mode for 5-hours, then gave it a full charge, and that seemed to help a little. My battery life went up from 1:50 to 2:30, so there was some gain to be had, but it's still not what it used to be.

Again, the specs on my MBP are as follows:

Model Name:          MacBook Pro

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

Bus Speed:          800 MHz

Battery Charge

Current Charge: 4170 mAh

Maximum Charge: 5174 mAh

79% Charge (as of this posting)

Battery Capacity

Current Capacity: 5174 mAh

Design Capacity: 5500 mAh

94% Life

Details:

Battery Loadcycles: 222

Battery Temp: 87.8F

Battery Power Usage: 25.8 Watt

According to Lion, I have about 1:50 on the battery right now. I'm going to do some writing and see how long it lasts me.

Per LandonAB obersvation, I have disabled the "Hide Scrollbars" feature in Lion. I'm wondering how that's going to affect the battery life.

Here's to hoping and experimenting.

As for my system as of now, here's what I'm running:

Mail

Twitter

Headline

Chrome (6 windows, 32 tabs total [research & job hunting])

and finally

Pages (1 Document open)

I've got a 2.3 Ghz, 17", MBP only a few days old. It came with Lion installed. I'm getting 2-3 hours realtime unplugged. And that's just using email and a browser.

Wow...

Wow that's unbelievable!! The most high end MBP with lion preinstalled! There's just no excuse here! I really hope this means it's an OS issue and not hardware. It would help, probably, if I could turn off mission control completely.. I'm sure it's saving what my desktop is doing which means it's doing it twice? I've noticed when I watch a video and go into mission control it shows the video playing in the desktop and in the preview desktops in mission control. It looks neat but I'm sure that has to eat up not only cpu but battery life.

I should note that I have reset the SMC on my 2.3 Ghz brand new 17" MBP, re-calibrated, deleted the Citrix (if it was there), added the scroll bars, and whatever other advice the plethera of threads on this suggested, gave it a pedicure, back massage, and a perm, and this computer is no better than a 2008.

New clothes—same old battery life: maybe 3 hours at best.

Just disconnected from a full charge from a dead battery.

At 100% it read 3:29

It dropped 1% in a matter of seconds and the time dropped to 2:55.

I'm using coconutBattery 2.7 to watch my battery life.

Even new in 2008, my MBP didn't get this bad of a battery life, and this battery is about 6-months old now

That proves, then, that is a software issue (since I'm on a brand new MBP).

When a fix comes, however, is uncertain.

Yes. it is conclusive that it is an OS problem based on these threads and others I have also seen.

I don't have an indication yet when an update is due.  I really don't want to reformat my new MBP to roll back to snow leopard.  I'm holding out on the update.

This is my first mac in years.  From your experience, how fast does Apple release an update in a major OS revision like LION?  days?, weeks?  If it is months, I might have to buy a new battery together with the update.

JUST A THOUGHT/QUESTION:

I am sure that with Apple's resources, they saw this during testing phase.  Why was there no disclosure on this bug?  Is this a usual apple policy?

This wasn't a big issue during testing or Apple would have fixed it then.

As I've mentioned before, the battery life on my MacBook Pro 5,1 with a 2.66 GHz Core 2 Duo went up on the upgrade from SL to Lion, from 3.5 to over 4.5 hours.

I would say apples policy has always been "we know what's best for you" but they seem to also utilize feedback from consumers, i.e. all those people who bought an iPhone.

although over time I think all of my hardpressed issues have been resolved either by third party apps or apple themselves. Like the magic trackpad, I had given feedback the momment I got my unibody MBP with one big glass button and gesture recognition. I told apple I wanted that in a wireless device, and I'm sure other people did too and they made it!. I was also peeved that my RAM only went up to 4gb but with an EFI update, it now maxes out to 8, giving me a few more years with my machine.

Maybe it's good that Apple is taking so long to update this os? I hear they have 10.7.2 out for devs but what happened to 10.7.1? you know?

I'm pretty sure the bug fix is already in the works. When they released 10.6.0 "Snow Leopard", it took Apple about two weeks to issue their first bug fix for Snow Leopard.

I imagine 10.7.1 will be out by August 19th.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_X_Snow_Leopard#Release_history

aug 19? that's more then two weeks.

Cushioning room for date felxibilty, just incase I'm wrong about their fix for this...