Q: Lion - Horrible MacBook Pro Battery Life

Hey guys,

having read through this it seems like my issue is slightly different to most others.

Since installing Lion i have, as the rest of you, noticed significantly decreased battery life.

So having checked activity monitor i found a very odd occurence that i did not see in Snow Leopard.

I saw something with the process name 'ruby', its user '_devicemgr' quitting a then reopening for a short period of time. Occurs about 3-5 times every 10 seconds. and when it does appear it is using somewhere between *80% and 99.9% of my CPU which i dont like. Also i have noticed it appears to be worse when i am browsing the web (i use Safari 5.1

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

just 2 weeks old, came with SL, upgraded to lion.. it is so dissapointing, once i have seen 11!! hours of battery while web-browsing with SL.. now? only I 3 hours?? wonder if i can return to my latest time machine backup before the lion?!

Have you called Apple?  Since your machine is new and you have 90 days phone support, I would suggest calling them.  At least then you can be another voice in their ear complaining about this and maybe (doubtful) they will offer a suggestion that hasn't been mentioned in this thread or a date for a .1 update.

Actually all Apple products, and yes, that includes Mac OS X Lion, come with 90 days of free phone support, at least in the US.

I tried to Archive and Install from my Snow Leopard disc and I got an error message saying I can't do it. I tried starting the computer off the disc, and I received a big bad kernel error (which forces you to hard reset the computer).

So looks like I'm stuck with Lion, though I'd be happy to roll back. That said, they likely will come out with a fix before Christmas.

Try this http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2389334,00.asp

Just ran a test on the battery life in Sleep mode for 2 hours. I started the battery off at 70% and let it sit in sleep mode for 2 hrs. Battery dropped to just 68%.

A 3% drop isn't too bad, but it certinly isn't perfect.

Certinly hope to see a battery fix in the next couple of weeks.

I am always amazed when I hear guys getting 10 hours on their laptops. I have never, in using Mac laptops from the very beginning, had anything over 3 hours. Ever. And it's just basic operations.

To get 7 hours, as advertised, would be amazing. So when I first used this new 17" the other day, and only got 3 hours, I was used to that. Only reading here do I realize that that's actually quite terrible for this "new and improved" Mac.

Indeed, hopefully a fix is forthcoming shortly.

Thanks for that link. I'm going to see what the next two weeks brings. If it looks like Apple has not made this a priority, I'm going to go back to SL which was working just ducky.

The sleep power consumption should depend only by the hardware. So, lion or not lion should be exactly the same.

On my MBP (2011) I'm getting 4 hours and 30 minutes with Lion. Sometimes more, sometimes less. The battery healt is 95% and my display is at 75% (someting like this). I don't know exactly how was before, but I have the sensation that I lost like 1 hour.

Just curious to know how many hours you get.

I have i7 2.7, and the most of the time I'm writing code on XCode, Coda, testing on localhost with Chrome and surfing the web.

I just unplugged for 10 minutes after a full charge (17", MBP, 2003, 2.3 Ghz), and I am reading 89%, 2:10-2:44 remaining. That's probably worse than my 2008 MBP with SL.

Greetings,

This is the only issue I have had with Lion, on my Macbook. After the upgrade, I took the machine out on the patio, as I usually do, and the battery lasted less than 2 hours, and it was fully charged. I've seen this before on a machine that has had a lot of use, but this one hasn't

I immediately suspected the battery meter of being out of calibration, figuring something in the Lion battery indicator of not being true. The meter is what shuts your machine off - the battery could be half charged, still.

I performed a calibration by charging the machine up to full, and ran it down until it shut off, and wouldn't come back on. Just letting it discharge, with use, until it goes to sleep, until it won't restart, is enough. I did this twice, but usually once is enough.

Now the Macbook runs for nearly 4 1/2 hours with normal, and steady use. I've charged and discharged it several times since then, and it performs correctly, still.

Apple recommends to do this once a month, but I do it every other month, except this time, as I had just installed Lion, and that's when the issue raised its head. It's funny, it didn't affect my Macbook Pro, after the Lion update.

Here's an article from Apple about it;

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1490

Cheers,

M.

********

The same thing with the USB printer and storage center happens to me. I have googled it and it seems like we are the only two people who have this problem. I'm sure there must be other people, but I wonder why it's so difficult to find other complaints.

dito

I took my sick Air into my Apple-certified repair shop (a lot better than the local Apple Store in terms of service) and turned it on.  It powered down after 20 seconds.  Then it rebooted.   Then it powered down.  Then it rebooted....

"Did you just install Lion?" the manager asked me as he wrote up my repair order.

"Yup," I replied, "but I think it's more a hardware problem."

"We'll see about that," he said as he swept the Air off he counter and handed it off to the young repair guru who's always fixed my machines since my G3. 

Stay tuned.