Q: Lion - Horrible MacBook Pro Battery Life

  Over and out. 

People ought to check out your profile.  You've been a busy beaver with something negative or mean to say to almost everyone who's had a problem with Lion, not just on this forum but about a dozen others.  Please give the insult trading a rest.  It's embarrassing and, while you're talking about Terms of Use, a disservice to the forums' members.  Final goodbyes. 

Bob Jacobson wrote:

 

People ought to check out your profile.  You've been a busy beaver with something negative or mean to say to almost everyone who's had a problem with Lion, not just on this forum but about a dozen others.  Please give the insult trading a rest.  It's embarrassing and, while you're talking about Terms of Use, a disservice to the forums' members.  Final goodbyes. 

1 other. I come here to learn things, but just get annoyed at negative folk like yourself. I do actually help along the way believe it or not. just not you. So I will leave you to your own little thread here and hope you sell lots of DaisyDiscs.

Bye

I came to this forum looking for information and advice on my MBP battery issues with Lion.

Is it possible for the Mods to weed out all the threads with personal attacks, insults, name calling, etc so we can deal with the real topic?

Thanks.

I agree with Bob Jacobson... I have seen several forums in which Mulligans missus says there is not even a single bug in Lion. Why the **** he is here if he doesn't have problems with Lion ? If he wants to learn as he says, better keep mum or give some positive thoughts rather than diverting the topic.

In the interest of restoring a sense of whimsy and wonder:

   "Did you hear the one about the nerd using Windex on his Windows? 

   "He was trying to clean them but couldn't get the (blue) screens off."

   <very modest applause>

Okay, I'll keep my day job.

Back to the Batteries...

Mhhh… Well it seems that many users need a piece of winged cheese to calm down. For sure one I got the "honor" to know during past months.

Moreover solving Lion battery issue wasn't in the list of new year's propositions in Cupertino.

I was having this same battery issue with my brand new late 2011 edition MBP. I took many trips to local Apple sore and spent significant time on diagnosis (what ever I found in many forums like this and suggestions from Apple tech. support). My local Apple store even replaced two of my brand new machines but they never openly admitted any kind of battery issues.

After spending 1.5 months on many trips to local Apple store and trying many diagnosis, I finally returned the machine and I got my full refund.

BTW: I never got more that 4 hrs regardless what I did (browsing html pages to movie watching etc.)

thanks

Is it possible to disable the usage of a core? Like Windows, and its Bios allow.
Do we on OSX have this ability?

In windows i can set the affinity to use dual core only, but no bios to manually set core usage.
If i could do this, then i'd have dual core while traviling, quad when plugged in.

This might give us 6-7hours battery again.

As some may know, I've been working with Apple/Engineering for about 6 weeks. After about 4 days now, of "fixing" my LION MACBOOK pro according to Apples instructions, I am now getting 7-8 hours of usage (double what I was getting). I have actually seen, in full idle mode, my battery life show as much as 13hrs and 12mins!! Apple engineering helped identify at least 2 "drivers" that were running on my machine, consuming huge amounts of battery life but not showing up anywhere (that I could see). They sent me, and I ran, their capture program that gave them low level details of what my machine was doing. They gave me instructions to remove and hey presto. 5 momths of pain, fixed for me in 15 mins in the end!

I asked Apple if there was anyway I could have found these "hidden" drivers and they didn't think so, not easiliy at least. Although deleting all the startup drivers/old programs fully, would ensure it too!

Apple also acknowledged that some programs, that have not been optimized for LION, actually perform worse (Battery life) under LION. I suspect Apple will work on trying to make the OLD code calls more efficient (or at least, not worse) or put out a bulletin to *ALL* MAC developers to quickly tweak their code! We shall see.

I know some of you say you do not have any "legacy" programs running, but if you've ever inserted a USB device and loaded a driver, you may! Or some piece of garbage, maybe came down from the web, or whatever.. I just dont know. Anyway, in my case it was a driver from a USB drive *AND* a driver from a USB 3G stick! After removing both of these, I went from 4 hours to double that. And it's been like that now for 4 days. I've had this MAC from new (but migrated from my old machine).

I am currently typing this with safari, mac mail, google music, dropbox and a number of other programs and showing 4hrs:41 remaining at 55%. I can point now to at least 10 or so other programs that will still kill my battery when they are running. I suspect the developers need to be told of the legacy code problems under LION.

Franc_Iphone wrote:

 

 

I know some of you say you do not have any "legacy" programs running, but if you've ever inserted a USB device and loaded a driver, you may! Or some piece of garbage, maybe came down from the web, or whatever.. I just dont know. Anyway, in my case it was a driver from a USB drive *AND* a driver from a USB 3G stick! After removing both of these, I went from 4 hours to double that. And it's been like that now for 4 days. I've had this MAC from new (but migrated from my old machine).

 

 

Sounds weird! You should had get the same effect under SL with those drivers installed.

Not if LION has a bug that is more evident with these legacy drivers. Which is the case for the other legacy apps I've talked about and Apple agree on. It's the old code, performing worse, under LION - perhaps on specific machines but considering people are downgrading to SL and doubling their battery life, it's all starting to make some sense.

This is very interesting, and the FIRST note of hope I've heard to at least getting a workaround to this issue.

I deleted everything in my autologin list and immediately after reboot the battery meter jumped from just over 5 hours, to 8.5 hours.  Now it didn't stay there once I started browsing the web, however I had never seen a number over 8 hours show up on the battery meter before.  It's been 30-40 minutes of testing and I'm now sitting at 6:23, and that's after at least 10 reboots. Not bad for 82% remaining on the battery.

After deleting everything from the autologin, I started putting things back in one by one to test results.  After rebooting, I would wait for the battery meter to settle in before making a decision about the app.  I'm now auto starting Dropbox, and CloudApp, and that's it.  It seems to me the culprits were:

AppTrap

Witch

I also took out PGPEngine, Alfred, and Google Notifier but those didn't seem to make as much of a difference as the above.

@Rayced makes sense in that the issue should have shown up in Snow Leopard, but maybe Apple changed the way Lion interacts with these so called Legacy drivers.  I sure wish I could run everything I was running before, but at least this is a workaround for now.  Please Apple....fix this!

Franc_Iphone wrote:

 

Not if LION has a bug that is more evident with these legacy drivers. Which is the case for the other legacy apps I've talked about and Apple agree on. It's the old code, performing worse, under LION - perhaps on specific machines but considering people are downgrading to SL and doubling their battery life, it's all starting to make some sense.

I'd like to be positive but you and htmanning are talking about estimate battery timing, not real battery life.

As I've mentioned before I got a longer estimate time after each SMC reset, but it didn't turn out in a real longer battery life.

BTW if it'll really fix the issue than we should see soon an official document, at least for developers.