Q: Lion - Horrible MacBook Pro Battery Life

Has anyone noticed that after the upgrade to Lion your Mac runs hotter when running on battery? With the same apps running, the same usage - my mac is running 10-15 degrees celsius hotter than when connected to power. Could that lead to the massively reduced battery life?

Yes and yes. Although my MBP appears to have stabilized somewhat but I still anticipate a .1 fix.

Yes, Yes, and yes... that is why all of us are anxiously waiting for the update of OS Lion to save our battery.

Some have already switched back to Snow Leopard.

Terribly right!!!

I lost my family pack Snow Leopard disc... sigh....

Now it seems like I have lost my old time machine back up due to new time machine backup with lion. URRRHHHHHHHH

Just upgraded from 4Gig mem to 8Gig.  I did this in hopes to get more battery life. (for speed as well).  Aside from the speed, I notice the battery reach 5hrs 30min on the battery indicator in the menu bar.  This is up from 4hrs.  Have not gone thru a full battery cycle yet.

As far as temperature, everything seems to be cooler.... Am running on integrated HD Graphics 3000 on battery.

But I still do not reach the 7hrs I had when I was using snow leopard.  I am still hoping that OS lion update will come soon to address the battery drain issue.

MBP 15' 2.2 8Gram early 2011

The memory upgrade helped. At 86% remaining power on the battery, the time hovers at 5hrs.

I had the same issue with the USB print and storage center. This USB print and storage center process was using 100% of the CPU nonstop. Ending the process in activity monitor solved the issue - my 2010 MBP was running incredibly hot and had about 1.5 hr battery life after installing Lion. Now it's much cooler, the fans aren't running at full rpm at all times, and the battery life has increased...

Guess it's just something that affects a few people - seems that there are many different bugs out there.

We can't upgrade RAM on Air's.

@Bob,

Is that a new MB Air?  Is it affected also?

Can't upgrade RAM?

I have an observation and a theory regarding the huge battery drain in OS Lion.

When I upgraded to 8Gig memory, I became conscious about pageout's, swap file, and inactive memory.

I noticed that after loading up my ram to try to see if I can activate paging.  But what I discovered is that even as I quit the applications like Aperture and Final Cut, the system does not make the memory available to me.  Instead, the system keeps it reserved and puts it in the inactive memory.  The result - sooner or later, swap file will be activated and paging will occur.

I was thinking, If I this is probably what is causing the drain in my MBP when I had 4Gig Ram... Poor memory handling which causes heavy swap file use and HD use.... more HD, more fan,  means more battery use.

Is this logical?

jesslorenzo wrote:

 

I noticed that after loading up my ram to try to see if I can activate paging.  But what I discovered is that even as I quit the applications like Aperture and Final Cut, the system does not make the memory available to me.  Instead, the system keeps it reserved and puts it in the inactive memory.  The result - sooner or later, swap file will be activated and paging will occur.

That's not necessarily true.

Inactive memory is just that - not completely free, but it contains contents that can be freed if needed.

So for example, the contents of your Aperture library are still in inactive memory and so should you relaunch Aperture much of it could be reloaded without having to go all the way to the disk to read disk blocks that may still be in the RAM cache in inactive memory.

This is how modern operating systems should work; truly "free" memory is "wasted" memory from the point of view that if disk I/O can be avoided, it should be as it's always the slowest part of the process of opening any application or file.

I seem to have similar battery problems as the rest of you. First after I installed Lion I noticed that my battery life was really short, so I reseted the SMC, that helped a little I think the calculation of the remaining time was more accurate, not nessecary more battery life.

However I have another problem (which my friend allso have), and that is that the recharge of the battery takes far far longer time now then before Lion. As it is now it takes longer to recharge the computer then draining the battery, and thats not right. Have read som post on the forum about people beeing unable to recharge at all so I guess I've been lucky... bu still... this is ******* anoying.

And allso I think that the battery, even when the computers is in sleep mode, drains faster now with Lion then with SL...

How many people in this thread have talked to Apple?  With your purchase of Lion you have phone support for OS X based problems, despite the age of the hardware.  I am curious what Apple is saying.

My battery life seems to have improved and my temperatures seem to have calmed down.  One thing I did was disabled istat menus controlling my fans.  I didn't realize the app did this and it had the fans running at 4000 rpm.  I have OS X managing the fans now.  Battery life remaining still fluctuates to extremes.  When reading a page in safari it may read 5.5 hours, scroll the page and it drops to 3 then goes back up after a few minutes. 

I agree. The Adobe Flash definitely have something on the battery usage. Once i turn off the browser that required the flash, the battery life seems getting better to normal. And the MBP seems getting cooler compare with when the adobe flash is running, my MBP getting very hot. With 84%, i'm having 6hrs time remain, compare to just now only remain 3:15hrs..

I have the same problem. I am plagued with the infamous Lion Black screen crash AND horrible battery life. I have a MB Pro 15 mid 2010 i7 and if anything my battery on SL was running at 6 to 7 hours on a full charge. Since installing Lion I get a full charge of a little more than 3 hrs. Even when the computer is in sleep mode for 10 mins I lose about 10 percent or more of my charge. This never happened to me with SL. I have checked the activity monitor and nothing is running. I've also rest the SMC and that has done nothing at all. Apple really needs to do something about this issue. Im pretty sure that batteries are not covered under apple care and with the way my computer has been running hot even with minimal web browsing it is going to take a toll on my battery health.