Q: Lion - Horrible MacBook Pro Battery Life

Hey Magicchik,

A few months ago I had this discussion with another board member...  It seems that with newer, namely 2011 MBPs with the 2.x (sorry I forget the specifics) EFI, you cannot downgrade to SL.  I was fortunate enough (at least for testing) that my older 2010 MBP had the older 1.x EFI and could make a downgrade to SL.

I know it's not the answer you're looking for but it might save you getting more frustrated trying to accomplish something that isn't possible with your MBP.

Hope that helps?

SO whats the status of this issue?

Have we made any progress with a solution to net more battery? A beta hotfix?

@MittWaffen If there is one it seems pretty clear that only a small few here have access.

I guess we have to wait patiently for a defined but unknown period of time  until Apple releases 10.7.3??

I follow some forums and when build versions have been released I have scoured the focus requests from Apple but have never seen mention of our issue defined here. - So at this point I am not putting all hope on this resolving our issue, but it's the best bet I have. 

I don't have access to the Betas or the developer site.  Besides, if I did, I only have one machine and it's my productive system, I woun't be prepared to throw beta versions of a patch at it anyway.  My guess is that you can probably lay your hands on them through some nefarious sources or go the legit route and throw down some $ for dev. account?

Just be sure to let us know how you get on if you go that route.

Finally, anyone care to comment on those erronious drivers being suggested as a cause a few pages back in this thread?  I haven't seen anyone come back and shed light on what they are or how to identify and remove them.

Seeing that you have a SnowLeopard startup disk - did the computer come with it originally?  Early 2011 maybe?

I found myself in the same situation and can't start up into a lower SL10.6.0 version (external or disk, although it came with my MBP), but I can start up into SL 10.6.8.

If you could manage to install SL onto an external drive (from a different computer maybe) then update it to 10.6.8 and then clone it over to your partition, I can't see why this should not work in such a case.

Do a search at the forum.  I'm sure you'll find what you need.

I feel sorry for Mulligans seeing as how he must have nothing better going on in life than to harp on people who are just trying to help each other. Who cares if the fix is coming soon or not, we can hope cant we? Bitter party of one your table is ready now go away and leave us alone.

Thanks have a nice day loser.

No, great life here thanks mate. Wonder what your point is. Apparently many here are VERY concerned about when the next update arrives. What it fixes, no one knows. I have nothing to fix but apparently you do. Thus a speculation of release is of no help to anyone. Similar to all your input (or lack of) within these threads. Nice try - no cigar.

Cheerio

Just wanted to share that I went to the iTunes support website and emailed them about my issues and I received a full refund for my Lion purchase. I know it doesn't fix anything yet,but at least you can get your money back if you haven't already done so.

I just upgraded to Lion for the sole purpose to be able to use iCloud to automatically dnload my photos from my iphone. because it takes FOREVER through iphoto.  Just to find that now my battery life is trashed.  Down from 10 hrs to 1% a minute.  Not only this but also found out that purchasing Lion wasnt enough, apparently I ALSO need to purchase an iphoto upgrade.  Waste of time and money.  I am going to try to restore to snow leopard from my time capsule, we'll see if it works or not.   Not happy.

Don't pin your hopes on the 'update'.  I'm running Mac OS X Lion 10.7.3 (11D42), the latest release on a MBP 13" late 2011 and I still get about 3hrs tops!

I can't remember if this has been mentioned here....but as soon as I connect to my NAS (which is connected to my router) my estimated battery time remaining drops a bunch.  If I eject the drive the battery time goes up. 

I've tried just about every suggestion in this thread including removing autologin items, and running gfxCardStatus, and none of it has helped.  Still waiting and VERY disappointed.

i dont think that apple works on a fix for this problem. but im very angry that a upgrade Lion/SL is a really downgrade, yesterday the battery has 2 Hours only surfing, nothing else. Battery life is at 97% !

Just out of curiosity, how many of you that are experiencing bad batterylife issues on your MBP did a clean installatoin of Lion? By that I mean, deleted your SL install, reformated your partition, and then installed Lion via a homemade DVD or USB installer from the original contents of the Lion Installer? I did and I think that's what might be the problem.

All of my colleagues at school that upgraded their MBP's to Lion (& have no problems) did so via the Installer they downloaded via the appstore. Makes me think that Lion still needs certain files that Snow Leopard has in order to run properly(atleast, thats my theory). I just wiped Lion off of my macbook pro & put back SL. Doing updates to 10.6.8 as we speak before I download & run the Lion installer via AppStore. Will keep you posted.

sssenator, I suspect that most people installed Lion using the Apple Store installer or it came installed on a new Mac.  Many, like me, installed over an existing installation of Snow Leopard (and many have had battery and/or overheating problems).  These have been the easiest ways to acquire Lion.  I don't know anyone personally who installed from a DVD, perhaps because millions of users bought Lion right away and there were no hard-media installers available for Lion for at least three months after the product was introduced.  Without getting into the code, it's impossible to know what Snow Leopard files, if any, Apple included with Lion on new Macs.  Probably none that weren't already imbedded in Lion.

I have my internal SL to Lion partition with all my "crap" installed and another partition with a clean (untouched) Lion installation (also internal) and can't find much difference in battery usage (when only using Mail, Safari, Activity Monitor and Console for testing purposes).

I can stretch it to 5.5 hrs if I only open a couple fo tabs, (edit) or and not stuff like real time share quotes in Safari, but as soon as I do some serious work with other apps it drops to 2 - 2.5 hrs.

same thing on mbp 13" late 2011