Q: Lion - Horrible MacBook Pro Battery Life

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 checked with the Apple Store Customer Support and you can only get a refund for Lion if you apply for one within 90 days of purchase.  After that you get three free movie rentals.  Lion's value = $9 to 12?

Did anyone had improvements after this "MacBook Pro (13-inch, Mid 2010) EFI Firmware Update 2.5" (http://support.apple.com/kb/DL1478)?

The documentation says it's only to activate Lion internet recovery, but who knows...

Nope. No improvements noticed here.

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.

yup did this and tried a full recovery direct from Apple, still poor battery life.

No progress as far as i can see since the Lion was released.  MBP now performs just like my PC running Window7, infact, the PC turns in 3.5, well done HP and Bill!!!

NOt suresssenator that the installation makes a difference. People who did clean install, after HD reformat have reported the problem and people who installed as Apple instructs - over , to replace their SL

The problem is resported by both types.

As we have read here , the problem may be hidden, embedded legacy files that we have on our Macs from previous software or OS.

Even Clean install- HD reformat folks  will then restore their "stuff" from a back up and , voila, they, too experience poor battery life

My  question- Do we know what the battery life is on a NEW MBP, fresh out of the box before the owner, user installs  or migrates anything?

If a fresh unadulterated (so to speak) MBP has a good battery life, that would help prove the thought that older hidden stuff we introduce into Lion is the root of the problem.

What older stuff? That becomes the next scavenger hunt.

So I did a clean install of snow leopard And then used the Lion installer. Battery life was at 3:20 on a full charge. Shutdown my computer, & came home from school. I turned on my MBP & unplugged it to check one last time before I reverted back to SL. No dice. Disapointed I clicked on my name/username on the top right corner to go into the "Users & Groups Preferences" pane on my Macbook Pro (mid 2010 model). By accident, I clicked on "Login Window..." so I typed my password to log in. When I loged back in...after a few minutes on battery, I noticed the meter read that i had 8:40 remaining! which leads me to conclude that:

I FOUND A FIX! At least for me anyway, but I would love it if you guys could confirm it.

Here are the steps I took. The stuff in bold are the steps I absolutely know for certain gave me that outcome. the stuff not in bold is the stuff I did a bit before and i'm not certain if it had anything to do with it.

A. Erased partition/entire drive with journaled extended

B. Instal Snow Leopard & run updates to 10.6.8 w/o making any changes to preferences or user groups

C. Download Mac OS X Lion installer from appstore & install

D. Turn off your MBP.

(I'm not sure if Steps A, B, C, D are necessary, but don't care b/c I got my awesome battery life back!)

1. Turn on your MBP. Let it boot to your desktop.

2. On the menu bar at the top right corner of the desktop, click on your name/username that you set up.

3. Then click on "Login Window..."

4. You should get an animation of the desktop flipping over like a box to the login screen and then the prompt to sign in.

5. Sign in!

Thats It! I guess something with the animation or the prompt to log in after having booted into your desktop had something to do with it.

Give the battery meter a minute or so to recalculate how much battery time you have, and you should be good to go.

Your welcome!

For doubters, here are some screen captures. Unfortuneatly I don't have any "before" pictures, just after:

http://yfrog.com/z/hsvdfrnp

http://yfrog.com/z/esxx4wp

Additional Info: you might have to do this everytime you boot/wake. Not sure, havn't tested that yet and its late & i'm dead tired. I know its not the most elegant fix outhere, but it sure was effective enough for me to be worth typing this up to you guys at 1am ish

Thats It! I guess something with the animation or the prompt to log in after having booted into your desktop had something to do with it.

It sounds like you changed Accounts (e.g., Users) when you logged in.  You're not using the same account (folders and files) as you did when you were logged in via Snow Leopard.  But Lion offers few panaceas.  Check back and report your battery life when the machine is on and gassed up in preparation for a day of hard work and possible loss.  Others have reported high (normal) battery recharge times, then a rapid dropoff when their onboard smart-appliances sense that there's no one futzing with the system.  Let us know how it goes.  I'm not optimistic this time as I was the last, but at least you're generating stand-your-ground encouragement to stick around.

This is interesting...but not a fix.  I can confirm that I do get higher estimate numbers on the battery meter after doing this, but they quickly fade once I start using the computer.  It's similar to the SMC reset but not quite as good.  I have no idea why this works but again, I do get higher numbers.  I don't actually get more battery time though.

Barbara, what do you think I mean, when I write "untouched"?

I'm under the impression that many a user here has tried whether it's possible at all and didn't migrate anything after a wipe, followed by a clean install.

@htmanning Hmm...I was just running Chrome, wifi, and watching the latest episode of House in VLC Player on my MBP and the time did drop to about 5:10 and battery was dropping at a rate of 1% per 3 minutes which was what I got while running snow leopard. Yes I was timing with my iPhones stopwatch. Right now i'm typing this in Chrome while playing iTunes. Meter is at around 7:30.

@Bob Jacobson No, I didn't switch accounts when I logged in. I'm a CompSci major at sfsu with a decent amount of experience in tech support. had I switched accounts, I would have mentioned it. Also note that in the second picture I posted, i was running activity monitor, which does use up some CPU averaing at 2%(sampling every five seconds) for me and my battery was still holding up

Message was edited by: sssenator

sssenator wrote:

 

 

 

I FOUND A FIX! At least for me anyway, but I would love it if you guys could confirm it.

 

 

You should read this thread carefully. You haven't found any solution, but just a cosmetic trick to let the battery meter report something that will never match reality.

Please post your real battery usage.

lesliefromstockton-on-tees wrote:

 

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.

yup did this and tried a full recovery direct from Apple, still poor battery life.

Three clean installs & SSD here. During the last install, I didn't install anything but Apple's native apps for a week. Even then, I got 4 real life hours.

what model of mbp you have?

and water battery health?

13" mid 2010/ 2.4 GHz. Battery at 296 loadcycles & 87% of its design capacity. I usally don't use external HDs when unplugged and have flash plug ins desactivated by default...