Q: Lion - Horrible MacBook Pro Battery Life

HTmanning, HTmanning, HTmanning. The estimated battery life is VERY relevant. I don't know where you've been living for the past 3 years but one thing I give Apple credit for is that the stated battery life / meter and the rate in which it goes down is actually quite accurate. I do agree with you, that in the wrong hands or not understood, this number can me irrelevant but I give most people credit for knowing how batteries work. After all battery saving tech has been on phones for years and people are used to understanding it more.

Everyone knows, if you do roughly the same things on the computer over say a 10 or 15 minute period and intend to do approximately the same things for the rest of the stated battery life then actually it's an awesome reflection of what to expect. Years ago, you would have been right but today, even the PC vendors / battery technology has caught up. It's the same with my mobile phone. It's close enough for me to have been relying on it for work

I actually fell for the trap early on in these LION problems because for 3 years as a MAC user I came to rely on the battery indicator in my traveling working life. Then, believing that perhaps you guys know better, actually would sit and work for sometimes literrally the actual hours the battery life would last (as it said it would hours before). So, as I said, give Apple and the battery technology and people some credit, used properly, it's a GOOD number. Of course, recaliberating a battery can effect battery life expectancy per charge, but it's consistent once done so.

Another thing you can do is take a look at CoconutBattery's indication of "Battery Power Usage" (the last item on its window). [You can download CoconutBattery for free at this official website: http://www.coconut-flavour.com/]

My experience is that batteries under Lion go away quickly because, somehow, this power usage is unusually high (this has been discussed in this thread before, somewhere around here). The point is: it should be at around 9 Watts while performing basic functions (that's a guess, an educated one). Mine, for instance, never goes under about 15Watts and it gets north of 25W depending on, say, just how many tabs are open on my browser (on 'good days' I get at most 4h battery life on my 15" MacBook Pro, with no keyboard light and brightness below half, and oh, it even has an SSD).

This is an important measurement because it has nothing to do with CPU usage (or it has little to do in these cases), sometimes my Mac reports 0% CPU usage and 'Battery Power Usage' fluctuates considerably.

Please keep reporting on how it behaves under the new release.

And thanks *a lot* for doing that (taking the plunge and coming back to tell the story!).

Franc_Iphone - The meter number is irrelevant as it relates to poor battery time with Lion. I've read so many messages in this thread from people who say their meter went up after a reset of some kind, logout, removal of auto login items, etc.  My meter has gone up too, but what hasn't gone up is the time I can leave my mac on battery. I have two brand spanking new macs, clean install, nothing in the auto login, half brightness, and I use 1 Safari session to browse and can't get beyond 4 hours.  Apple advertises 7 hours.  The number on the meter is irrelevant in knowing whether or not this issue is solved.  The only thing that matters is actual usage time.

winter_bob wrote:

 

Another thing you can do is take a look at CoconutBattery's indication of "Battery Power Usage"

Look at my first post on previous page (144):

     "P.S. battery power usage 8.4-9.5 Watt, before update it was never lower than 11!"

HTManning. Fair point, I would say, after 2 or 3 reboots, the SMC resets are all cleared and it seems to settle back so I do that (Which is very quick on my SSD for me).

Sorry, I missed the "PS".

Brilliant!

Now that sounds encouraging.

Thanks again.

winter_bob wrote:

 

Sorry, I missed the "PS".

 

Brilliant!

Now that sounds encouraging.

 

Thanks again.

You are welcome) Try to update, anyway it is better than 10.7.2

2 hours of surfing Safari and Mail and still have 6:30 estimate time (73%). Battery power usage from 7.8 to 11. So it looks much better than before.

Some light in the tunnel .  I have installed the patch  10.7.3 and  the battery life looks encouraging  5-6 hours with watching video VLC , browsing , downloading  and max brightness . The only thing i did is install the patch 10.7.3  and reboot - nothing else . As i write still have 1.31 hours left  ( interestingly - battery meter is showing red even  i still have 20% left  but that's by the by)

Will watch it for few days but in general my 5p advise is  to install the patch .

I installed the update, and got an error! After that, Lion did not restart! It only stuck to that grey screen, and I had to recover from Time Machine!

I cant recommend this update, before Apple solves the problem. And I´m not the only one having this problem!

Just installed the update about an hour ago. I used the combo update downloaded directly from Apple's site. Update installed without a hitch on my 2010 MBP. I ran repair disk permissions right after that. Can't say I notice anything different right now (positively or negatively).

Its almost fully charged however, so I am about to take it off power and work straight off of the battery for the rest of the day.  Just to clarifly, I have been seeing the same battery shortage like *almost* everyone else here. Ill report back in a few hours if the update has made any changes. I am skeptical.

This is my observation: I installed the new update yesterday.  I haven't noticed any improvements, actually, while watching a youtube video using my firefox browser, the fan was loud and the computer got very hot.  It seems that I can fry eggs on my new MBP.  (Previosuly I had a beta version, and I think it was better).

I have been working from 100% battery down until 90% battery. Running Chrome (no videos or flash) and mail with wifi. Screen only at 3 steps of brightness. 

10% of battery has equated to 37 minutes of working.

Not sure if we can extrapulate this, but if we did, I should theoretically get 370 minutes of work, which is 6.16 hours. 

Cocunut battery says I am using 10.0 watts and that my battery is at 93% of original capacity after 20 months of usage.

Ill continue to post back if this is useful to anyone on the fence about upgrading to 10.7.3

The University I work for just put out a warning NOT to apply the new 10.7.3 update without a full time machine backup because it is full of glitches, missing icons, and - worst of all - boot errors which are effectively turning people's laptops into carefully machined aluminum doorstops.

Don't upgrade without without a full backup. Just to twist the knife: I never had windows ME or Vista effectively brick a computer.

Cheers.

Also, the note about SMC reset stands: it is a placebo for those of us fretting about battery life and will return to its former state as many of us have discovered.

Now Im down to 80% and it has been 70 minutes.

Carrying this out should give me 350 minutes. 5.83 hours or 20 minutes less than my previous estimate at 90%

FWIW My computer estimate fluctuates between less than 5 hours and over 6 hours remaining. Not sure I trust that though.

70% and not quite 110 minutes. I am on pace for an approximately 6hr battery life. Screen brightness is rather low, but overall I am pretty pleased. Its an hour lower than Apple advertising but my battery is 20 months old.

I should note that I have been using gfxcardstatus to force intel GPU only. I have it on the power source based setting.

Hope Apple still releases a better fix, but I have to say that 10.7.3 (if it installs correctly) does seem to be better for my 2010 MBP 15" than 10.7.2.

FWIW, I still wish I was on SL, but iCloud was too tempting at the time.