Q: Lion - Horrible MacBook Pro Battery Life

Oh dear someone always has to have an opinion. To be honest i could not give two hoots about the planet after i spent the best part of two and a half grand on a laptop, so stick that in your green rear end and smoke it!

Note: I have lived in Brazil on and off for some time now so if you think replacing a rechargable battery is environmentally un-friendly then you should consider where all the special metal based commodties come from that make up the bulk of your daily computer high-tech life and then consider where the paper you use to write on comes from and then ask yourself why there is not much of the Amazon remaining.

Why do you have to flip out for a normal consideration?

If only after one year a battery has to be repelaced, than that's not planet friendly at all. Which means also it costs money.

I've been in living in Brazil too, when Cubatao (San Paulo) was an inferno.

PS I think you'd better watch your language, I bet if we meet in person you'd gonna be the one sticking his own head in his own redish rear.

adamfromkilgetty wrote:

 

Oh dear someone always has to have an opinion. To be honest i could not give two hoots about the planet after i spent the best part of two and a half grand on a laptop, so stick that in your green rear end and smoke it!

 

Note: I have lived in Brazil on and off for some time now so if you think replacing a rechargable battery is environmentally un-friendly then you should consider where all the special metal based commodties come from that make up the bulk of your daily computer high-tech life and then consider where the paper you use to write on comes from and then ask yourself why there is not much of the Amazon remaining.

and i would love every minute of it....:) incidently where is San Paulo?

Okay. I received an invite from Apple to check out Mac OS X 10.8 "Mountain Lion", and as it stands now, I can't see any improvments in the battery estiments in ML as of yet. I am timing the battery life indepentantly cus we all know the estimate that the OS X has isn't always the most reliable.

As for ML's new features, Notifications is nice, Messages is defently still in Beta, Reminders and Notes are nice. I like that the software updates are handled through the App Store and not separately. I didn't understand why Apple left the system split the way it was with Lion.

Right now I'm running with 4 tabs open in Google Chrome. Mail is open, AppStore is open, I have a Torrent download (via Transmission) open, Steam is downloading Portal and Portal 2, and Twitter is open.

Currently the indicator is reading 58% with 59-minutes left on life. This is my first full battery charge and discharge with ML.

Hope to have more news later next week.

Okay. Got the battery down to a complete 'empty' state of 0% with 0:00 on the time. Just plugged back into the charger (have some downloads that I don't want to drop with a dead battery).

As for the real-world time: 1 hour, 46 minutes, and 13 seconds on an early 2008 model 15" Core 2 Duo MBP.

I'll do some more tests over the next view days. ML is sitll pretty solid, and while it's still beta, I feel that if I wanted to use it as my daily machine, I could do so confidently, but we'll see how things go in the next week.

Hello all,

I have a late 2011 MBP 15" with the discrete graphics card. I have definitely noticed the weak battery life despite trying all of the tricks such as

low screen brightness,

no keyboard back light,

using integrated graphics card only (with gfxstatus),

using sleep whenever possible,

resetting SMC,

resetting PRAM,

applying all updates almost as soon as they come out,

etc.

My MBP came with Lion preinstalled, so I have never been able to compare it against SL performance.

My battery charges quickly (within 1.5 hours with minimal use starting from about ~10% charge), but drains VERY quickly (within ~2 hours or so) when running off of battery. I am not doing anything power or graphics intensive. I have not noticed any difference between the default "Dynamic Switching" of the graphics cards, or using the integrated card only. I made a few calls to Apple Support and a visit to the Genius Bar. Neither was able to help me on this issue. Officially, this is an unrecognized problem. I was told that computers with Lion preinstalled probably wouldn't work at all if I attempted to remove Lion and install SL. The Lion updates I install have had no impact as far as I can tell.

However, I did get in touch with a specialist at Apple (who, I've been told, are at a technically more proficient level than that of a typical customer service rep) who contacted me about this issue. We spoke over the phone, and he had me do a few diagnostic tests back in Nov 2011. The log files from those tests were emailed to him the same day. Unfortunately, I haven't heard from him since despite multiple attempts at reconnecting in order to check up on how things were going. In short, Apple does know about the problem at the technical side. However, I don't know if anything is actually being done about it.

I have also been invited to test out Mountain Lion last week, but have declined for now. Before being a guinea pig, I had a few questions but was not able to reach a Apple specialist to answer them.

I'm probably not contributing something that hasn't been said before, but thought I'd let everyone know of what I've learned during this journey... If anyone has any more information - technica or whatever - I'd appreciate it!

Best of luck!

<Edited by Host>

calibrating the battery:

I didn't think this would work because i thought it was only for the old powerbook batteries, but I tried calibrating it (letting it drain to 0% and then charging) and it seemed to actually help. either that or i'm becoming so use to this low battery that it only seems like the charge is better.

-although i should mention one new concerning thing i've noticed:

with my past macs i've always just directly plugged the ac adapter into the wall without any issues. with my macbook pro

i tried plugging it in directly, without the provided apple extension cord, and when i went to reach to unplug the adapter it was incredibly hot. when i use the extension cord with the adapter i don't notice this tremendous heat.

As per the docs, the integrated battery unibodies purportely come "calibrated from factory" and require no further action. Which sounds like someone in Cupertino is blowin smoke up our collective kazoos, cause each friggin battery is different from the rest, no matter how serialized the production line is, and I see no way the battery controller is able to guesstimate the remaining charge time throughout the lifetime of the battery unless it gets a chance to see the real deal every now and then.

Let the Battery Wars proceed unabated! 

I reset the smc and got 3.5 hours on my MBP c. 2008 battery.

Anybody seeing any difference with the new EFI update? Instaled it about 3 hours ago and I just switched to the battery now. I know it probably isn't the best way to judge but when I look at the battery percentage, it says 7 hours. In my opinion, that's a good sign because since installing Lion, I never ONCE saw it go up to 7 hours.

Yes, I am running Mountain Lion and battery is much better, I have gone from 3.5hrss tops to 5.5hrs.  This has stayed at 5.5hrs post efi but I now see 11hrs and 7hrs on a regular basis reported - not seen that for some time!!  Going in the right direction.

I actually managed to run the MBP for 7hrs on battery with Mountain Lion, nothing but a download running!!!

@Rayced - Cookies and browsing history deleted in Chrome but couldn't see any difference!

Latest EFI update - Significant change definitely (in my case) towards longer battery estimate time. Estimate time constantly varies but range it completely new. Laptop fully charged overnight. This morning I've been using laptop for about 25min so far and it's shows 92% of charge and estimate time variations are from 7.25 down to 6.10.

Let's hope this might be a beginning of the end of this forum

I have just upgraded the EFI, no significant changes yet, power is still 14-16 watts (or around 5h), but I will see what's gonna happen after I drain & recharge.

I'm using the early MBP 15 with lion 10.7.3

DrChandra wrote:

 

@Rayced - Cookies and browsing history deleted in Chrome but couldn't see any difference!

 

 

Then it's just affecting Safari. Try to use Safari as browser for while instead of Chrome, then clear its cache and Google's cookies. You'll see what I meant. I don't think that's the real issue, but it could be connected to it.

lesliefromstockton-on-tees wrote:

 

 

I actually managed to run the MBP for 7hrs on battery with Mountain Lion, nothing but a download running!!!

Not bad at all. If you think about it a download would involve both high network activity and high disk activity as well.