Q: Lion - Horrible MacBook Pro Battery Life

It seems that things are starting to improve for those with 2011 mb(x) machines. How about older machines like 2010 i7 mbp?

neilford

Mine's a 2011 model and I see no improvement, so if there's some secret I should know other than the firmware update, please do tell. (I'm not a developer, so no ML for me, and I have to confess that I'll be far less than pleased if I have to shell out for an OS update to fix a problem my MBP came with!)

The same goes for me..

Battery life not something to be proud of...

When I try to install the EFI update, it says that the operating system is not supported. I am running lion.

I'm scared to upgrade from Snow Leopard. Should I? I really need the battery performance... a Lady at Apple Care assured me there were no issues and claimed that she had not heard about any battery issues after upgrading to Lion (they're very obedient little servants, arent they?!)

I've had no battery issues with my MacBook Pros, but if you ate concerned  and don't want iCloud, them there is no reason to update.

Pete

If you really need battery performance my only advice is: don't do it!

Look, I'm using macs since the firsts powerbooks. I don't know how many years ago.

And I have never felt so frustrated with Apple as I was with the battery performance when I switched from SL to Lion.

And there were other collection of issues as well: when returning to SL it happened that TimeMachine was not compatible, the Mail structure archive was not compatible as well. Very funny.

I've got a MacBook Pro 15" of April 2011.

Daniel

Have seen no issues whatsoever with Time Machine or Mail at all. If you look at battery and wifi issues, they do seem to narrow down to a few releases of MBPs. You don't need to update if you don't want but do remember that there will be no further support for SL and it will shortly be three OSs back, out graded by Lion and Mountain Lion. If you are concerned at the pattern problem a few are having then just wait until those reporting problems are happier in their reports.

Good Luck

Pete

As soon as I got my MBP in November and saw the problem, I told my brother not to update his past SL. Until there's a fix, I wouldn't do it. Despite what others might say, I've successfully run older OSes for years without an issue--SL and even Leopard still run just fine, so if you don't have a real need for the Lion features, I'd wait to see what happens with ML, especially since it's not supposed to be a long wait.

I agree with alto2 and have gone back to Snow Leopard on my MacBook Pro 13" 2010 model. 

You'll never beat Snow Leopard's battery life with either Lion or Mountain Lion, even with the improvements made with CPU Power Management in 10.8.  In Snow Leopard I can literally work all day without a plug, whereas in the best cases was losing 1 - 2 hours in Lion. 

In the meantime I've found alternatives to iCloud and am convinced that Snow Leopard is the ideal operating system for Core2Duo systems.  If you must have iCloud and are willing to accept a 20% reduction in battery life then wait for Mountain Lion.  The Developer Preview is quite stable and includes features such as AirPlay which were originally planned for 10.7 anyway.

I did backreading on this forum but I got lost.

So, anyway. I got a new MBP 13" inch running Lion 10.7.3 a couple of days ago, and I was surprised by how my battery life goes down so fast and how I use my laptop for 2-3 hours only. Is there a simple solution to this, or I should contact Apple right now?

Thanks.

mickey007 wrote:

 

I did backreading on this forum but I got lost.

 

So, anyway. I got a new MBP 13" inch running Lion 10.7.3 a couple of days ago, and I was surprised by how my battery life goes down so fast and how I use my laptop for 2-3 hours only. Is there a simple solution to this, or I should contact Apple right now?

 

Thanks.

Take it back to where you got it from, explain the problem and ask for a replacement. I did this with my niece's MBP 13" she got for Christmas. Her sister's battery life was excellent, her's wasn't, they replaced it immediately.

Good Luck

Pete

I'm here to ask you guys for a bit of advice.

I bought a seconhand mid 2010 Macbook Pro (2.66 Ghz i7) and Lion had already been installed by the previous owner. I had heard a few bad things about it but honestly at that point I didn't care that much as it as a new Operating System and I never though it would be like this, especially coming from Apple. As soon as I first charged it I realized the battery life was nowhere where it should be, at a maximum of 3 and a half hours of light use. And the fan noise is impossible. Right now it's silent, but it gets to the point where I only have chrome and Itunes open and it sounds like I have a truck in my room. I just put it to sleep because I can't handle it.

This was my first mac so I'm unsure if I've gotten too used to the Lion features (multi-touch trackpad is the only one I remember now, but, again, this i my first mac so I don't know if I've gotten used to something that is only available on Lion) or if it too risky to downgrade, as I will soon be outdated by two OS's with the release of Mountain Lion next June.

I'm a Graphic Designer so I use Adobe programs quite a lot (mainly Indesign, Illutrator and Photoshop) and other things like Office, Itunes, Skype, nothing much really... Battery life is important because I will be travelling quite a while and would really appreciate having the 7 hours I should be having (or at least 4 using Adobe applications). And no fan noise, for the love of god.

However one of the main things I'm afraid of is going back to Snow Leopard to realize that the problem is actually my battery and not the OS, as some people on here have had problems with the battery itself as opposed to being a Lion thing (Lion probably helped, but even so), because when I got my Macbook Lion had already been installed so I have now idea of how was its performance like with SL. Should I take the risk? If ML proves to be fine would I have to buy again Lion and then ML?

Thanks in advance.

There are many many post here on how to revert to Snow Leopard if you wish. Just do a search. As far as Mountain Lion goes, well no one will know anything for sure until the delta release version comes out. So it really is your call. A lot will swear by SL, others will swear they see no difference in battery life. I too run Adobe CS5 and if I am using all apps opened at once, I know my battery life will be shorter because of the demand I'm putting on my CPU and RAM.

Good luck

Pete

Hi, Pete, thanks for your reply. Do you think SL is better for someone using all apps at once (because I sure do that) in terms of battery life and performance? And when you say your battery life is shorter, how long does it last for? Are you on SL or Lion?

Sorry for the ridiculou amount of questions