Q: Lion - Horrible MacBook Pro Battery Life
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Mar 18, 2012 7:42 PMby Courcoul,I guess I'll add my tale to this thread. Used to have a Feb'08 MBP running Leopard but logic board died suddenly and was forced to buy an Oct'11 MBP. Naturally, it came with Lion preinstalled, so I never had a before and after and never ran the snowy cat in a production environment. So I start getting used to Lion's new quirks and eccentricities, having migrated all my stuff using Setup Assistant. Haven't stress-tested to the bitter end to see how long it will last, but have been able to go for up to 6 hours, with 35% charge still remaining.
The interesting point in my Mac's story is how the battery has behaved and how it seems to be degrading. This is the maximum charge capacity, as reported by Coconut Battery:
date capacity 12/17/11 7018 1/18/12 7160 2/7/12 7148 2/8/12 7135 2/9/12 7132 2/10/12 7145 2/11/12 7156 2/12/12 7157 2/13/12 7156 2/14/12 7157 2/15/12 7162 2/17/12 7121 2/19/12 7160 2/21/12 7165 2/23/12 7161 2/28/12 7173 3/1/12 7021 3/7/12 6974 3/7/12 6967 3/10/12 6960 3/12/12 6971 3/13/12 6962 3/14/12 6964 3/15/12 6918 3/17/12 6941 3/18/12 6941 At first, I didn't save the report very often cause I figured it was a new computer. Then I started seeing all the threads of woe and desperation on low battery performance. Interesting how the max capacity peaked about 2 months after I received it, and is now firmly going down.
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Mar 27, 2012 5:57 AMby g8production,I have a MacBook5,1 with FileVault2 actived and i have 2 batteries. The first battery is a "service battery" for Lion, not for SnowLeopard. It works only for 2h; the second (new) battery is a "good battery" for Lion but it works only for 2h and 30m.
I have reinstalled Lion, cleared deamon, resetted the SMC, resetted the PRAM... but the battery life is the same.
One more thing, the charge is lost also when the MacBook is in stop! 10% after few hours of stop!
Please release a fix!
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Mar 27, 2012 6:01 AMby petermac87,g8production wrote:
Please release a fix!
Please tell Apple. We are users like you. No good yelling at us. Go here
http://www.apple.com/feedback/macosx.html
Pete
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Mar 31, 2012 2:22 AMby TobiasKruse,I just want to enlist myself in the myriad of users who seem to have this problem.
Just a couple of weeks ago I updated from SL to Lion 10.7.3, battery life of my MacBookPro Mid 2010 15" plummeted to about half of its previsous value.
I am getting paticularly worried since my MBP had the Nvidia switching problem and the Logic Board was exchanged (luckily after apple enlisted this error in the official list for warranty approval between 12 months and 24 months). So from my point of view this is the second pretty big issue with this MBP and I am not very happy about it, to put it mildly... Too bad that recognition and fixing of this issue takes so long.
Fingers crossed that the issue gets fixed...
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Mar 31, 2012 6:21 PMby paulachris,All of this sounds familiar to me -- and I am running a 2010 Macbook Pro 15" but have done no upgrades to my system -- yet. I have been following the disucssion for a while to see if I want to upgrade ---
About 3 months ago my Mac began running hot -- very hot - battery life is half of what it used to be. I have contacted Apple support twice -- both times I have gotten no resolution. I looked back at general apple updates that I received and I had two in a row that came down about a month before I noticed all of this starting. Could this heating problem be something other then or in addition to Lion?
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Mar 31, 2012 7:40 PMby alto2,Here's a question I don't think I've seen addressed here: how much fluctuation in battery time remaining is normal? I ask because mine really shifts wildly. I reset the PRAM this afternoon just for kicks and just now unplugged the MBP. I went from 6:29 to 4:04 in less than 3 minutes, with a smaller flucuation (20 minutes and back up) before then. And now it says 6:38. In previous experiments, I've had it go from 4 to 3 to 3.5 and then down to 2:45 in the space of a few minutes as well.
I don't recall anything so wild with my iBook, which was my only other Apple laptop. As a result, I just don't trust this battery to last for anything like a reasonable amount of time because I never feel like I get a good read on it. Is this sort of thing at all typical, especially with Lion, or have I been correct in assuming that it's characteristic of the problem?
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Apr 1, 2012 6:56 AMby jasoninboston,Same issue as everyone else. Can't read all 163 pages. Has anyone found a solution that actually worked? What do the Apple "experts" at the Genius Bar say when you bring your Mac in? Are they aware of the issue. Do they offer a solution?
I'm wondering of iCloud has anything to do with it. All I know is I'm down to maybe 3-4 hours. Sometimes less.
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Apr 1, 2012 7:12 AMby tjastro,I have exacty the same issue with my MacBookAir after I upgraded from SL to Lion. Tried to re-condition my battery a few times. had aslight improvement but the battery life is down significantly. And it acts erratically, which I expect it to do to some exent depending on CPU usage but not this much.
Annoying. I need my battery life back!!!
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Apr 6, 2012 3:56 AMby Tenux,http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/battery-health/id490192174?mt=12
install this app and go to tips, it shows you how to calibrate your battery i tried it it works for me
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Apr 6, 2012 12:16 PMby Courcoul,Tenux wrote:
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/battery-health/id490192174?mt=12
install this app and go to tips, it shows you how to calibrate your battery i tried it it works for me
Oh, cute! Coconut Battery on steroids!!
Free, I like...
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Apr 9, 2012 8:29 PMby NYC apple,I have had this problem for some time. Stumbled on another thread today which spoke about activity monitor. I have finder at over 100% sometimes as well as mdworker. I am not doing anything special, have all finder windows closed, etc... Force quitting finder and letting it restart seems to help battery life as it brings the finder CPU usage down to 1 or 2 % right away. And I get two hours of added battery time all of a sudden. Very annoying but helpful.
