Q: Lion - Horrible MacBook Pro Battery Life

Of course it was tested, but from my small sample (friends, facebook, etc...) a lot of people are having similar issues... so something went wrong on the QA.

I just hope they are actively looking into it...

Taipan10 wrote:

 

Mine wasnt showing anything using cpu
Not over a few % anyway

Mine too. MBP 13" 2.7 i7 8GB RAM, But I still have 1 hour less.. now I'm able to run only 4 hours.

I removed local shapshot using terminal. Because I don't like backup my computer when I'm running on battery. I'm a developer (iPhone, MAC, website) and I love to work in coffee place so battery is a must.

I'm pretty sure they are looking.. If you think about for people (people who use the conputer just for go online) mac is awesome because of the battery, and for design. So apple are selling a lots of macbook because of the long battery life.

I guess they don't want to go back on this point..

I tend to see a possible cause here.

I'm personally not removing stuff because I changed to a new OS.

Removing Silverlight and Flash at itself will have a massive influence on power consumption.

By doing so you can't get a fair judgement.

If I remove Flash and Silverlight I will get a lot more juice as well, that has nothing to doe with Lion.

Can it be the case that new Lion users start out without Flash and therefore not noticing the decrease in power since it is compensated by not using stuff like Flash?

Check for runaway apps...

http://support.apple.com/kb/TS1473

As an anecdote, I've been running Lion since launch on my 2011 15" MBP without any problems. Battery life is about the same as it was under factory Snow Leopard. My wife's '09 unibody white Macbook has been running fine, as has our early '08 Al iMac.

PS: Some apps will use discrete GPU regardless of your usage. I've noticed this with the Twitter for Mac application, it will always turn on the ATI GPU. There's no way around this that I am aware of. I stopped using Flash and uninstalled it for good riddance as it was getting hung up on various sites. Adobe says they are working on final release but Lion support is in beta for now. Removing Flash altogether hasn't been a harrowing experience, something I recommend trying if you're having issues with Safari on the web.

Message was edited by: John P. (added PS: section)

A fair comment. I have done everything I possibly can to extend the batt life, and now using iBank it has dropped 10% in 20 mins. Yep. It still *****. Removing the apps isnt helping.

I agree.. I am not removing anything.

My best guess is that there is some memory leak in the code and/or the video card kicks in without really being needed.

Adobe are declaring this stuff...

Flash Player

Flash Player may cause higher CPU activity when playing a YouTube video. This issue isossibly related to disabled hardware acceleration. 

UPDATE: The final release of Mac OS X 10.7 provides the same support for Flash hardware video acceleration as Mac OS X Snow Leopard (10.6).  The previous known Issue suggesting that video hardware acceleration was disabled in Lion was incorrect and based on tests with a pre-release version of Mac OS 10.7 that related to only one particular Mac GPU configuration.  Adobe continues to work closely with Apple to provide Flash Player users with a high quality experience on Mac computers.

For what it is worth, I disabled the local backup - that was a pain because I lost much of the security I had in the backup. Time Machine and Spotlight seem for me to be the main (but not only) problems. The Time Machine backups appear to use more cpu than they should but that is a mute point. The bigest problem is after each backup Spotlight decides to "index" it. Yes, it now accesses the Time Machine disc and starts the labourious process of indexing.

The local backups took even more time and resource and again Spotlight had to index what it could. Removing the local backups made a big difference.

These backups and indexing takes place hourly by default. In my case the process is complete within 20 to 25 minutes but that is only 35 to 40 before the next one. This indicates a bit of a design problem but not the end of the world. The entensity of the processing is the major concern. When the hot (to the touch) computer with very noisy fans blowing like a hurricane interfers with you doing your work, something is very wrong. If I was planning to update all of my audio files and render a feature film I could understand. But when you are editing a simple text file it becomes a serious problem.

Apple, turn off indexing when running on batteries. In a trade off between finding a newly added file (where do they come from anyway) and being able to use your computer in a remote location -- using the computer in the remote location wins every time!

In a poll at the German MacUser discussion board, 99 votes showed this result regarding the battery life after switching to Lion:

Has clearly reduced: 50%

Has clearly improved: 11%

No significant change: 39%

In sync with what you read at fora.

Rather interesting that the results are so diverse..

I just got a new Macbook Pro in May. Should I not upgrade my computer to lion?

That is a very personal dessision only you can make.

My personal advise would be to go through the forums and see what possible issues you might expect. You can always try Lion but be sure that you have an absolute perfect backup from Snow Leopard before you try Lion. And if you do tend to upgrade, please do a Battery-check before and after ;-)

I'm sure that the problem is not with Adobe Flash.

The battery life of my MBP 13" 2010 goes down with out using Chrome or Safari or some Adobe product.

I hope Apple works on that. I liked Lion, the only problem i see on it was the poor battery performance.

If they don't fix that. I guess i will continue using Snow Leopard until the next Mac OS.

I also have a MBP from mid 2011 ... I upgraded to Lion and regret it... (battery plus heating issues) If I were you, I would wait for them to fix the issues and then upgrade.... You are not missing out on anything by not upgrading now.

I would roll back if I found an easy way to do it....