Q: Lion - Horrible MacBook Pro Battery Life

Hi William,

It's not just Adobe, but Apple's own applications are crashing! Motion 5, Final Cut "Pro" X, Cinema Tools... It's been a looooong time since I've seen such instability. But the very same programs are working just fine under Snow Leopard on my Mac Pro.

I'm with you on that bobhillsnotcities.... Apple is sending me a new computer, but given that this is affecting laptops of various kinds, I think it's a waste of time and nothing will change. It's a bit shocking that there is no patch yet for this, but then, it may be far more complicated than that, and Apple may be doing extensive testing before its release.

What's really strange is that Apple either purposely released Lion with this problem, or they didn't notice it—which is hard to believe. But then again, just about everything today is low quality. Profit is king, not customer satisfaction.

Forgive me, I'm ranting.

While I've never gotten more than 6.5 to 7 hours out of run time on my late 2009 MBP, resetting the SMC seems to have worked for me.

However, it was not immediate.  Following power up after SMC, it took about 5 min. for things to calculate correctly...   Now have ~3 hours on 55% battery and I have a lot of little "background tasks running all the time"...

I just ordered a macbook pro 15 yesterday. So im guessing i will be having this battery issue since its coming with lion.

+1 here. 15"MBP, about 6 weeks old. About 40% reduction in battery life after the upgrade.

I totally agree. I downgraded to SL after using Lion for a couple of weeks. I got my battery back and also the MBP is not heating up anymore.

I gotta say that I miss the gestures in Lion but battery life is more important than gestures. Lion reminds me of Windows Vista: slow, keeps crashing, programs keep freezing up. Apple should fix these probems.

Rotten Apple.

I wrote in their feedback page. I think we should all do that, we should keep reminding them that their system was full of bugs and they messed up big time. Soon, their will put a video on their website, talking about some giant leap and an important update on Lion while in fact, it is just a patch to fix this lousy battery life issue.

BTW, I was on youtube and I found this video (they are basically making fun of MabBook Air): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EaKWHvUASgk

Enjoy it, it's funny.

Apple is replacing my 17" because they say the battery must be faulty. I'll let you know if that's the case. ;-)

For me it was the fact that the GPU wasn't dynamically switching, and I was always using the NVIDIA card (15", 2010, 2.66GHz, i7, 4GB RAM). I have been using gfxCardStatus for a whle now, and was surprised to see one particular app was always there.

For me it was Growl, and to be more precise, the GrowlHelperApp. I had to quit the process for this in the Activity Monitor, after which my GPU started switching automatically, and my battery life went back to normal.

13" MBP

Processor  2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo

Memory  4 GB 1067 MHz DDR3

Graphics  NVIDIA GeForce 320M 256 MB

Battery life used to be phenomenal - 10 hours or so.  I would go the whole weekend without charging.  After Lion, maybe 3 hours.  Pandora is the only thing I use with Flash, and I can close that and it is still draining.  I burned up half of my battery this morning in an hour doing the same stuff that I usually do.  No runaway processes.  Stinks.  SMC reset doesn't help.

Same hardware as mine, same probelem.

Had been wondering if it was specific to 320M machines, but seems a broader issue than that.

Just got back from my genius bar appointment.  They gave me a new battery and everything seems to be holding up quite well.  I'm on 22% battery and currently saying I'll get 1 hour 46 minutes, which seems normal.  They didn't seem to think it was a problem with Lion, so who knows if there will be an update soon.

Yep! Apple did the same thing with the iOS 4.someting. I was having a lot of battery problems, like the battery was dying in 6 hours stby. But after 3 weeks they released an update solving this problem.. so, I guess they know. Maybe they just don't want to say it in public right now.

Anyway, I guess it's a good idea to leave a feedback on AppStore about the battery life!

Have a nice day everybody (with the Mac plugged in).

I had this thougt too several times...

mac is just becoming to popular...

it's a market-owner disseas I think

Same problem here... Late 2008 MBP 2.5Ghz. Battery life is horrible after Lion. I thought it could be SpotLight initially, but not the case. I've tried the SMC reset which I thought helped, but still drains very fast in the "Better Battery Life" mode. If I have it in Higher Perfomace mode... wow- drains real fast. I'm doing a drive image (since I have it set up the way I want), and going back to SL until this is worked out. Ugh...