Q: Lion - Horrible MacBook Pro Battery Life

Thanks Joel. I suspect there are real issues with Lion but things are compounded ( worse ) when upgrading unless the SL is a fresh install and all updates added. I may try and erase and install and see what happens. For sure, will do a clone of existing SL before trying this.

I was the one who posted that 10.7.1 solved the problem! It's been 24 hours since my post all I can say that we are going to wait more to see again our MBPs (if) having 5-7 hours battery life.

Since I opened the lid a few minutes ago after full charge my battery time was showing 3.30, 5.45 and now 2.30 h of battery time. All in 2-3 minutes. I'm running only Google Chrome with 3 tabs. 10.7.1 does not bring the fix!

Now all my PCs have better battery life than my MPB.

@DrChandra

What happens if you do a reboot? 

hi,

So like all of you i have this battery problem on my new MBP15 i7 bought in july.

I went to the apple store (montreal) to look for help . the mac genius there told me it was the first time he heard about that problem. When i told him there was a 30 pages long post on apple forums, he told me that millions of people bought lion and didn't have that problem. so if 1000 people complains on the forums, its not a big deal.

Anyway he did an hardware check, everything was fine like i suspected. then he reinstalled lion from a clean install using one of their external HDD. He told me that might fix it because a fresh install doesnt have previous files and stuff from SL.

back home i checked after charging the battery full. the mac lasted exactly 2h40 until i got the warning popup.

And i was just browsing on chrome and listening to some music.

big fail, same as before !

Thank for sharing this info. That means I willNot try an erase and install of Lion at this time. The osx is truly buggy. Will stay with SL 10.6.8 or until Apple fixes Lion

Can I reinstall Snow Leopard without wiping out my files, pics, videos, etc?  My battery life still *****, but I don't want to lose everything I have on my hard drive. 

@FastTJR

No changes, I have feeing that it gets even funnier. Time readings are changing every 10 sec from 2.41 to 3.20 to 3.00 and all the time I am on the same page not changing anything.

I've seen this many times in the past with Microsoft and more recently with Google (Android). Apple will try to hush hush until the find a fix, typical corporate shyt. Questions is how long we are going to wait for ths to happen.

@doudoucorp

Apple store, don't waist your time. Those guys there are just to put the show for the public and to sell more and more.

I got my macbook pro with lion when i bought it and playing with photoshop for 2 hours with the graphic card running i still have 2hrs 47min left. is that normal battery life for these machines or is that still on the low side. this is my first macbook pro so i dont know whats good or not

It seems to be the basic attitude. We appear to be collateral damage.

doudoucorp wrote:

 

hi,

 

So like all of you i have this battery problem on my new MBP15 i7 bought in july.

I went to the apple store (montreal) to look for help . the mac genius there told me it was the first time he heard about that problem. When i told him there was a 30 pages long post on apple forums, he told me that millions of people bought lion and didn't have that problem. so if 1000 people complains on the forums, its not a big deal.

Anyway he did an hardware check, everything was fine like i suspected. then he reinstalled lion from a clean install using one of their external HDD. He told me that might fix it because a fresh install doesnt have previous files and stuff from SL.

back home i checked after charging the battery full. the mac lasted exactly 2h40 until i got the warning popup.

And i was just browsing on chrome and listening to some music.

 

big fail, same as before !

I'll put SL back today to see the difference. I'll post the update. (MBP, 13", i5)

I just went back to leo. After a month I got complettly crazy between the heat and the batttery issue.

how is the battery after you changed? is it back to normal ?

Not sure yet exactly on how to quantify the actual benefit, but this seems to have resulted in my battery time going from 2.5 - 3.5 hours on full charge to adding what appears to be 2-3 hours... my meter is now fluctuating between 5 to 6 hours instead at a current 94% charge...  and has been acting more like it did when I was running SL...

All I did was this:

1. SMC Reset
2. Installed http://codykrieger.com/gfxCardStatus and set GPU to Integrated
3. Installed Fan Control:  http://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/23137/fan-control (and set my Thresholds at 115 deg low, 165 deg high, and base 1500 RPM.)
4. Disabled the Time Machine Mobile Backups via the terminal:  MacBook-Pro:~ $ sudu tmutil disablelocal (Which Incedently gave me back more HD space)
5. And rebooted...

I'd like to see if anyone else has any success with this, or is it my imagination playing tricks on me?

Use it for a day or two and let us know.

I just installed SL and Applications pack. At the moment one download is in progress (updates), battery is fully charged and battery reading says: 7:24 (brightness 1/3) MBP i5core, 13"

Lion (Vista) need more polishing.

I am not sure if this cut and paste will work. If it does, take at look at the 2010 MBP battery charge (<=====) vs the 2011 MBP battery charge (<=====). Very interesting that the 2011 version's battery appears to hold less charge than the previous model. I might be mis-understanding this, but it seems like there is a problem here. Both systems are running OSX 10.7 (the new system is 10.7.1 while the older model if 10.7.2).

The new MBP shows a full charge capacity of 8,444 mAh while the older MBP shows its full charge capacity as 13,031 mAh!!  That's a big difference even using the new math.

Look deeper and the Voltage numbers look totally different as well. It is probably only a coincidence but the Voltage numbers look sort of interesting as they could be considered within the number range of the other system's Capacity. Also note how the older MBP has a charge remaining that equals the full charge while the newer MBP has only 97% of the full charge remaining.

Of course there is always the case where these numbers are totally meaningly just to look good/interesting.