Q: Lion - Horrible MacBook Pro Battery Life

Oops... the colums are labeled backwords... sorry!! Left is MBP 2011 while the right is MBP 2010.

@doudoucorp

SL installed and life is back to normal. I've been installing various appz for the past couple of hours, brightness is over 50% and my battery reading is 3.43 right now. Mac is quiet, no fan sound, case is cold.

It's my fault for being a tester-volutier, *****

From all these its clear that there is something wrong with Lion. My opinion is to stay with SL untill apple adresses this issue. Less battery life means more power consumption, leads to

1. Reduced battery life for sure (as all batteries are having only finite number of charge cycles)

2. The extra amount of energy drawn from the battery has to be dissipated in some form or the other, it can be heat from the CPU, or from GPU. Or it can be the higher speed of the fan. Or it can be the wifi card that is consuming this extra juice. Whatever it is, again its gonna shorter the life of that component. I am not telling that all macbook loaded with lion will die soon, but for sure you are stressing your machine more compared to the same task you do with SL. Why to reduce the life of hardware just for the sake to use latest software ?

I am not an expert in electronics, but just my thought...

Just to add my voice to the chorus . . . Macbook Air late 2010 . . . I did peek at Activity Monitor and shut down a couple of things (iTunes Helper which was a Login item on my account) and sync services agent . . . and I did see a bump up in battery life briefly, but I don't think these were the only culprits.

Happily I only upgraded one Mac and will stick with Sl on the others until this is fixed.

Other than that, Lion is pretty good . . .

Well well well . . .

I was trawling through this thread and then discovered that there is actually a 10.7.1 update (I had missed that) so I went ahead and installed it.

There is no reference to battery life in the 'show details' but when I re-booted, my battery life looks as though it may have returned to normal . . .

Hmmm . . . . let's hope this is it . . .

In regards to the 10.7.1 update, its another disappointment as the battery life on my 2011 MBP 13" still remained at a sad 4hrs in comparison to the 7hrs+ i used to get on Snow Leopard.

One of the reasons i initially bought a MBP was for its great battery life but it seems that apple has got us all in a big trap with Lion. Im not impressed Apple...

so i installed SL back on my MBP. the battery like has not improved much. I am using it at 30% brigtness, very lights use (mails, browsing, couple of youtube videos). Battery life close to 4.5 - 5 hours, earlier it used to be around 7hrs+. Any solution to this?I hope the battery is not damaged , how do i check that?

@guru_pinu

I did the same thing and it was strange in the beginning but later on everything was OK. Now when I'm back on SL battery life looks endless.

your battery info is in System Profiler (SL) under "power".

You should wait a few days (and a few restarts) before taking conlusions about the battery after the downgrade to SL. The battery's life/capacity is measured in cycles, the condition in "condition".

IMO it is impossible that the battery is damaged by the OS.

Am on my 3rd day of FRESH LION INSTALL + 10.7.1.  Battery life hovers close to Snow Leopard. Macbook is cool and no memory leaks... peace at last.

When u say fresh install - explain. Did you "erase and install" or reinstall from recovery partition?

It's been 2 days alreay, discharde fully, twice. Worst part is i'm using it a lot and still it's less than 5...

DrCHandra: What all applications you run and @what brightness and what is the battery life you get I'm sick of this now. Very light load and i have to charge the battery twice in a day..this is bad!!

@Philip: I reformatted my HD and installed Lion.  I did not upgrade from Snow Leopard. I also disregarded my time machine restoration.

With regards to my previous post...  It was my imagination playing tricks on me...

Disabling Tim Machine Mobile Backups, using gfxCardStatus and Fan Control did not solve the issue after all...

Consitently only getting 4 hours...

I am curious however...  is anyone using the iStat Pro Widget?

I would be interested to find out what Lion users are experiencing vs Snow Leopard users in the following areas, during basic usage:

Fan RPM speeds

CPU Temperatures

GPU Temperatures