Q: Lion - Horrible MacBook Pro Battery Life

With regard to doing a fresh install of Lion...  While I am not disputing nor doubting that this worked for you, especially after a 3 day trial, I am somewhat perplexed as I have read numreous accounts from people who have purchased new Macbooks pre-loaded with Lion who are experiencing poor battery performance...?

How can this be?

@Bazmanian:  Yes. I agree with you and I am wondering about that as well. I am thankful that my mac has settled down yet I am left uneasy because I am still not sure about the cause of the problem to start with.  I am just hoping no new bugs come up.

For anyone's info and if it might help, this is what I did.

1. Reformatted my internal drive

2. Installed a fresh Lion from a thumb drive Lion boot

3. Updated 10.7.1

4. fixed system permissions

5. re-conditioned the battery once.

     btw: even without reconditioning, my mbp battery was already showing extended battery life... up to 5hrs.

6. re-installed my apps, adobe flash included

7. turn off resume function

     This can be found in the prefs, under general: unchecked (restore windows when quitting...)

Good luck to everyone

I was shipped a new MPB as I have mentioned before with Lion. Under 3 hours battery. So I bought a new MBP with SL and my battery life is around 9 hours.

That said, battery life is around 5 hours on the older Lion after reinstaling ,but it's still no where near Sl.

So are you getting 5 hours now or more like 7-8 as with SL?

I have been on battery now for 2.5 hours, running Parallels VM's located on a Time Capsule... so, in other words heavy use...  I am now showing 1:21 min. remaining...

Maybe things are leveling out on their own...  and as maryplacestudio stated maybe 5 hours is just the best we can hope for from Lion as compared to the 7-8 in SL.

I hope there is a fix but maybe it's not broken, maybe it is just Lion and 5 hours is the norm...  I fear that based on what I am seeing now, Apple may not consider it as something that needs fixing....

I would still be interested in someone telling me what is a normal expectation for fan speed and CPU and GPU temps... for both Lion and SL...

Thanks...

8-9 with SL

5 with Lion.

Just checking email, Safari browsing... There's no question that Lion his been messing with fans and batt life.

@Bazmanian: 5hrs before the reconditioning... between 5:30 to 6hrs... peaking at 7 to 8hrs after re-conditioning and SMC reset.

cocnut battery util indicates that I had a 3% degradation in battery.  I plan to recondintion after a few cycles. I hope to improve on the battery life as I continue to use this in the next few days.

let me add... I also installed SMCFan Control

I am unfamiliar with battery reconditioning...  can you please elaborate as to how this is done?

I'm sorry.  Reconditioning; I mean Battery calibration....

http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1490

Any official news/response from Apple? Apart from clerks tips?

Big Improvement: Resetting power management per other posts on lion battery life (power off, disconnect from power cord, hold down shift-control-option with one hand and hold down power button with other hand, hold at least 10 seconds, reboot afterwards). Fans running a lot less, much quieter while working, hope will help battery life, but at least I can work without fans running constantly.

Checking activity monitor showed that VMware Fusion uses a lot of cpu capacity while booting up windows 7, and while loading apps, but goes down afterwards. Look forward to next upgrades for Lion and VMware.

Mac Book Pro late 2009, intel Core 2 Duo 2.53 GHz, 8 GB RAM 1067 MHz DDR3.

We've got two MPB's of two different generations and both of them seem to suffer from this. It looks like the Flash plugin is causing this... if I close all browsers the situation quickly returns to normal. Even changing to another tab in a browser (one where no flash is used) caused CPU load to decrease quite a lot. This has not been as much of a problem in SL.

Here what they say about it:
http://blogs.adobe.com/flashplayer/2011/07/correction-regarding-hardware-acceler ation-of-flash-player-on-mac-os-x-lion.html

Yes, the official statement is not the interesting part here. I don't know who's fault it is (and I don't care) but denying Lion users the use of Flash is not ok by any standard.

I too am experiencing the overheating issue with Flash in all browsers...

Temps soar to from 120 F to 170 F and Fans from 2500 RPM to 6500 RPM.

Interestingly however:

1. This only happens when I first hit the Flash video; after playing flash video for about a min. or so, the system normalizes and temps come down and fans quiet.
2. Using the Discrete GPU helps a little reducing stress by about 10-15% I'd guess, but not a dramatic affect.
3. This is only happening on my Macbook Pro...  the iMac seems unaffected and temps there remain at 130 F with fans crusing at ~1000 RPM...

Lastly, the Time Machine Buddy Dashboard widget has the same affect on my Macbook as Flash...  Things soar for a min.  then normalize...  or it may be time machine and the time capsule as I had to abort a backup last night as well due to it seemed like my Macbook was going to melt during the backup process...

I;m still investigating that one...

Needless to say, none of this is not going to aid in the Battery drain issue.

I am interested to know if jesslorenzo, are you experiencing these Flash issues after the Fresh install of Lion, as I am preparing to do this as well to my Macbook this week to see the affect...