Q: Lion - Horrible MacBook Pro Battery Life

I installed Lion by end of July, used it a fortnight and decided to go back to SL 10.6.8. Have a 15' MacBookPro Late 2010, i5, 4GB RAM. Battery was horrible, about three hours. High temperatures, fans rotating nearly all the time.

After carefully reading this an other threads, I came to a conclusion: After an upgrade, there must be remainders of the old system causing trouble by forcing processes which keep the cpu under full load.

I found the culprits within the root and the user libraries: Check the folders "launch agents" and "launch daemons" for old stuff. In my case, I found lots! They all seem to trigger processes...

Within this thread and others many people complained about the citrix processes and other things alike giving trouble. Those processes are triggered by this daemons apparently.

e.g. there was an old launch daemon for VMware Fusion (which in my version was NOT compatible with Lion). I made two backups (one clone copy, one with time machine), put all those culprits to trash, deleted all old prefs files in all user libraries and root library, repaired permissions and did an upgrade from 10.6.8 to 10.7. After reboot, I installed 10.7.1 at once, rebooted from the recovery disc an repaired permissions on the main hard drive.

After this, shutdown, restart, and: Fine. Period. I disconnected my MBP from charger yesterday 6.00pm, fired it up this morning by 8.30h, worked the whole day with two hours sleep mode, and have now (9.30h pm) 31 percent battery remaining. Believe it or not. No fans, no high temperature, just smooth even working. Without "clean install" or wiping the disk. Just doing some maintenance work on the old system beforehand.

Would like to hear from others, that this works, too.

You know what, I tried every solutions in the net with no luck. I even clean install Lion, but yeah... Lion is really the problem here. I love the features that introduced in Lion but decrease in battery life... I can't tollerate. The main reason why I bought macbook pro is because its battery life time compare to other laptop.

Last night I rolled back to SL.

I am the one who really care of my battery maintenance. Before I upgrade to Lion, my battery health was 92 - 94%. After installing Lion it went to 88%. After calibrate goes to 90%. Aha.. don't tell me that Lion cause this much battery deteriotion. My macbook in midd of April 2010.

Battery is consumable I know, but this sudden deteriotion make me point my finger to Lion. Back to SL and the battery life is still 89... will try callibrate and see how its goes.

Ok that's it. I am quit from this Beta testing program.

When I was in Lion I have no unusual activity occur in Activity Monitor. Fans good, everything seems to be ok. But how calm the battery life is so short.. about 4 hours the best? I don't understand. Already clean install Lion but still the same, super short battery life. My macbook pro bought in Midd 2010. With SL it can goes 8 - 9 hours with Wifi. Don't believe it... belive it. With Lion the best was 4 hours.. believe it too.

Agree but I'd like to add that after I went back to SL after using Lion for almost 2 weeks (5 days since) I calibrated my battery and I have very surprising results. Before Lion, coconut was giving me 97% of design capacity (13" MBP May 2011) and now 93% of Deign capacity.

My question to Apple is: What happened to 4% of my battery capacity in only 10-15 days while I was running Lion?

Would you mind providing a simple work flow so we can check these folders for old files.  I'm not sure where to look for these folders and files.  I would like to go through and clean them up since I did not do a clean Lion install.  I upgraded over Snow Leopard.  Thanks.

@Goatstorm:  Re: Lion, yes I installed all my apps again from scratch when I did a fresh install.

re: SL, if you look thru the previous posts in this thread, you will notice that there are recomendations to reset the SMC and recalibrate your battery when you switch back to SL.

Good luck.

Hello, thanks for your post.

I downloaded Lion the moment it was released. Of course, I experienced the same problems like all the people in this thread: battery life, heat and annoying fan. I downgraded to SL. I noticed after the downgrade that the battery was actually affected by Lion and it didn't give me 7 hours like it did before the upgrade. So I thought, I already lost the battery, I might as well upgrade to Lion again. I have a favor I need to ask you: Could you please write in detail the steps that we should do to get the same results that you got: which files to delete (I haven't installed much, just the regular applications and a couple of video players, nothing else), which permission to modify...etc. Some of us here (like myself) are new to the MacBook world, so writing the steps in detail would be of great help.

my battery died after the installation of lion. i replaced it in apple stored.

have $ 13*.**  charged on my bill. saw same battery online for 40 bucks, tools for 10 bucks.

it's totally not a problem caused by Lion, it's a "concidence".

i had to replace it, because the battery was dead, and i need the laptop for daily uses.

BSOD also occured after the installation of Lion. Hmm that's 140 + 500 + 29.99. Good deal. 500 is for logic board replacement, even though some ppl get it free from unconsistent apple retail care.

*waiting on someone to bring this up as a class action law suit*

After a long time I came across with the solution to my MBP 15" battery life with OS Lion issue.

I installed gfxCardStatus and realized that my MBP was not doing the automatic switching between the integrated and the AMD graphic card. The AMD graphic card was running all the time and that's why my battery life was so short.

After I installed the app and fully charged my battery, it lasted for 7 hours or even a bit more.

Hope this solution is usefull for you guys!

Same resolve for me..  although it was an app that was running all the time (Skype) that was making the AMD run all the time and hence draining the battery

I think in my case its the app for Twitter. When i switch to integrated, i can't view the app, all I can see is white where the tweets should be... Anyone having the same problem with the Twitter app?

no.  my twitter displays everyhting with both gfx cards

@mdesanti

I came to the same conclusion after a lot of research plus trial and error.

After installing gfxCardStatus it became obvious that as soon as anything caused my early 2011 17" MBP to switch from the integrated to the discrete graphics card the battery life would decline.

In my case, one 'offender' is Path Finder (a great 3rd party appp that is a major enhancement over Finder).

The developer is aware of the issue (it is not specifically related to Lion -- the threads in the support forum actually discuss the problem occuring with SL), but says that they are dependent on Apple to fix it as it is Apple code that does the card switching.

iPhoto is another 'offender'.

Here are some details:

80% battery

MBP using integrated graphics card: 5:23 projected life

Launch Path Finder.

MBP switches to discrete graphics card: 3:51 left

After a while this 'recovers' to 4:22

Close Path Finder

MBP switches to integrated graphics card: 5:33 left

Launch iPhoto

MBP switches to discrete graphics card: 4:12 left

Close iPhoto

MBP switches to integrated graphics card: 5:14 left

Note that once opened, I did not use either Path Finder or iPhoto, I just left them open

Having said all that, however, I still believe that Lion is inherently less battery efficient than SL. Even after managing the graphics card switiching, I still see less life than I got with SL on the same machine. Also, as previoulsy posted, the projected battery life with Lion seems to fluctuate more frequently and with larger swings than under SL.

Ok, I will try to give some hints as to what I did. Be warned, you are acting on your own risk:

1. Backup your boot disk.

2. Backup your boot disk.

3. Backup your boot disk.

This is serious: Clone your disk with CarbonCopyCloner or anything alike and make the target disk bootable. Double check that it IS bootable. So you will have a working system to get back to. I did this with my system SL 10.6.8. I assume that you have SL 10.6.8. installed, being in good working condition.

4. After that, sign in as an administrator (I always work without admin rights, it is safer...) and go to yourHD/Library. ("yourHD"=name of your startup disk.) Look for the folders "LauchAgents" and "LaunchDaemons". Open and check contents. IF you find any old files with names or parts of names of long abandoned software: Put this items to trash. In my case I found some old items apparently connected with VMware Fusion. You may find other items...

5. Within your HD/Library, open folder "ApplicationSupport". Sort by date, showing oldest items first. If you find any old items (I had some "last modified" 2007...), you might throw them to trash as well. Leave them untouched when they belong to software you still use. But in most cases they will be remainders of software you dismissed a long time ago...

6. Within your HD/Library, open folder "Preferences", sort by date, showing oldest items first, repeat steps from 5.

7. Within you HD/Library, open folder "Printers", throw away all printers which you do NOT use. (With Lion, it is easy to download new printer drivers for the printers you use).

8. Restart your Mac. After booting up, empty trash. (you cannot do this beforehand, files will be locked).

8. Perform steps 4 to 8 for every user account you have on your harddisk. There is a difference: This time, open the Library folder within the users home folder. Path: yourHD/username/Library.

Optional: After that, use Cocktail or Onyx or another system tool to run the essential cron scripts plus repair permissions on your startup disk.

9. Now, go to the Mac AppStore and redownload Lion. Why? Well, you get a fresh copy of 10.7.1 installer. Apple just brought it to the AppStore last night. You may have to hit the option key to redownload Lion within the section "Purchased".

10. Upgrade your system with the Lion installer.

11. Reboot with Lion.

12. Shutdown immediately after starting up.

13. Start the Mac and hold the option key pressed.

14. Choose the "Recovery HD" for startup.

15. Start DiskTools. Repair permissions. Shutdown.

16. Restart your Mac. This time with Lion.

Hopefully enjoy yourself with a working system.

NB: I use GFXcardstatus 2.1. as well. Configure it to use "Integrated" when on battery.

Good luck!

I have done an erase and install of Lion 10.7.0, the updated to 10.7.1 and any other updates. My mbp June 2011 , 13 inch, intel 2.3 i5, 4 gb ram with 320 gb hd, 9 cycles on battery. On full charge battery, off over night, start this AM, no apps open. Battery showing 8hrs, 45 mins runtime. Running for about 1 hr and battery is showing 8 hrs runtime with on safari running. Thus far ok with Lion but must run a few days to make sure.