Q: Lion - Horrible MacBook Pro Battery Life

Just wanted to let everyone know that I bought my brand new 15" Macbook Pro like 3 days ago and it already came with Lion installed. The battery life on it is HORRIBLE. I get around less than 3 hours of web browsing on it...

I honestly hope that Apple does something about this with an OS update. And brande new notebooks are getting the same issue... This *****

I just received my new 15" MBP (2.2 Ghz Intel Core i7, 8GB RAM), Lion preinstalled obviously. I've been very annoyed to discover how poor the battery life is - it will only last for around 3 - 3.5 hours, and that's just running a few simple apps and light webbrowsing. Read through a lot of the posts here, but I don't find that the computer is running particularly hot with Lion - it's just very poor battery life. 

@FabioDias - as u can see - I have the exact same problem!

If you just purchased your Mac and are unhappy with your battery life, why not just return your Mac?

....because he needs a computer?

Actually, William, I did take my computer back. In fact, Apple replaced the first laptop with a second and I sent that one back too, at Apple's expense.

So their little Lion is not making much profit from me. I found an older MacBook Pro with Snow Leopard, and lo and behold, it has twice the battery life of the brand new MBP with Lion running the exact same software.

@Damon Dumas

..and Apple says the 15" MBP gets 7 hours battery life in their tests, but I think there are people on this thread who might disagree with that...

When I first upgraded to Lion I was getting 3-4 hours battery life from my Early 2011 17" MBP.

I have done the following:

1. SMC reset
2. PRAM and NVRAM reset
3. Several battery calibrations.

After each charge and discharge cycle I was getting progressively longer battery life. I am now consistently getting 6+ hours battery life.

In fairness, when on battery, I am also being careful about my use of apps that I know trigger the discrete graphics card, as this seems to be a major driver of accelerated battery usage.

I tried everything. We need a fix from Apple now.

Go give feedback!

http://www.apple.com/feedback/macosx.html

Hi Everyone.

A few weeks ago, I was active with this thread because I was having problems with short battery life, memory leaks, and increased temperature on my MBP 15'' 2011 that I upgraded with Lion.

A week or two ago, I reformatted my HD and installed Lion on a clean Hard drive... I upgraded to 10.7.1... reset my SMC and calibrated the batteries.  For a while I was getting 6hrs on my laptop and I was happy.

After a few weeks and a few cycles of battery charging... I can accurately say that my MBP averages 4.5hrs of battery life.... peaking at around 5hrs.

Whe I went to the Apple store they said.  All our units on the floor with Lion average 4hrs.  That is normal sir.  I asked them how I can get back the 6 to 7hrs battery life, he promptly suggested.... go back to snow leopard.

I asked again... is this the best I can get in battery life with Lion.  He said, YES.

I wish Apple would be forward about this thing.

Hi all, just got a Macbook Pro as well, with preinstalled Lion OSX. Similarly getting lousy battery life like many on this thread. I also noticed that after having charged the battery back up to full capacity, after two days of shutdown the battery lost 2% of charge (100 to 98). Seems like quite a bit for having had no activity for two days.

Is this normal? Am I nitpicking? Feeling a bit let down on the purchase after having heard all these great things about these computers.

My MBP with SL also loses a similar amount of charge over a day or two with no activity. I think this is completely normal.

I dual boot with lion(upgraded) and SL. right now i m at 50% gave me 3:35 with 20-30 min on youtube and 46-50 processes running and brightness is 5 bars. in lion i get 2:00 with 50% charge doing same amount of work as i did. so Sl give me more then 1:30 more. i will try installing fresh lion  and see what i get.

boot time in sl is 25 sec and in lion its 45 sec.

i m using macbook pro 13" 2010

I have an 2008 MBP 2.4Ghz Core 2 Duo/4 GB RAM/500 GB HD. (replaced motherboard in 2009, new HD & battery in 2011).  Moving to Lion upgrade cost me 4+ hours battery life, constantly running fan, & a MBP you could fry eggs on.  The Apple Genius solution was to wipe my HD, format, and reinstall Lion.  Now the fan doesn't run as much, the MBP is slightly cooler (but still very hot), and the battery life ***** still (1 1/2 hour with a new battery).  I cannot travel anywhere on an airplane without "killing" my battery.  Snow Leopard was much better!

My MBP is about as good as a MS Vista PC.  I did all the suggested fixes on this forum prior to going to the Apple Genius and nothing really works.  Lion OS is the root cause of the problems.  I was going to change my business group from PCs to MBAir this year but I have too many issues now to recommend such a change.  Windows 7 is better than Lion - sorry if that offends any diehard Mac users.  Why didn't Apple release a quality product like they have in the past?

Apple needs to step up and fix this mess. This really *****!

No offence taken. I've been using Macs faithfully for over 20 years, but often with gritted teeth at their high prices, lack of compatible software, and yes, at times, buggy hardware.

It seems as if Lion was tested on iMacs, and they either forgot to test them on Macbooks (doubtful) or they simply said, "Oh well... they'll still buy our stuff." Well, not necessarily... we might just hang onto our "older" computers that still run well, and skip an upgrade. That's precisely what I did when I returned two of their MBP's last week and went to an older, SL, compatible model.

On my MBP 2011.

I did a SMC reset:

1. Shut down the computer.
2. Plug in the MagSafe power adapter to a power source, connecting it to the Mac if its not already connected.
3. On the built-in keyboard, press the (left side) Shift-Control-Option keys and the power button at the same time.
4. Release all the keys and the power button at the same time.
5. Press the power button to turn on the computer. 
   Note: The LED on the MagSafe power adapter may change states or temporarily turn off when you reset the SMC.

http://support.apple.com/kb/ht3964

Then a PRAM reset:

1. Shut down the computer.
2. Locate the following keys on the keyboard: Command, Option, P, and R. You will need to hold these keys down simultaneously in step 4.
3. Turn on the computer.
4. Press and hold the Command-Option-P-R keys. You must press this key combination before the gray screen appears.
5. Hold the keys down until the computer restarts and you hear the startup sound for the second time.
6. Release the keys.

http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1379

Then i repaired disk permissions: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT2963?viewlocale=en_US

And now my 2011 MPB is back to over 7 hours of battery. And at most at idle up to 12 hours battery. Good luck.

Lion has a few bugs and there are also many changes that are under the hood. That said a reset of the SMC and PRAM is usually a good idea when you upgrade any version of OS X. Also you should look into clearing some of the cache files which tools like Onyx can help you with.

What I have noticed is that Lion uses exobrant amounts of RAM. The 4 gb of RAM that I have in my 2010 MBP were plenty for my day to day operations in SL yet wit Lion that is usually scraping the bottom of the barrel. Then you add the fact that the integrated GPU uses some of that 4gb ram and at times my Lion install runs very very slow and starts using the HDD swap file a bit too much for my liking.

A relatively cheap solution for me was to upgrade the RAM to the 8gb max limit. Given the prices of RAM today that was a fairly inexpensive upgrade too. Believe me when I tell you that the difference is like night and day. I am still using the same old 5400 rpm HDD (yes I know it's pitiful) and yet the computer is very responcive and quite usable. You should know that on average about 45% of the 8gb or ram is being used and at times when I work with large spread sheets or other databases that goes quite a bit higher.

The bottom like however is that Lion NEEDS a minimum of 4gb RAM in order to perform as advertized. Now I'm sure some of the memory hogs will be fixed and that will go back to the usual 2gb but for now your only options are upgrade your RAM or get an SSD. It is quite sad since OS X used to have fairly modest hardware requirements ...

I recently got a MacBook Pro (pre-installed Snow Leopard) and thought of upgrading to Lion. I'm already having issues downloading it from App Store as the download doesn't resume once interrupted (I already tried twice  downloading 1.97 and 1.13 GB in successive attempts and ended up again with a fresh download starting from zero).

But after reading this thread about the poor battery, I've changed my mind and I'll not be upgrading until Apple comes with some solution. I can't put my battery back-up at stake. I'm happy with its 7 hours something back-up so far with Snow Leopard.

One of my friends who recently upgraded to Lion also complained and advised me to stick to Snow Leopard as he's already repenting.

I hope Apple is listening to us and comes out with something substantial.