Q: Lion - Horrible MacBook Pro Battery Life

Sorry, my misunderstanding.

I agree—I've never ever seen 7 hours on several MBP's I've used.

Hi guys,

I was having the exact problem like everyone else in here but seems to be gone. My MBP came with SL and after upgrading to Lion the battery was usable for 3hours. I did the SMC reset and the battery calibration and now I get around 6.5hours or more/less depending on the use.

I would suggest the battery calibration (let the computer run on battery until it shuts down, charge it to the full and repeat the process again) and the NVRAM+SMC reset. That solved my problem but this is a pretty "new" MBP 13'' i5 (early 2011).

HTH.

The first new MBP I used had some Migration stuff sent over, everything but the apps.

The second new MBP had files manually brought over. Both machines performed the same with under 3 hours battery time.

I think there might be something to SL migrating something over. However, few people use a MBP "as is" and are required to bring files over, of course, unless they are new to MBP. In reading this thread, there seems to be many new Apple users who are getting very poor performance. So the whole thing remains a bit of a mystery.

I should note that Firefox and Chrome take an hour off the meter whenever they're opened. Safari give my MBP an extra hour of life. So I'm not sure exactly what processes these other browsers use to drain the battery more quickly.

This is some problem with spotlight indexing server.

Disabling Spotlight in Snow Leopard solves this. Launch the Terminal and type the following command:

sudo mdutil -a -i off

http://osxdaily.com/2009/09/20/disable-spotlight-in-mac-os-x-10-6-snow-leopard/

I do get some extra hours after using all this starting with p and r and shift and cmd. I do have 92% capacity, a 2.4GHz dual core mbp 13'', and now 7:20 after charging, with wlan on and a quite dark screen (1 stripe on). One problem her is that MobileMe is syncing quite often, but I do not quite know why. And this ***** (energy).

I have a new MBP 15" and initially I was only seeing about 3.5 hours of battery life.  After trying the reset procedure mentioned in this thread I saw my battery life increase quite a bit.  Last night I tried to verify the battery would indeed last > 7 hours so I killed all running apps (that were visiable in the task list brought up via command+tab), turned off the power saving features so neither the screen nor computer would go to sleep and I disabled the screen saver.  In a terminal window I ran (using /bin/ksh as my shell):

while true; do date >> ~/battery-life-log; iostat >> ~/battery-life-log; sleep 900; done

I left that running all night.  What I found was it logged for 9.5 hours and I still had about 45m battery life left when I killed the while loop.  Note that iostat typically reported:

          disk0       cpu     load average

    KB/t tps  MB/s  us sy id   1m   5m   15m

   37.53   3  0.10   1  0 99  0.12 0.09 0.06

So the system was very lightly loaded.  Also the screen brightness was about .25 of full brightness.  I'm satisfied the battery is working as advertised on my MBP.

@William Fiveash

Good work but I have filling that you are missing the point. Our problem is not the hardware, we know very well what MBP batteries are capable of. Problem is poorly tested software which doesn't let us use our machines to the maximum potential. What you are suggesting is to kill everything in our machines in order to achieve what we had with Snow Leopard by default.

No way, this is something what should be fixed only by Apple. 

I'll put a brand new HDD, Lion and update without any data transfer and post the results here (for fun only)   

I discussed this issue with some apple engineers. They found a solution that works wonders for me. I'm talking from 3:30 hours to 6:00 hours. Restart your computer, use as normal, but ONLY use safari as your internet browser. Do not even open firefox, chrome, etc after restart This has solved the issue for me, let me know what you guys see, and I'm now getting battery life as I expected it to be. Do not run gfxcardstatus in the background either.

I didn't kill everything, just running apps.  All normal, system background processes were running.  One can not expect 7 hours on a battery if some program is using the CPU or harddrive (or DVD) at a constantly high rate.  The way I normally use my laptop with various apps constantly running I'm seeing:

load averages: 0.36 0.55 0.64

Running at a overall 0.64 load average will result in significanlty less runtime on battery than what I saw when my 15m load average was .06.  I think if people are seeing lower battery life they should fire up Activity Monitor and see what is is running.  If it is native Lion programs that are either consuming I/O or CPU at a high rate then yeah, Lion is to blame.  If it is a third party program then I would be hesitant to blame Apple.  And this advice from Apple is also useful to read:

http://www.apple.com/batteries/notebooks.html

How is this even a solution?

I absolutely agree with you. Apple should address this issue and we're not the ones supposed to look for tweets to make our battery last longer with Lion.

1. I use no other browser.

2. My CPU, disk and network usage are minimal at best

3. The battery life will go from 7 hours to 1.55 at a whim, or anything in between

4. Plugging the power cord in to charge a flat battery will jump from saying it will take 4 hrs to 1 hr in minutes!

5. I have migrated from a 3.5 year old 17: Macbook pro with average battery from of nearly 3 hours. So getting shown I have only 2 hours left after 10 mins usage is just a bug. It will jump back up to 7 hours within minutes. Yo-Yo is common.

6. Shutting WIFI off seems to help. The engineers did mess with some settings that got me to 7-8 hours which would be great if not for the fact, the next time I opened the machine 30 mins later it shows 2 hrs again.

It's just a mess. As a 3.5 year 17" MAcBook pro user, running the same software, i think I know enough to know something is inconsistent and buggy!

Definitely. I notice even under Snow Leopard that I lose an hour or more of battery running either Chrome or Firefox.

Too bad. They're better browsers...

True, Chrome and Firefox drain battery faster but only is there is a Flash content on the page (that means most of the time). 

Actually for me, I've found that using either safari or chrome I've gotten anywhere from 5-7 hours of battery life after doing a smc/pram reset. on the other hand, Firefox drains my battery like none other (3-4 at most), in addition to my computer running really hot