Q: Lion - Horrible MacBook Pro Battery Life

Hi all,

I was contacted from Apple Support, California regarding this problem. He had read my post in this discussion and called me. He collected some information from my MBP for further analysis.

I wanted to inform you all that Apple has taken this issue and is working on it.

So a workaround/update can be expected soon.

Thank You.

Regards,

Ragu

Just an update on my end. I bought three MacBook Pros in the last two months. The first two had Lion. Using just the browser and email, I was getting less than three hours on the MBP, on both machines. So I returned them to Apple and bought a new MBP that still ran Snow Leopard.

I am now getting 7-8 hours off a fully charged battery using just the browser and email.

Hi guys,

Had the same issue with my mid 2011 MBP so I decided to downgrade to Snow Leopard again, to find out that everything was working fine there.

I then thougt of trying with a new, clean install of Lion, because previously I had upgraded from SL.

So I created a bootable Lion partition on a USB drive, reinitialized the drive with disk utility, installed Lion from scratch and then reinstalled just the applications and settings, thorugh migration assistant, from the last tested Snow Leopard time machine image.

Well I must say that - to my surprise - everything seems to be working fine now.

Advertised battery time was 7h50 after first startup, 9h03 after first reboot. Now, Mac being on since half an hour, I get 6h24 of battery autonomy left, with Chrome running over a WiFi Network, keyboard backlight off and display luninosity half way down (normal conditions during daytime).

Hope this helps.

Cheers.

Chris,

if you go back in this post you'll find that quite few of us tried the same thing and came up with the same results but only in the beginning. Put appz back and start using it and in no time you'll be able to see that the real size of the bug is equal to a GIANT...

Guys,

Really now, stop using Chrome and Firefox (for a while) - just use Safari, do the recalibration and the SMC reset (correctly - until you see the light bouncing from orange to green) and see if that changes anything. I had the same issue as everyone else here but after the reset + recalibration I have 8-9h now in Lion. Of course I do not have two graphic cards, but just as a test. (I have the 13'' MBP 8GB RAM, SSD)

All I've read here is I am using Chrome and a couple of other programs - it seems Chrome does exactly the same thing as Firefox in switching the graphic cards. Just try it with Safari and see if there is any difference.

Hi elis.gitin and welcome.  I keep asking the same question, but it would be good if everybody made it clear:

your 8-9 hrs of battery life is that from a full charge to empty (stop watch), or

is it showing that time in your menu bar?

Hi Redarm,

This is mainly what Lion shows me, however, yesterday with two VMs under VMware, Firefox + Flash Block & Adblock Plus extensions, PPT, Word, Terminal, Text Wrangler, Adium, Mail - it used to show me 8h. After 4h of work it showed me 6h - I know it's strange - but that is fine for me, nevertheless to say that I keep the VMs on an external drive which is powered via USB.

The recalibration says you should leave your computer on battery until it shuts down. I guess that is the best moment to measure the battery discharge time. I did this test a couple of months back (one or two - I do not remember correctly) and after 6h it started to complain about the battery.

There is clearly a problem with the 15" and 17" and there was the same with my 13" but now it seems to be gone - and that is mainly the reason I share my findings with you.

HTH.

4 real hrs of work with an external drive attached (my firewire drives eat battery for breakfast) and still showing you 6 hrs. out of 8 sounds fantastic.

So it could well be the hardware differences that does it for you: 1 graphics card instead of 2 (although I still don't get more than 3 hrs. even without programs running on the descrete one) and/or the smaller display and/or the SSD drive and/or the processor (dual core instead of quad core).

If you don't mind me asking have you ever run it down fully since and how many hrs altogether did it give you?  Sorry missed that one's already answered - was that with all the apps running you mentioned, or without?

Ok a couple of observations. 

I myself have re-installed from scratch too, a couple of times, each trying different things and suggestions in this thread, from SMC resets to battery recalibrations.   Initially I had great battery life, similar to SL, however then after installing/restoring my apps things started returning to the reduced battery life we are all seeing.  I'm actually thinking that there is nothing wrong with Lion per say, but with the Apps, or maybe a combination of them both.

When Lion was released alot of apps needed to be made compatible with lion, I don't know what this entailed, however apple had released a lion compatible version of xcode, is it xcode and some core library that when used to recompile the apps is causing the problem?

anyway my 10c worth.

Stephen...

Also confirming that after reinstalling Snow Leopard battery life is back to normal albiet at a reduced battery capacity due to the lion discharge rates over the last month.

I can also recommend the app Battery Monitor (BTW I'm not affiliated in any way, just a happy user of it), while a paid app in the app store, it has a great feature of logging the battery capacity, current discharge and voltage in a trend line in near real time, this give a great visual indication and a more accurate time asto current battery usage/life. I had previously been using coconut but it didnt give as much detailed information as Battery Monitor.

Maybe someone can recommend a free alternative that also trends or logs?

Stephen

I was advised to do an SMC reset and battery life was then saying 7 - 9 h. However, after a bit of use things have dropped back down to around 3.5 h which I think is a slight improvement. The machine doesn't run as hot as it used to.

Still need a proper fix. My ~2.5 year old Macbook pro (same non-removable batery) has 95 % battery capacity. If peoples new machines have dropped to 95% within a few weeks then this is very problematic. I'm concerned about my new one which is showing 98% capacity after 1 month!

Sat

I already reported that I was concerned about the same thing, lost capacity. It seems that coconutBattery not getting accurate reading. I took my MBP to Apple store and we found that my battery is still where it was before Lion upgrade/downgrade.

Unfortunately the other problem is still very present. Full charge, SMC, battery reset, no Chrome/Firefox and still only 2.5-3 hours...

Apple must fix this.

Hi guys. I have a macbook - mid 2010 core 2 duo , upgraded to 8 gigs of ram. I upgraded to lion last month. I noticed that the battery life has dropped from SL. I think it has something to do with the trackpad. I noticed that the expected time remaining keeps on changing when i start to type. while typing, the battery life increases and after using the trackpad, the battery life drops. Right now i used the mac on minimum brightness and with wifi and only surfed the net with safari. The battery life drained by 10 % in 45 mins. so on a full charge i should get 7 - 7.30 hours with wifi and minimum brightness. On SL i used to get about 8-9 hours but using the ethernet cable. So i'm guessing the battery life isn't that bad after all. the cpu is around 45 degrees celcius. And the fan is running at around 2000 rpm.

Hi all,

I found this thread is very interesting and usefull. I just follow some of instructions here (thanks for share!) and now I got my battery back: from 4h30 to 6-8h, my midle 2010 13inch macbook pro also much cooller!.

Here is what I did :

- Delete old plist, preference in startupItems, Launch Deamon and Launch Agent

- Delete old printers

- Delete all unnessary load when start up from 3rd party (in maycase that is Blackberry, Plex server, Evernote, Adobe things) - in Library/LaunchDeamon

- Restart computer

you could find the original detail instruction in page 3x

And as rjji93 said, I also see that using trackpad est a lot of energy also, compare with if you using keyboard only.

When I typing this, the time now up to 9h when battery has 88% left, 25% LCD brightness! and CPU temparate is 44oC. Much much better!

Thanks for all!

Same issue here.

Battery life has been reduced significantly from approx 6 hours to approx 3 hours, after installing Lion.

I have a MBP mid 2010, 15" screen, 8GB RAM, 2,53GHz I5 processor.

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