Q: Lion - Horrible MacBook Pro Battery Life

Trackpad is the RAT! Ok, maybe not the only one but definitely is major contributor to erratic behavior power consumption! I tried not to use trackpad and I could spot the difference almost immediately.

What are we going to do now? Next 3-4 months without Trackpad! Mac trackpad is one of those features that makes Macbook being way ahead of any PC. When I want to recommend Mac to a PC user one of the first thing to say that you really need one hand to operate the whole machine (trackpad) and use the other one to support your head !

Hello Apple, here is another good tip, please read this post and you may see how many of us are frustrated!!!

It seems that ELEPHANT is still in the room and it's even bigger!

Just did another thunderbolt update.... that was released today.

Didn't make a great deal of difference but it may do by the end of the day.

If I leave the machine for 5 mins, the battery shows 11 hours... When I come back and start surfing/emailing, it's a respectable 6 hours.

Fire up my VM and it drops to 2.5 hours (even when in background). Quit the VM and within 2 mins, it's back up to 6.5 hours (I've been on it for 30 mins now since a full charge and unplug.

So, I think it's better, but I've been fooled before. Typing this, I am showing 6hrs 30 mins. Definately VMware is a battery killer...

From 4 hours to 7 hours with this update... kind-of-but-not consisitent-too-early-to-tell... You should try youself.

What IS forming to be a pattern here with ALL of us, is immediately following any major change (repair, update, clean ot whatever), we all seem fooled into what looks like a fix. Then a few hours or a recharge or too later, the benefits disappear. In itself - what does THIS point to I wonder???

Good description, my experience after the last update was identical!

What puzzles me even more is that I met quite few people with new MBP and they have no issues with the battery! Briefly talking to them I found that all of them use VMWare, Chrome, Firefox and so on!!!

DrChandra wrote:

 

Good description, my experience after the last update was identical!

 

What puzzles me even more is that I met quite few people with new MBP and they have no issues with the battery! Briefly talking to them I found that all of them use VMWare, Chrome, Firefox and so on!!!

I agree as I have two MBP 2011 at home bought within 2 months of each other, one mine, the other my fathers, both came with SL installed and then upgraded to Lion.  My Fathers does not have a problem what so ever, SL like battery life, while mine as mentioned in a previous post has gone back to SL due to the battery problem, I was consistantly getting 3.5 hours life. 

Which leads me back to my observations I posted earlier. I'm wondering if alot of these problems are down to the compiler and the changes required to make the apps Lion compatible, My Fathers MBP has no addition apps installed he uses it for email, safari and photos, while mine has alot of installed apps.

....anyway another 10c worth

Stephen...

am i the only one to still have crappy battery after going back to SL ?

The apple store even changed my battery for a bran new one. but its still the same ! I guess there was nothing wrong with the first battery

I think that I changed from Lion to SL  and back about 4 - 5 times. Initially battery was OK on SL expect the last time, it was draining much faster and that was the main reason to put back Lion again. What's the point having SL is battery life is still crap! Too tired to try anything, just waiting for Apple fix and in mean time I'll keep charging!!!

Been watching this thread since my post weeks ago.

Since leaving the Macbook Pro alone and using as normal on Lion I'm getting about 3.5 to 4 hours actual operating time.  I changed my battery meter to Icon instead of Time...  You'll at least psychologically feel better.... not having to see that thing bounce up and down.   LOL.

I think that's as good as it gets until Apple does something about it...

Still better than a PC I suppose... 

Ha! After installing Windows 7 through Parallels to do a bit of work, yes, I can say without a question, "Still better than a PC." But this is very much a "Window's" bug.

Hi, i've had Lion since 10.7.1 hoping that would have sorted out all MAJOR bugs. The only problem i have is sometimes random crashing (but that's just the apps themselves i'd assume) but the battery is the worst. I used to get about 8 hours if i were to just surf the web or look at word documents etc, now i get abot 4 and the capacity of my battery is decreasing throughout. Very dissapointed, especially that they haven't fixed it yet - they must have seen the change in battery life with tests before releasing Lion or did they just not bother?

Hellloooooooooooo, as you can see our pet elephant is still in the room, aren't we lucky!

No change except that I developed a routine to charge twice a day my laptop on weekends (at home most of the day).

I wonder when we can expect to reach priority list for Apple considering that iPhone 4gs and 5 are coming up, iOS5, all bug fixing, Samsung war, new CEO... well, April 2014 looks promising.

Sorry Web Browser went haywire!

Sorry Web Browser went haywire!

Hi All,

I have MacBook Pro 17" brand new and I'm getting maybe 3.5 hours while the thing is idle / screen saved most of that time.

Using SnowLeopard

Joe

Still the same problem here.  Just spent a lot of money on a MacBook Pro which should have up to 7 hours of wireless web.  I'm lucky to get 3-4 hrs of basic browsing after installing Lion.  Very disappointing.

Sure the MacBook looks good and is quite snappy but a laptop with a battery life of 3 hours isn't much use to me.  I would prefer to not have to sit by a power supply.

I'm hoping OS 10.7.2 will address the problem and will be released alongside the iphone 5 and iCloud update sometime next week.  I imagine this will be the case as I've heard a lot of the testing around 10.7.2 has been to make sure iCloud runs without any problems.

Fingers crossed.

Fingers crossed... and batteries charged!