Q: Lion - Horrible MacBook Pro Battery Life

Also getting the same issues. Since installing Lion have noticed by mid 2010 MBP running hotter and battery life decreases much quicker.

I use VMWare Fusion for some Windows Tasks and that appears to be slower too, but even without that running the battery takes a hit.

About to try the reset suggested in these posts.

I finally got to SEE that my battery holds 10:48 hours of life after doing the SMC reset. God alone knows how much i'll actually get! Fingers crossed...

this is wat i did earlier, shut down, press and hold for 10 secs ( tried both plugged in /out) the

power button + shift +ctrl+opt

REsult: never saw it going higher than 8 hours, it ws a relief from the 4 hours i got immediatly after installing Lion

NOW: Plugged in, Shutdown, press and release the

Power+Shift+Ctrl+Option and released within 3 secs.

restarted and voila! 10 hours 48 mins! so happy to see the old battery life is back.

But!!! no guarantees yet... will post again if this actualy does last that much. i'll b happy if i get at leaest 7

I tried resetting SMC again and waited for the green light (going from orange to green). Immediately after the restart 10h:46m. In the first min it jumped back to 7 and now while typing is 8h. It seems that something has changed which is far better than at the beginning.

Thanks for the tip  : )

same here, i'm down to 85 % now and shoes 4:31

ok guys, i have succesfully completed 7 hours + batter y in the lion after resetting smc as i mentioned earlier.

plugged in, shut down, all 4 keys press together and hold 3 secs, leave together, press power to turn on.

i got an initial estimate of 10:48 and now at 30 % charge after 7 hours,  i have 50 mins left on the battery. my usual usage as in snow leopard.

Hope it works for all.

Macbook pro 15 inch early 2011, 2.2ghz

I tried reseting SMC twice.  The batter power only momentarily goes up to 7hrs but averages 4.5 to 5 hrs on 100% charge.

Right now I'm down to 70% charge with 3.5 hrs left.... The battery consumption did not improve with reseting the SMC.

Different version of the MBP reset the SMC in different ways.... please tell us what MBP you are on because therre are like twenty different versions of the same computer.

I'm on 5,1 late 08 MBP 2.53 ghz 8gb RAM

checked activity mon and CPU, nothing spiking over 7% (chrome renders and flash).

I get one hour of battery life fully charged even after calibrating the battery and doing an SMC reset. Battery tested as "Normal" with only 10 cycles. Brand new.

tried the terminal cmd, but nothing was there so it didn't delete anything.

bah! :-)

And it won't get any better after resetting the SMC, as that is not the issue. This will only tell the battery display in the task bar to show the true amount of energy left, and will not gain you back any extra energy. A reliable friend in an Apple store tells me it's because Lion is not (currently) utilising the graphics card to display video etc. I noticed that when playing flash videos through Rockmelt and when playing movies in MplayerX the CPU usage is jumping wildly - and yes, it's because Lion is displaying the graphics and video through the processor alone and not utilising the graphics card. Wait for an update, and be patient peeps!

Can someone from Apple confirm this? Is this a wild guess, opinion of a single Apple employee or the official statement?

Cheers.

Read the fine print wick

I did indeed. I stand corrected. Let me rephrase my question - did anyone get a similar response when talking to Apple?

Thank you TheSmokeMonster.

I'm just passing on what I was told this very morning by a friend who works for Apple store Hamburg. As far as I know it's definitely NOT an official statement or a wild guess and it makes perfect sense to me after watching the CPU usage on videos & graphical media. I've been following this thread to see if anything can be done (and resetting SMC did not), so I've posted this here to possibly alleviate worry.

Not sure this Apple ''clerk'' at the store knew what they were talking about. If you download either gfxCardStatus or GPUInfoMenu, you will be able to see ''live'' which is being used--the Integrated graphics on the Intel chipset or the NVIDIA (also called discrete) GPU.

With gfxCardStatus you can actually override the settings and, for example, set only the Integrated to be used on battery--which--saves battery life.

Anytime the NVIDIA GPU is utilized, battery life will suffer. You will get much better battery life on either dynamic switching or the Integrated alone.

HOWEVER, CERTAIN OFFENDING APPLICATIONS WILL ''HIJACK'' THE NVIDIA GPU AND NOT LET IT GO. Firefox (I'm using 6 right now), for example, is the chief offender. Firefox will grab hold of your NVIDIA chip when playing flash--AND WILL NOT LET IT GO. So, once you've gone to a site and played some Flash content, you'll be stuck with using the NVIDIA GPU until you quit Firefox. You can fork over 99-cents to the App Store and get a little utility called FlashFrozen, set it to auto-kill Flash processes in Firefox and this helps--just be aware that the auto-kill will do exactly that--kill Flash processes. If you go to a site that wants to play Flash, sometimes it will just fail out.

LASTLY, Google+ and Hangouts: Again, in Firefox, if you initiate a Google+ Hangout, if you don't have it installed already, it will want you to install two plugins to enable the video part--and once again--if you initiate a Hangout, the NVIDIA GPU will be hijacked until you quit Firefox.

Long story (sorry) short: Until the various applications that hijack the NVIDIA GPU learn how to play nice, your battery life will suffer.

Grrrrrr...

After getting some rather impressive numbers on the battery meter yesterday morning, I've come back here to say that my battery consumption still feels way off. Who's to really tell, but I feel like I'm getting maybe 70% of it's former utility. I understand there will be changes in this dept...but this basically makes my $2000+ laptop near useless on the go. I just find this whole thing very frustrating...

Sorry, venting...

For the record, I've gone thru all the tacky fixes I could possibly find. The SMC thing has me convinced that it gave me a little more flex in this juice issue...that's it.

I suppose now, I'm just shocked that the internets (as they call them) are not banging down the castle walls at Apple HQ. Where's the documentation? This seems to be widespread and quite serious. I'm seriously cool with keeping my lappie plugged in all the time...but is that killing off the lifespan of my battery even more? Lion is just chomping thru my cycles. Since Thursday, I've probably gone thru 10 more cycles at the very least!

Thanks for your persistence everyone!

Thanks smokemonster.  I was actually successful with reseting the SMC.  Unfortunately it barely helped the power consumption.  After reading this thread, I see that the problem is not in the power management but with OS LION.

I can also see that this thread is raising the necessary alarms for Apple to respond to this issue/bug.  I really hope they do soon.  This OS is really pounding on my laptop batteries; and they are not cheap from what I heard.