OS X Lion Battery Life

I was having the same issue. Brand new MacBook Pro, 15" with the 2.3 i7. I was only getting about 3 hours of battery use out of it after upgrading to Lion, and just when I was threatening my computer with a complete reinstall (erase and install), I booted to the Lion Recovery and repaired disk permissions. I couldn't get the computer to Erase or repartition the hard drive, so I booted back to Lion, and voila! Estimated 7:33 hours of battery life right now at 98% remaining, now bumped up to 8:08.

It's a long shot, but give it a try. I had tried all the other suggestions to no avail, but this seemed to fix it. I'll report back if it hasn't changed anything.

Hey Flazer,

Did you still get the 7 hours after that permission repair? How did you boot on recovery mode?

Cheers

ldipenti, yes, I'm still getting better battery life, depending on usage and brightness etc. Currently I have 7:18 remaining with 98% battery.

It is much improved over the 2 - 3 hours I was getting before, but I haven't actually done a complete drain to test the full life.

To get to the Lion recovery, you hold command and R as the computer boots up. This boots to the recovery partition. You can also do the permissions repair through disk utility in Applications - Utilities - Disk Utility, then choose Macintosh HD and repair disk permissions.

Hope this helps.

Flazer wrote:

ldipenti, yes, I'm still getting better battery life, depending on usage and brightness etc. Currently I have 7:18 remaining with 98% battery.

It is much improved over the 2 - 3 hours I was getting before, but I haven't actually done a complete drain to test the full life.

To get to the Lion recovery, you hold command and R as the computer boots up. This boots to the recovery partition. You can also do the permissions repair through disk utility in Applications - Utilities - Disk Utility, then choose Macintosh HD and repair disk permissions.

Hope this helps.

In my case it helped but a little bit, going from 2:30 - 3:00 to 3:00 - 4:00 on my Macbook Pro 15" i7. Before Lion, the battery usually indicated 7 hours as yours.

Has anyone read anything about Apple acknowledging this issue? I'm getting worried as weeks pass and no patch is published to fix this.

I, too, would like to know if Apple is aknowledging the problem, and are the doing anything about it?

I've got a 15" 2.53GHz from mid-2009 --

I used to get about 4-5 hours from a battery with 93% capacitance (with 100% charge).

I do not have two graphics cards, and all that fan/heat inducing Spotlight indexing is long over.

I noticed this roughly after installing Lion, as I usually get about 6.5 hours with typical surfing at 30% brightness.

I went to the Apple Store today, and their immediate solution was to replace the battery (yay!) -- this did nothing. Though I do appreciate getting a few more years out of my laptop.

They then proceeded to do a PRAM and an SMC reset. This too did nothing.

I did a permissions repair via disk utility - no noticeable difference.

My current statistic, with only Firefox/gmail/gchat open - I get 4hr35min at 96% charge.

Based on what I've read on what 10.7.2 is going to provide/fix.. we may have to wait a little bit longer for the software fix for this issue.. which *****.

Yes, my battery life has been halfed by updating to lion as well. I usually get 8 hours per charge, and now I'm struggling to get just three. I hope that this gets resolved in an update soon!

I also have the same pb.

After an upgrade from SL to Lion, I tried :

- a clean install of Lon

- repair permissions

- reset SMC and PRAM

- clean everything with Onyx

- check which grafic card is running

and I still have 3:30 of battery life on my macbook pro 15' mid 2009 2,66mhz whereas I had 6/7 with SL !

Because I mostly use an iMac, I didn't pay much attention to power usage. But I also have a 2009 MBP with this recent activity:

- Authored and burned three DVDs (three hours)

- Viewed 1-1/2 hours of video (1.5 hours)

- Half hour of web browsing (.5 hours)

I started at 99% charge. Authoring and burning brought the charge to 40%. Viewing video brought charge to 5%. Web browsing brought it to 0%. After which, my MBP shut off.

I'll join the multitude saying that there should be greater battery life. A number of unseen features in Lion are sapping battery power. Apple should allow the user to "opt out" of energy sapping features he may not use. 😕

I was having major battery life issues having installed OS X Lion on my MBA.... I wasn't getting a third of the battery life prior to installing Lion. Added to this, the battery seemed to be running very hot.... something I never encountered with my MBA before upgrading. I can now say, that having installed the latest update (10.7.2) the battery life was showing life similar to that before Lion (shows 8 hours after a full charge as compared to 3 hrs pre-update) and the battery is nowhere near as hot as it was a couple of days ago.

Progress at last......

Thanks.

Just an update: After 10.7.2, my battery life is much more stable and at times I even get estimates that exceed what apple advertised on my MBP. It said I had 9 hours of life remaining. Of course, if I'm using more horsepower, this drastically reduces, but it's even better now than it was after I stumbled upon my original fix.

Hope everyone else is finding good success with this.

I think we need the Tech Sites like Engadget etc to do reviews about OSX Lion Battery problems, maybe then Apple will do something to fix it.

Macbook Pro 13" i5 2011

SL - 7 Hours or more

Lion - 3.5 Hours

Did you try the update as well as the other mentioned fixes?

Yes i've done the updates the reinstalls and SMC / PRAM etc

The only real recent change i've seen in lion is that the time might show an extra hour or two at full charge but that drops fast after a few minutes but the overall time stays the same using lion, around 3.5 Hours and using the same apps on SL is over 7 Hours.

I'm planning on going back to SL Full time, if there's no fix soon. I'm guessing Apple will just come out with newer macbook pro's to fix the problems and leave all of us to sort it out.

ScreenShot of my battery dying. Normal use. web surfing, word etc.