MacBook Air battery life/standby time destroyed by Lion!

Running Lion 10.7.2 on MacBook Pro 15"

Noticed same issue. When I was on Snow Leopard I was constantly amazed that I could close my lid for a week, then turn back on with MINIMAL battery loss. After updating to Lion my battery will be almost dead just overnight. It's getting very frustrating.

In response to all those with problems, it is not universal and is almost certainly due to some process that keeps running and prevents the system from caching all the memory to "disk" and shutting down the CPU.

Solving it depends on identifying the process and preventing it from loading - it probably has some Lion incompatability.

It's a process of elimination. I would begin by starting the Air holding down shift. This avoids loading anything in the start-up items. Don't load anything and see if it will completely sleep. Thereafter its a case of adding back the Apps you use one-by-one.

I would suggest using Activity Monitor to find out what (of your) processes run as you go. This is not a quick fix I'm afraid but it's something you can do and unless anyone else has any brighter ideas or better suggestions, the only way to solve the problem.

Hi all,

I have the same issue on my MBA 13" i7 (2011). The battery loses about 10-20% or move when its put into hibernate / sleep mode...

First I thought that I may have installed an a "wrong" App or I did a wrong adjustment, but after I reset the MBA, the issue was still there, so it's either a software issue (Lion OS) or a hardware issue?

Does anyone has a solution for the battery consumption issue in sleep mode?

Hello all, any solution for that in the meantine? I have two MacBook Air: One 13" Late 2010, and one 11" 2011 which I bought two weeks ago - both running Lion 10.7.2. While I don't have any issues on the 13", the 11" loses about 30% battery life over night when the lid is closed. I don't know whether the issue comes from Lion or any other software, but maybe we should list the installed software so we may find the reason for this weird behavior. On my 11" MacBook Air, the following non-Apple software is installed:

- Microsoft Office 2011

- Adobe Photoshop CS 5.1

- Firefox

- Chrome

- VMWare Fusion 4.1.1

I have to mention that I installed same software on 13", without any battery problems.

Had the same problem. Turns out Adobe Reader was constantly accessing the CPU in background. Shut it off and the problem seems to have gone away.

Hello, I have a late-2010 MBA. Loved the battery life [and the cool operating temps] of SL. Upgraded to Lion because I loved the features ... but the battery life definitely took a hit and temps were higher. Both effects were substantial and easily noticeable over the few months of using Lion.

Upgraded yesterday to 10.7.3 via Software Update ... and have had no problems during install or since.

Result: I see a longer battery life and lower operating temperatures. Don't have a very experimental or data-driven basis, but definitley very noticeable and very welcome nonetheless.

Same problem:

Model: 13"

Bought: dec 2011

Been buying macs for a long time without making too much analisys on discussion boards for defects before buying a mac.... I think there is a design problem (software, hardware) I don't know, but I pay alot for this products because of the reability (imagine using windows). The main idea here is battery lasting longer. That is how marketing present this product.... And portability...

...and my intention was to replace a macbook pro with this product.... Better idea,,,, insert an SSD into the pro model.... And think twice before downgrade to lion (I hope is not rude to say, but the results are in many forums but as I see it is a downgrade)

Hey tech support give this forum an idea to solve this problem....

Hey all,

I think the issue may have something to do with this support article: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4392. MBAs are supposed to eventually go into hibernate mode where the computer's wake image is stored on the SSD. My 11" MBA came with OSX Lion so I don't know how it's battery life would be under Snow Leopard, but after using the "pmset" function in Terminal I noticed a discrepancy. "hibernatemode" was set to "3", which is the setting that tells the MBA to copy the startup image to the SSD but to also keep the image in RAM and power the RAM. Powering the RAM while in hibernate is contradictory to the support article, which states the image will be written to the SSD and power to the RAM will be cut. Reading through the "pmset" man pages I found "hibernatemode" "25", which tells the computer to write the wake image to the SSD and then power down RAM. This is in line with the support article. Perhaps Snow Leopard knew to set MBAs to "25" and Lion set MBAs to the normal portable default of "3"? I'm just guessing here. Either way, changing "hibernatemode" to "25" seems to have solved my sleep drain problems (0% battery loss over 4 hours), since while in hibernate power is no longer being fed to RAM.

And two other points. "standby" needs to be set to 1 to allow the MBA to drop into hibernate. "standbydelay" (in seconds) can be changed to have the MBA hibernate faster. The default is 70 min; I changed mine to 15 min (on battery).

The best thing to do is type "pmset man" in a Terminal window to see how pmset works, but this command should get your MBA sleep straight while on battery power ("-b" is for battery):

sudo pmset -b standbydelay 900 standby 1 hibernatemode 25

Once you execute this command you can type "pmset -g custom" to see your settings for both battery and AC power. Read through the man pages, pmset is a pretty cool function. And whatever you do, don't give "hibernatemode" values other than "0" "3" or "25"; according to the man pages you can really screw things up otherwise.

And one last thing to remember, per the support article the MBA will not drop into hibernate if it is still paired to bluetooth devices, so make sure to disconnect any before putting the MBA to sleep. I'm going to test this, though, because I like the convenience of bluetooth wake from sleep, etc.

I hope this helps out.

And one other thing. Maybe the reason the "hibernatemode" on my MBA was set to "3" is because I used Migration Assistant to transfer over all the content of my old MBP. Perhaps a clean install of Lion on an MBA will have a "hibernatemode" value of "25", but using Migration Assistant will flip the value to that of the computer you are transferring from.

I tried this out and it seems to work. I do see better standby time ... but need to do some before/after testing when I can to get a quantitative sense for the improvement.

One note: A Software Update I did after applying Shadwig's change reset PMSET to the original values. I had to apply Shadwig's change again.

Shadwig, would it help to apply the changes to AC Power mode also?

I continue to be very happy with the 10.7.3 update. Definitely cooler operating temperatures and longer battery operation.

Mr. Sunshine,

Now that you mention it, I don't think I noticed battery-drain issues until after updating to 10.7.3. I recently purchased the MBA so didn't have to deal with those initial drain issues.

As long as everything is working the way it should, I don't see how the AC hibernate mode would affect the battery hibernate mode, unless the MBA doesn't switch to battery power management when unplugging it while it is asleep. It's worth keeping in mind though if the battery drain starts up again. I am currently using "3" on AC power, so will keep an eye out for battery drain after unplugging the the MBA while it is asleep.

Message was edited by: Shadwig

And over a 24-hr period, checking the battery status periodically, I only lost 3% charge when checking this morning. Good enough for me.

I was skeptical, but this appears to have fixed my issues. The MacBook Pro gave me several dire warnings to try to talk me out of making the change, but since I applied it all I have to do is close the lid and the system shuts down with almost no drain overnight. I appreciate it so much!

Thanks!!

my mba 2011 13" it battery only life 2and half hr. today i go to apple store to check it. they said it battery is work well. no problems. unless it work only less than a hr. they suggest me to reinstalled the lion clear to see if it can have a longer battery life. why???? i can install others programs?

I had the same problem after upgrading. Simply put the battery drains at work or sleep.

Found a program called Agadminservice keep running the CPU at 100%.

Then I found this page:

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3191543?start=0&tstart=0

Problem solved with it. I have no clue why all these happened though.

Hope it helps.