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2010 15" MBP Battery life with Lion and SL test

M

mark28

macrumors 68000
Original poster
Jan 29, 2010
1,632
2
SL. I can get 9+ hours of battery life ( almost 10 hours )
Lion. 7 hours of battery life

Snow Leopard had alot of programs and games installed.

A clean Lion OS X with 0 programs installed, can get only 6-7 hours of battery life with only Safari running and this a fresh installation with nothing installed.

So SL > Lion for mobile computers imo.
 
There could be a lot of contributing factors. Windows only gets a few hours for me on battery life. It's just how well the OS is optimized to extend battery life. I'm sure Apple will push out an update eventually that will increase the time you can spend unplugged.
 
mark28 said:
SL. I can get 9+ hours of battery life ( almost 10 hours )
Lion. 7 hours of battery life

Snow Leopard had alot of programs and games installed.

A clean Lion OS X with 0 programs installed, can get only 6-7 hours of battery life with only Safari running and this a fresh installation with nothing installed.

So SL > Lion for mobile computers imo.
Click to expand...

Did you allow time for Spotlight to index the new OS?
 
Tydog07 said:
Did you allow time for Spotlight to index the new OS?
Click to expand...

Bingo.

Before indexing my i7 15" MBP was getting 3hrs of life. Now, it's about 5.5 depending on what I'm doing.

Certainly better than my old 16" Dell Studio XPS (with a quad-core i7). Even with it's 9-cell battery, it would only get 2.5hrs of untethered use.
 
mark28 said:
SL. I can get 9+ hours of battery life ( almost 10 hours )
Lion. 7 hours of battery life

Snow Leopard had alot of programs and games installed.

A clean Lion OS X with 0 programs installed, can get only 6-7 hours of battery life with only Safari running and this a fresh installation with nothing installed.

So SL > Lion for mobile computers imo.
Click to expand...

9+ hours? care to elaborate how you got 9+ hours?

At most i can get 6-7hours...
 
greythorne said:
9+ hours? care to elaborate how you got 9+ hours?

At most i can get 6-7hours...
Click to expand...

I'm interested too! The most I can get with Camino running and writing some Word documents, is 6 hours or so. I attributed it to the 8Gb of RAM and i7 under hood.

I'd love more battery time.
 
Tydog07 said:
Wait, will I be getting less battery life with 8GB ram?
Click to expand...

Well, 2 sticks of RAM will consume more power than one, but I have no idea how that will impact overall battery life.

I was just stating my operating conditions and my battery life.
 
Doesn't Safari have a bug where it eats up RAM.. so wouldn't that mean using more power? (could be wrong with that idea but still..) if you can try a different program.. make sure safari is completely closed.. try maybe quicktime playing a video or something similar.
 
greythorne said:
9+ hours? care to elaborate how you got 9+ hours?

At most i can get 6-7hours...
Click to expand...

Just running Safari with Brightness lowered. I got 9:40 in SL. ( in Safari I was going threw sites like this )

In Lion, 6:33. Spotlight was done for a while so it didn't influence the results.
 
ahdickter said:
There could be a lot of contributing factors. Windows only gets a few hours for me on battery life. It's just how well the OS is optimized to extend battery life. I'm sure Apple will push out an update eventually that will increase the time you can spend unplugged.
Click to expand...

Probably. I'm back to SL and wait for an update of Lion OS X before I move over again.
 
Same here I got 9 hours in SL with just internet browsing and screen brightness at 1/4. Now if I do that Ill be lucky to get 6.
 
Are people talking about *measured* or *estimated* battery life?

Estimates are meaningless - perhaps Apple changed the estimation algorithm between SL- Lion.

Thinking of changing to Lion for my 2010 MBP - but a bit worried about the battery life effects. Right now I get about 5-6hours of use per charge...
 
Tydog07 said:
Wait, will I be getting less battery life with 8GB ram?
Click to expand...
No.

BAC5.2 said:
Well, 2 sticks of RAM will consume more power than one, but I have no idea how that will impact overall battery life.

I was just stating my operating conditions and my battery life.
Click to expand...

Yes two sticks will use more power but it is negligible, and since every Apple laptop comes with two sticks no matter what (2x2GB or 2x4GB) then it isn't really an issue.

8GB could potentially increase battery life depending on your usage. If you were paging with 4GB then you were wasting power writing and reading things from the hard disk which is using more power than just reading straight from RAM (Which is what happens anyways, so paging just adds the step of copying from HDD -> RAM).

Probably not much extra battery life, but definitely not worse.

On my 15" MBP 2010 i7 I can get around 6-7 hours if I use gfxCardStatus and set it to the intel chip, which is fine unless I am watching fullscreen flash video. Otherwise I get 4-5 hours in normal usage, and around 2-3 hours in Windows 7. And less than 2 hours when playing a game.

I haven't really noticed any significant drop in battery life on Lion, maybe a little worse, but not anything noticeable since my usage changes all the time.
 
I have found that while watching gfxcardstatus it switches to the dedicated GPU more in LION then is did in SL. I wonder if there are a few bugs to work out in that.

If Adobe is right about Flash not being able to use Hardware acceleration in LION then that may be it also as the CPU is probably doing more work in LION that is typically offloaded to the graphics processor when flash ads are in use.
 
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