I bought my Macbook Pro 13" about a week ago and it said that i should have 7-8 hours of battery life but i only get about 4-5 hours when fully charged. The only thing i know is that this was an issue for everyone updated to Lion. My only concern is that i updated my Macbook to 10.7.2 and it still didn't fix it. So what can i do to get my Macbook to the full 7-8 hours for school? The 4-5 hours won't cut it and its really disappointing.
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2011 Macbook Pro Battery Life Issue's
- Thread starter Mr.Uav
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School work ( word process), watching movies, browsing, and little video editing. I really don't know, i forgot to mention that this is my first ever Mac, I've been a PC user almost all my life so i am really new to all of this.
I assume they aren't done concurrently.
Some of those tasks are intensive and use battery intensively. Do you need Wifi to be turned on during school? Is it even on at school? How's your brightness set at?
no, its one of those days when i really need to use my Mac i will take it. my brightness is setup at medium.
This is the footnote on the apple website for the MBP 13''. It says "up to 7 hr wireless web browsing."
I guess that watching movies and video editing is a bit more demanding, which might reduce you to 4-5 hours. Have a look at the battery guide and run one of the programs suggested there to check if the capacity is fine:
https://forums.macrumors.com/posts/9875442/
Well im not doing it all at once, but i still get ****** battery life, even if im just surfing the web (I.E. youtube, yahoo news, Facebook, twitter)
Sure you'll get 7-8 hours of battery life at 1/2 brightness browsing the web. You will not however get 7-8 hrs of youtubing. Flash is an CPU intensive app. Popups and adds do as well for that matter. It will kill your batterylife down to 4-5 hrs as you have been seeing.
Check out how much current you're pulling and what's the watt usage.
open up a terminal and type in "pmset -g rawlog"
and or check your coconut battery. For reference, here's my stats of my 15 inch running on integrated video with 1/2 brightness while typing up this post.
You need to be in the 7-8 watt range on a 13 inch to reach 7-8 hrs. It's easily doable, you're just probably doing something more intensive than browsing macrumors.
EDIT: Yes, that does say 7:56 time remaining.
Check out how much current you're pulling and what's the watt usage.
open up a terminal and type in "pmset -g rawlog"
and or check your coconut battery. For reference, here's my stats of my 15 inch running on integrated video with 1/2 brightness while typing up this post.
You need to be in the 7-8 watt range on a 13 inch to reach 7-8 hrs. It's easily doable, you're just probably doing something more intensive than browsing macrumors.
EDIT: Yes, that does say 7:56 time remaining.
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If you have flash installed it will drain your battery much faster. Try the ClickToFlash extension to reduce the drain from ads and other unnecessary flash elements.
Hey, I bought the same model as you, back in September of this year, and mine also only lasts 4-5 hours tops, regardless of what I do. I have taken it into an Apple store twice, and they've said that the battery is fine, and they seem to think that its because of the programs I'm running. All I know, is that with my prior windows laptops, the battery life that they've advertised, is about what I'd get, running the same apps, or same types of apps. Yet, I get less than what Apple advertises. Other than battery life, I absolutely love my 13" Macbook Pro.
Intel Based Macs- Resetting the System Management Controller (SMC)
my battery life improved markedly after i did this.
I read somewhere that Lion has a 3hour battery decrease. Can't remember where I read it though.
I had the same issue with my 15" Macbook Pro and I found that the reason for the reduced battery life was that some applications were triggering use of the ATI graphics card which use more power than the integrated Intel graphics.
The solution I found was to install gfxCardStatus and manually select the integrated graphics.
If you're going to do something graphically intensive like playing games, you can then switch to the discrete graphics.
The solution I found was to install gfxCardStatus and manually select the integrated graphics.
If you're going to do something graphically intensive like playing games, you can then switch to the discrete graphics.
I'm having the same issue with OP have have tried all sort of things, incl switching to the more battery gentle Intel card but still getting only about 4-5 hours.
Been only using it for a few days now. Have not run SMC yet but planning to in coming weeks should battery situation not improved.
I'm having the same issue with OP have have tried all sort of things, incl switching to the more battery gentle Intel card but still getting only about 4-5 hours.
Been only using it for a few days now. Have not run SMC yet but planning to in coming weeks should battery situation not improved.
Do you have the 13 or 15 inch?
I have the 13" model, i love it and i had it about two weeks now. But my 2 only complaint is that it gets very hot even while watching youtube videos.... and the battery life. I have tried SMC and nothing major happened. The only thing i may know what may cause all of that is Lion itself. I've heard numerous complaints that Lion runs flash and that is the reason for the sucky battery life and getting hot. I'm researching on how to get Snow Leopard back on here, but since im a Mac Newbie im afraid of screwing something up.
I'm sorry, but this part doesn't make any sense at all. Can you explain what you meant by that?