Battery life dramatically improved with 10.7.1

[DrNelly]

Hi folks,

after updating to 10.7.1, the battery life of my MBA 11 i7/256GB has improved almost 15%. From 235 minutes (browsing with safari and no flash installed, email, and coding) I am now getting between 270-280 minutes consistently. I have gone through 2 and a half cycles since yesterday and both full cycles show the improvement. I also noticed a small temperature decrease under the described conditions.

EDIT: My screen brightness is set to 4 bars and bluetooth is off.

Is anyone else experiencing better battery life after the update? If so, please post your regular usage times.

It seems 10.7.1 has been a more substantial update than I thought.

Cheers.

 

[macfly4]

maybe we can also add this info to my prior thread:

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/1214002/

good to know!

 

[kilonet]

What update is this?

 

[Nioxic]

What update is this?

an update that was released today

i bought a mac today, which the store had delivered today as well. It had the update when i checked in the info

also it says somewhere i have to OK downloading updates but i didn't.. so don't know if it came installed with the update, or just simply downloaded this (sorta important?) update without asking me

 

[brand]

an update that was released today

10.7.1 was actually released yesterday.

 

[macmba]

I think the best way to test battery life is to have exactly the same things happening on different MBAs. For example, do ONLY web browsing with everything else closed, at a certain brightness level, and excluding videos/youtube, otherwise there are way too many factors to be considered. Bluetooth mice, Wifi, speakers on/off, VMware, etc etc etc

 

[accessoriesguy]

That's great to know!
You know its done good when you notice it.

Some people say the OS feels overall a lot smoother, they probably fixed some of the drivers/errors so the computer is running more efficient now, longer battery life is always good!

 

[alecgold]

its hard to tell how long the battery actually lasts from this info, it is just a prediction that takes the strain you gave it and the current use into it's little calculation.
And although it is rather nice and somewhat accurate, I'm not sure if you can state on that info alone if the 10.7.1 update did improve battery life by 15%.

 

[Mike07335i]

Well I am also noticing a battery improvement since 10.7.1 came out. Obviously have to test more but seems like it added about an hour of usage. I have been working on it as usual this morning and its definitely slower in dropping percentages.

Mike

 

[theosib]

Not as good as Snow Leopard

With Snow Leopard, I used to get on the order of 6 hours of battery life. With 10.7.0, it was about 3 hours. With 10.7.1, it's more like 4.5 hours.

 

[lcseds]

Reminds me of the AT&T signal strength issue with the iPhone. A new update came out and *surprise!* the signal strength went up. Not to say they didn't work a little with power management with this release, but just don't look at the little battery display on the top bar for an increase. One needs to use it as they normally do and average any improvement.

 

[bp1000]

Funny you mention this

On a full charge, just unplugged and idle, once settled it used to read around 8 hours with 10% brightness, keyboard BL and BT off.

Now it was consistently sitting at 10:30.

I don't normally notice as it's normally plugged in all the time. Nice little boost if true.

 

[theosib]

Reminds me of the AT&T signal strength issue with the iPhone. A new update came out and *surprise!* the signal strength went up. Not to say they didn't work a little with power management with this release, but just don't look at the little battery display on the top bar for an increase. One needs to use it as they normally do and average any improvement.

Well, I'm not sure if it makes any difference, but I'm getting my battery life projection from iStat, not Apple's battery menu. Maybe it calculates its own projection, or it just reads the same one that Apple's menu item reports. Dunno.

With 10.7.0, I noticed that SystemUIServer was consistently using 4.4% CPU, at idle. Now, it's usually under 2%, which is an improvement. On the other hand, Safari's WebProcess uses CPU time for no reason (I've got no Flash and no animated images).

Some people complained that the on-die GPU was never being used; I downloaded a program that let me control which GPU was being used, but it didn't make any difference. However, they reported that it did help for them. This may vary between Mac models. I've got a 2011 17" MBP.