Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

DeadPixel217

macrumors member
Original poster
Jul 22, 2011
31
0
I know many many others are suffering the same problem as me when it comes to battery life on a MacBook Pro. I get a MAXIMUM of 2 hours with brightness bow, no backlight and locked to the integrated GPU. This is completely unacceptable and far short of the 7 hour promise. I'm reading forums and I get 2 hours? Is there anyway to get Apple to sort out this problem? I didn't pay several thousand pounds for a laptop that holds its charge less than my first generation netbook.
 
______________________________________________________
Have a look at Activity Monitor (Applications / Utilities /) and select All Processes and sort by CPU to see what the culprit may be.

image below uses sorting by CPU as an example
Acitivty_Monitor.png

Further reading:
______________________________________________________​
______________________________________________________
Check out the section titled "BATTERY LIFE FROM A CHARGE" in the following FAQ:

This should answer most, if not all, of your battery questions:
Apple Notebook Battery FAQ by GGJstudios
______________________________________________________
 
The OP only has one 2011 15" MBP and a 2007 MB, according to the signature. Or are you referring to something else?

oops! I misread the MB to an MBP.
.............

OP do you effectively get only 2 hours battery life (forget what is being displayed) ?
Do you have a battery utility (like coconut or iStats) to check your battery health?
 
Mhmm, been on my late 2011 for 1h 10 so far and I've got 6h 23 remaining... keyboard backlight is on and my display brightness is a few notches up from minimum.

In other words, as other posters are alluding to, there's something happening on your machine that's draining the battery and it certainly isn't typical for everyone. Either you've got a runaway process munching CPU cycles or your battery is duff.
 
I saw a huge drop in battery life on my mid 2010 MBP after "upgrading" to Lion. I have since went back to Snow Leopard, but I'm still not seeing 7 hours like I was prior to the switch to Lion. I now get about 4 hours. I do play games on FB that are flash intensive. I find that when I do anything that involves Flash player, it causes the battery to drain super-fast, fans kick on, and computer heats up excessively. This was NOT the case before updating the OS to Lion.
 
I saw a huge drop in battery life on my mid 2010 MBP after "upgrading" to Lion. I have since went back to Snow Leopard, but I'm still not seeing 7 hours like I was prior to the switch to Lion. I now get about 4 hours. I do play games on FB that are flash intensive. I find that when I do anything that involves Flash player, it causes the battery to drain super-fast, fans kick on, and computer heats up excessively. This was NOT the case before updating the OS to Lion.

if you downgraded back, then Lion shouldn't be the issue... are you sure your computer battery isn't just getting old/vents are getting clogged with dirt particles?
 
I find that when I do anything that involves Flash player, it causes the battery to drain super-fast, fans kick on, and computer heats up excessively. This was NOT the case before updating the OS to Lion.
This is common, no matter which version of Mac OS X. Flash is notorious for being demanding on system resources. It's true in Lion, SL and Leopard.
 
I saw a huge drop in battery life on my mid 2010 MBP after "upgrading" to Lion. I have since went back to Snow Leopard, but I'm still not seeing 7 hours like I was prior to the switch to Lion. I now get about 4 hours. I do play games on FB that are flash intensive. I find that when I do anything that involves Flash player, it causes the battery to drain super-fast, fans kick on, and computer heats up excessively. This was NOT the case before updating the OS to Lion.
I'm also enjoying 7+ hours with my 15" Mid 2010 MBP running 10.6.8. It's returned great battery run times since I bought it new when Apple released this model. Frankly I'd be happy with 5 or 6, I didn't expect to get such outstanding life.

I'm so glad I decided not to take the risk that is Lion, instead leaving well enough alone.

That said, the path I took since I was somewhat interested in trying Lion, but not at the expense of my other trouble free Macs, was to buy a new 13" 2011 MBA. I'm disappointed in the relatively short & inconsistent battery life. I can't even quote a time since it varies a lot.

This tells me there's an inherent issue that still needs to be sorted out by Apple. I guess time will tell. At least, for me it's just a secondary laptop running an OS that I'm not fond of anyway. Perhaps as time goes by Apple will improve it.
 
just surfing the web and listening to itunes i get btween 6-8 hours depending on the lighting condition i need. this is also on an ssd.
 
I just picked up my MBP 3 days ago. I'm getting about 6 hours or mixed use. I'm extremely happy with that seeing as though I came from a windows based laptop that would maybe get 3.5 hours or mixed use.
 
I've not actually ran the battery down fully yet on my late 2011 13" but projected time remaining tends to put it around 6-7 hours for light use and 5 ish watching videos. A Flash ad or two on a website seems to reduce that substantially though.

ETA: Trying to use Handbrake on battery reduces it to about 1.5-2 hours. Not that I would normally use the battery for that but I was just trying to get an idea of what is likely the worst case scenario so it was either that or gaming which has a similar effect (but that wold not run the optical drive).
 
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.