Lion Battery Life Nightmare

[seabrey]

Upgraded to Lion from the App Store - have a MacBook Pro 2011 13".

Battery life halved - at best, down from 7 or 8 hours to 3 or 4.

Have reset SMC, calibrated battery, installed gfxcardstatus - all to no avail.

Has anyone found a way of fixing this problem?

 

[Hyper-X]

yes, go back to SL until Apple fixes Lion.

 

[iThinkergoiMac]

Upgraded to Lion from the App Store - have a MacBook Pro 2011 13". [...] installed gfxcardstatus - all to no avail.

gfxcardstatus only helps those who have 2 graphics cards... which you don't.

Lion hasn't affected my battery life at all, so I'm not sure what it may be. Did you have any custom energy settings that got reset when you installed Lion?

 

[GGJstudios]

Upgraded to Lion from the App Store - have a MacBook Pro 2011 13".

Battery life halved - at best, down from 7 or 8 hours to 3 or 4.

Have reset SMC, calibrated battery, installed gfxcardstatus - all to no avail.

Has anyone found a way of fixing this problem?

Read the BATTERY LIFE FROM A CHARGE section of the following link. This should answer most, if not all, of your battery questions:

Apple Notebook Battery FAQ​

 

[windowstomac]

My battery life has gone down (subjectively) maybe 10-15% since Lion but nothing dramatic.

I was travelling a couple of weeks ago and kept finding myself without a power socket and found that just one or two notches down on the screen brightness makes as HUGE difference to how long the battery lasts.

 

[Samimac]

Try deleting old spotlight plugins. My problems was with Office 2011 plugin that caused some how the higher cpu usage and lower battery life.

 

[seabrey]

cheers guys

ithinkergoimac - pretty sure I didn't have any custom energy settings.... how would i check?

windowstomac - yes that's true about the screen brightness, but with 50% brightness I still used to get twice as much juice with SL compared to Lion

samimac - that sounds promising.... whereabouts would I find a list of plug ins?

It's really frustrating. I've got clicktoflash installed, can just be running safari with one tab open, and get the poor battery results I mentioned before.

 

[ssn637]

cheers guys

ithinkergoimac - pretty sure I didn't have any custom energy settings.... how would i check?

windowstomac - yes that's true about the screen brightness, but with 50% brightness I still used to get twice as much juice with SL compared to Lion

samimac - that sounds promising.... whereabouts would I find a list of plug ins?

It's really frustrating. I've got clicktoflash installed, can just be running safari with one tab open, and get the poor battery results I mentioned before.

My battery life was halved with Lion, even following a clean install of 10.7.2 on a MacBook Pro 13" 2010 Core2Duo model. The battery monitor reported 6 to 7 hours' remaining on a full charge, which seemed reasonable, but after around 3 - 4 the system shut down with minimal usage. I've since gone back to Snow Leopard and can easily finish a full day at the office without a charge. Although the IntelCPUPowerManagement extension was updated beginning with 10.7.1 I noted via iStat Menu that when idling the CPU voltage refused to drop below 0.925V. In Snow Leopard the CPU voltage when idling drops to 0.725V, which I assume has a significant impact on battery life.

There's a huge thread over at the Apple Support Forum (must be over 70 pages by now!) where many users reported having brought their systems in to see an Apple Genius only to be told that the new features in Lion simply require more power and it's the price we have to pay for them. For those of us with MacBooks suffering under poor batter life we have the choice between longevity and iCloud. iCloud was nice at the beginning...photo streaming from my iPhone 4 and bookmark synchronizing were fun, but when my iPhone started dying after only a few hours in standby mode I had to delete the iCloud account on it and shut down all but the most necessary notifications.

 

[r0k]

My battery life was halved with Lion, even following a clean install of 10.7.2 on a MacBook Pro 13" 2010 Core2Duo model. The battery monitor reported 6 to 7 hours' remaining on a full charge, which seemed reasonable, but after around 3 - 4 the system shut down with minimal usage. I've since gone back to Snow Leopard and can easily finish a full day at the office without a charge. Although the IntelCPUPowerManagement extension was updated beginning with 10.7.1 I noted via iStat Menu that when idling the CPU voltage refused to drop below 0.925V. In Snow Leopard the CPU voltage when idling drops to 0.725V, which I assume has a significant impact on battery life.

There's a huge thread over at the Apple Support Forum (must be over 70 pages by now!) where many users reported having brought their systems in to see an Apple Genius only to be told that the new features in Lion simply require more power and it's the price we have to pay for them. For those of us with MacBooks suffering under poor batter life we have the choice between longevity and iCloud. iCloud was nice at the beginning...photo streaming from my iPhone 4 and bookmark synchronizing were fun, but when my iPhone started dying after only a few hours in standby mode I had to delete the iCloud account on it and shut down all but the most necessary notifications.

I haven't tried taking my Macbook "on a walk" away from my desk but I do have some experience with iCloud. I set it to NOT push anything from iPhoto on my Mac. This way I only push stuff I choose to manually push.

On my iPhone 4 and iPad 1, I have it set to push photos. Photostream has not affected my battery life on my iPhone but I still have not enabled backup to the cloud nor do I have backup to wifi enabled either. Do you have backup to the cloud enabled? Perhaps that is the difference.

I have kept cable backup around because I only backup a few times a year as mobileme and now icloud pushes around all my calendar and contacts data. I also have to use the cable with image capture to get movies off my phone as iCloud (thankfully) doesn't push them. I have eyefi software and whenever I force it to push a few gig worth of movies I've taken, my battery goes down the tubes, hence my decision to live with "the cable" every now and again.

 

[Samimac]

cheers guys


samimac - that sounds promising.... whereabouts would I find a list of plug ins?

Spotlight plugins are located /library/Spotlight/
The Plugins are called ******.mdimporter

Keep only the those you use. I have mac in my office and I didn't notice any difference in my workflow after deleting that plugin. However, cpu usage was lower.

 

[randolorian]

10.7.3 beta fixed the battery problems for me on a late-2008 MBP. Back to normal now (~4-5hrs instead of 2-3hrs). It's also not as hot as it was with 10.7.2. My suspicion is that the battery problems with Lion are defects in the video drivers that cause the graphics chips to be under more load than normal. This could also be the reason for the degraded graphics performance many users are seeing under Lion.