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Massive drop in battery life after installing Lion

J

joeshaw92

macrumors member
Original poster
Jan 6, 2011
43
0
Hi guys, I installed Lion a couple of days ago when it came out, amd my battery life has been suffering massively. I used to get on average 5 1/2 - 6 hours on a charge, not what was advertised but definitely acceptable. Now, the meter rarely goes over 3 hours, and if it does, not by much.

My laptop is a 2011 13" MBP i5. Any idea on why this is happening and how to fix it?

Cheers
 
Disappointing news. I'm avoiding Lion myself on my MP until the initial bugs are worked out and will probably stick with SL on the MBP for some time due to some programs requiring Rosetta.

You might consider that Spotlight might be doing it's thing. Is this a consistent behavior over several days or is the situation improving?

Also, use the activity monitor to see if you can identify any processes that are running away.
 
I had the exact same problem, and went to the Genius Bar on Friday. They tested my battery first, and it's perfectly healthy (my computer is only a month old), so I just had them do a clean, fresh install of Lion.

After that I didn't have any more glitches or beach balls, but my battery life still seems less.

At this point I don't think there's much we can do. Software isn't optimized for Lion yet, so a lot of programs are worse on Lion than on Snow Leopard.

Try calibrating your battery, and maybe try putting your display at a lower brightness?

I'm truly sorry, you're not the only one with this problem.
 
Same here. I was getting 7 hours of battery life before Lion was installed and I'm lucky to get 3.5 now. My MBP is running quite hot as well.
 
joeshaw92 said:
Hi guys, I installed Lion a couple of days ago when it came out, amd my battery life has been suffering massively. I used to get on average 5 1/2 - 6 hours on a charge, not what was advertised but definitely acceptable. Now, the meter rarely goes over 3 hours, and if it does, not by much.

My laptop is a 2011 13" MBP i5. Any idea on why this is happening and how to fix it?

Cheers
Click to expand...

Def agree! Has nothing to do with spotlight, I've had lion for 3 days now. Battery meter is showing 3 hours 51 minutes, 100% charge, brand new MBP only 9 cycles on it (used to show over 7 hours easily). Only half brightness and running integrated graphics. If i max the brightness and switch to dedicated graphics the battery meter drops to 3 hours 21 minutes - this is insane!!! I feel like I'm using DELL all over again...... :mad::mad::mad:
 
I'm glad I'm not the only one experiencing this. The fan also seems to be going constantly, its audible all the time which is something I'm not used to, and definitely not liking. I'm not doing anything more taxing than I was in 10.6 so I dont understand why it's getting to hot and using so much power.

Lets just hope they fix it in 10.7.1, or something comes along. Annoying because I was told battery life was actually slightly better in lion...
 
I haven't noticed a battery life issue with my 17" MBP. I'm currently conducting a test. Started 50 minutes ago from this writing, currently at 87%. 50% brightness, backlit keyboard off, Bluetooth off, using Wi-Fi, background items like Skype, Dropbox, LogMeIn, iChat, SMC Fan Control, GFX Card Status, MenuMeters, Temperature Monitor, TotalFinder, and Safari with 2 tabs (MacRumors and eBay) all running. Will post my results after I hit 50%, 20%, etc.

The most time I got under Snow Leopard 10.6.8 conducting this test was 6 hours, 31 minutes. Looks like I may possible get a bit more. However, that test was conducted with just a 750GB 7200RPM HDD and normal SuperDrive installed. See sig for current configuration.

FYI, I conduct this test once a month, also re-calibrates my battery so I kill two birds with one stone.
 
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WillEH said:
After running Lion, my MBP seems to warm up faster now. Never had it so hot before. :(
Click to expand...

My experience with lion is that my mbp runs much cooler. Normally it would ramp up to 6200 rpm and 90c running certain apps but now doing the same it stays 2000 rpm. With heavier apps it maxes 4500 rpm where it used to be 6200rpm.
 
This is getting beyond a joke now, all I have open is Facebook on chrome (no flash) and the soundcloud app running and im at 70 degrees! And it had only been turned on for less than 5 minutes. Really getting worked up now, not sure what route to take?
 
I'm going to call Apple Technical support tomorrow just so they have a record of me complaining about it. I really don't know what else i can do.
 
Ditto

Same thing is happening to me. My MBP is running way hotter and draining the battery a lot faster. 3 hours is about what I am getting. It drained %15 in the last few minutes.
 
Zoraka said:
My experience with lion is that my mbp runs much cooler. Normally it would ramp up to 6200 rpm and 90c running certain apps but now doing the same it stays 2000 rpm. With heavier apps it maxes 4500 rpm where it used to be 6200rpm.
Click to expand...

I have same thing. My MBP runs cooler than it was on SL, and actually today I noticed improvement in battery as well. On youtube for example I always ran fans faster around 4000 rpm and was in mid 60sties Celsius where now with 2000 rpm im in same range. So for my machine Lion is definitely improvement. After using it unplugged for like 45 minutes, internet only, it shows 8:49 battery left. Keyboard is off and screen dimmed to half brightness, skype is running on background, chrome with several tabs, bluetooth mouse, smcfan, missin control with 3 desktops....
 
Pay for what you get...

I observe this forum since OSX Leopard premiere and I can say that Apple customers are so much focused on unnecessary features that you lose sight of really important things i.e. battery life is one of most important factor in mobile computer, same with temperatures. Especially because everyone knows that MacBooks are really hot under load. During last years computers are so efficient that performance is more than satisfied.

... and I am really surprised that Apple customers write that OSX Lion generate troubles. Historically Snow Leopard decreased battery life significantly and also increased temperatures compared to Leopard. Incompatibility issue with Adobe products. You do not have to be prophet or fairy to predict that it will happen with Lion.

Almost everyone is telling us that new Apple OSX is faster, smarter, easier and very very impressive. Definitely worth to update and to have ;-)

It seems that it really does not matter if you brand new Lion 10.7 make your Mac 10 Celsius degree hotter than before update. The important is fact that I have BRAND new OS and I am on the top ;-)

I really can not understand it. How can you be so blind and praise OS if it cuts your battery life time about a half??? Do you really require a new polished interface, natural gestures, Mission Control etc ? Where is the line? How much of battery life that you can tolerate in the name of Apple lifestyle: 1 hour, 30 minutes, 2 minutes? I am damn sure even if next OSX will consume your battery life, RAM and CPU resources about 99.9999% you will buy it. Just because it is new and from Apple.

Is it worth to spend money for new OS if this will give you just theoretical boost (generally less perfomance in benchmarks) and visible decreased battery life about half? Is it worth to write about new gestures if fans in my Mac are louder? I do not think so...
 
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get gfxcardstatus and force integrated, I'm getting 7+ hours in lion. flash disabled too - clicktoplugin
 
gfxstatus would make no difference, I'm using a 13" so i dont have a choice. And in chrome i'm using flash block to stop flash from running when its unwanted.

I've reset my SMC, lets see if that makes a difference
 
I just did a clean install after initially doing the upgrade (wanted to clean a bunch of stuff out). So far, seems the battery is about the same - doing the upgrade yielded me the same life I had with SL. I have two desktops right now, one with Safari/Mail and the other with Coda/Preview, keyboard lights off, auto brightness, and it's telling me I have about 6:50 left (this after about an hour of use already). Not bad.
 
I had it saying around 6:50-7:20 left when it was saying 85-90% left, but my test just concluded and I got a mere 6 hours, 2 minutes (running the same things consistently, on the same table). So about a 30 minute drop from my SL tests.
 
limo79 said:
Pay for what you get...

I observe this forum since OSX Leopard premiere and I can say that Apple customers are so much focused on unnecessary features that you lose sight of really important things i.e. battery life is one of most important factor in mobile computer, same with temperatures. Especially because everyone knows that MacBooks are really hot under load. During last years computers are so efficient that performance is more than satisfied.

... and I am really surprised that Apple customers write that OSX Lion generate troubles. Historically Snow Leopard decreased battery life significantly and also increased temperatures compared to Leopard. Incompatibility issue with Adobe products. You do not have to be prophet or fairy to predict that it will happen with Lion.

Almost everyone is telling us that new Apple OSX is faster, smarter, easier and very very impressive. Definitely worth to update and to have ;-)

It seems that it really does not matter if you brand new Lion 10.7 make your Mac 10 Celsius degree hotter than before update. The important is fact that I have BRAND new OS and I am on the top ;-)

I really can not understand it. How can you be so blind and praise OS if it cuts your battery life time about a half??? Do you really require a new polished interface, natural gestures, Mission Control etc ? Where is the line? How much of battery life that you can tolerate in the name of Apple lifestyle: 1 hour, 30 minutes, 2 minutes? I am damn sure even if next OSX will consume your battery life, RAM and CPU resources about 99.9999% you will buy it. Just because it is new and from Apple.

Is it worth to spend money for new OS if this will give you just theoretical boost (generally less perfomance in benchmarks) and visible decreased battery life about half? Is it worth to write about new gestures if fans in my Mac are louder? I do not think so...
Click to expand...

Is this a rant directed toward Apple? Just making sure.
 
Quick heads up, there is a slight improvement after resetting SMC. Not a huge one but I'd say its added about an hour onto the battery life, definitely something to try if youre having problems.

I'll report back later and let you know what I get estimated at full battery
 
I have been experiencing battery issues on my MBP since the installation of Lion however, I think I have it narrowed down as to what is causing the problem.

It does not seem to matter what I am doing, the battery life is always about what it used to be, until I launch Safari.

It seems that the scrolling both up and down and forwards and backwards is caning the battery. If you look at Activity Monitor, the CPU and memory use increases significantly when scrolling.

For example, my battery at the moment says that it has 7hrs 1min whilst I am typing this post.

If I start scrolling backwards and forwards or up and down web pages, within minutes it is reporting back that I have just over 4hrs remaining.

Could anyone else report back if they are having the same issues?

Thanks in advance

Jason
 
ABadSanta said:
Is this a rant directed toward Apple? Just making sure.
Click to expand...

Definitely no, but I am curious where is rationalism with no excuses?
This is not a right direction to cut battery life and increased CPU load. Most of these features are not worth it. You do not need another Windows on Mac.
 
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