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Has anyone noticed any battery life decrease after upgrading to Lion?

I'm on MacBook Pro (mid-2010). Before, on Snow Leopard, when unplugged I had minimum 5hrs of life. Now, it's not much above 4hrs at best. Is this a common problem?

I notice the estimate battery life now fluctuates a lot more than before, too.

UPDATE

Battery life is definitely lower than before upgrading. I'm getting up to about 5hrs of work now while I was able to pull out 6-7 before.

Re RAM usage. I'm not a heavy RAM user tbh. I always have at least 0.5GB RAM completely free and most of the time it's around 1GB free at least so this can't be it.

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Is this a reduction in the estimated battery life, the actual battery life, or both? – Mike Scott Jul 24 '11 at 14:46
I haven't tested thoroughly but my impression is that both seem to be reduced a bit. – Michal M Jul 24 '11 at 21:18
I noticed my battery life seems to have decreased lately as well, but didn't think to attribute it to Lion. Interesting... – michaelmichael Jul 25 '11 at 20:50

3 Answers

up vote 2 down vote accepted

Yes!

Both me and my girlfriend have had the feeling that the battery life has decreased significantly with Lion on our 2010 MacBook Pro's, compared to Snow Leopard. Especially when the machine is "sleeping" (when you just close the lid). Unfortunately, we don't have any numbers to back this up (yet).

I've been trying to determine what the problem could be, but it's a bit tricky due to the sheer amount of variable factors. We're pretty much running the same applications as before, and nothing seems to be out of the ordinary when examining the running processes and hardware utilization. We've both got 8GB or RAM, which should be more than enough for Lion (it doesn't write to scratch).

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up vote 4 down vote

Rather than looking at the estimated time remaining, use your machine to determine if there is an actual difference or if it's just a change in the battery-life-remaining algorithm

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up vote 1 down vote

Lion is said to run best with 4GB of ram. Snow Leopard didn't demand that much. I haven't tested Lion on older systems, but it is logical to conclude that because it demands more of your machine it will decrease battery life.

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Downvoter, care to say why? This is pretty reasonable answer - if a system is short of RAM it's going to work the HDD harder and use more battery. – JRobert Jul 25 '11 at 22:34

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