Battery life dropped considerably on Mountain Lion.

Hi guys

I posted a coupled of times on the forum linked to you by Franc_iPhone. My short history is:

- SL: 6-8 hours life I would guess. I never tested it as it was never an issue.

- Upgrade to Lion Jan 2012 - 3:30 hours life (real life tested)

- Searched web, found forums etc

- All the Apple stores I went to denied any knowledge and seemed surprised at the forums

- Was on the verge of taking my early 2011 15" MBP back to the Apple store for diagnostic etc, when an EFI update came out (end of Jan or begining of Feb) and that fixed matters immediately. Now up to 6-8 hours (I have never done a 100% to 0% test as it lasts too long for me)

Can I suggest that you all listen to Franc_iPhone. He is a well experienced with this issue and, to my mind, has always been involved, helpful and polite - others have not been so.

This is a deeper issue than closing a few legacy apps, following Apple's guidance on battery health, and doing an SMC reset. I was lucky. I only lived with this for a month, but others have had a year of this and have tried everything (not Everything, just everything!).

I am not upgrading to ML as the risk of lost battery health is a pain.

Franc, keep up the efforts. They are appreciated. Hopefully Apple will really focus on this issue.

No battery life degradation on my MBA 2012 after installing Mountain Lion. 😎

Battery life is still as good as it used to be with Lion.

Hi all,

I clean installed Mountain Lion on the 28th, and I'm experiencing some battery life issues as well.

It dropped from 10h to 5h30 top.

I have a late 2011 Macbook Pro 15" that came with Lion :

- 2,4GHz intel core i7

- 8Go 1333MHz DDR3

I tried these things you've all been through :

- GFX CardStatus

- Reset PRAM

- Reset SMC

PRAM & SMC helped getting back up to 5h30 when 100% charged as it was only 2h after install. But obviously, not good enough.

FYI : I've tried these 3 options only on the following day after having rebooted several times and installed all updates available..... so during some kind of cruise status...

I suggest as many people as possible run some identical tests on their machine, and thereafter post them in a different topic, so that Apple can have a database to work on.

Tests such as : copying x files, of x size, then all watching a video on youtube.... and then take the battery life and % left, with screenshots of the activity monitor.... This still has to be specified, but I really think it may be helpful.

Cheers

Kriswin wrote:

Oh well, I'm getting my rMBP today, I'll install ML and tell you the results.

There's a fair chance it comes with that beast already.

Nah, it went to Preparing for Shipment on the 26th, I highly doubt it would have come with it. I'd be heavily pleased though.

Thank you Forbes for finally getting the word out. 176++ pages of posts on apple's forums for all of us poor suckers who upgraded to SL and have had this problem for over a year have gotten barely any attention from Apple. We were all waiting with bated breath for ML to see if they had fixed it behind the scenes and just werent telling us. When in fact, its happening to more and more people's computers. My mid-2009 MBP got 7 hrs of consistent battery life, immediately upon "upgrading" to SL it dropped to 2-3 hours. Like most of you, I can literally sit and watch my % drop sometimes 1% per minute. This is with light non-flash browsing and mail open in the background.

I am so very frustrated with apple mainly for the lack of response on their part. We have been begging, no - more like SCREAMING - for at least a response from them with acknowledgement of the problem at that they are working on it, and a few have claimed to have been able to get a hold of someone within the company, but other than a few possible folks (with no results to speak of) mostly its been crickets.

Now that its "hit the press" so-to-speak and might affect their PR and possibly bottom line, they will hopefully announce that they are searching to find a fix for it. WE NEED TO GET PUBLIC ABOUT THIS PROBLEM - otherwise Apple will continue to turn a blind eye to a significant problem with their computers. Twitter, Facebook, whatever - this needs to get out.

And yes, before you say it, I know Apple doesn't moderate their support forums and so "officially" didn't speak up for that reason, but really? If I was a business and a topic of this magnitude exploded on my forums, you better believe I'd at least stop by to collect info and inform my valued customers to rest assured that we're working on the problem. But thats just me.

If I sound perturbed, I am. I expected much better from Apple.

Folk,

At last found a solution for the battery life issue. Please read the complete reply for detailed explanation.

I have a Mac Book Pro 15 Early 2011 (2.2 GHz Intel Core I7, 4 GB DDR3 RAM), I had upgraded from Lion -> Mountain Lion a couple of days back. I was very disappointed when i saw that the battery life dropped dramatically from 6+ hrs on a full charge to around 2 hrs on full charge.

The activity monitor showed no deviation from the normal. I was very disappointed and was planning to downgrade but then out of curiosity I thought lets go ahead and see what the issue can be. I tried the following,

- Reset PRAM

- Reset SMC

After doing the same, I didnt find much difference may be a few minutes added. But going on further, I realized that people who have done a complete install, I mean a clean slate install are not facing this issue. This triggered a doubt that may be there is something to do with the disk as when left alone suddenly the fan speed used to go up and even we could feel something to the disk. Realizing the same, I did the following verification on the disk using the Disk Utility (Applications->Utilities->Disk Utilities)

-Verify Disk

-Verify Disk Permissions

I found out that there were a lot of warnings that i found in them. The first one gave hard file pointer issue and the second one listed out many library files where the permissions were messed up.

To Repair the same I followed the following steps,

1. Unselect all the types of files in Spotlight (System Preferences -> Spotlight)

2. Run Disk Utility

3. Verify Disk Permissions

4. Repair Disk Permissions

5. Verify Disk

6. Repair Disk Permissions

On the 6th step i got a notification to proceed with disk repair during startup. I hence followed the instructions,

1. Reboot system

2. Press Command + R during boot

3. Select Disk Utility from the option in the menu

4. Verify Disk

5. Repair Disk

6. Verify Disk Permissions (Just to be sure)

If any disk permission erros are found then,

7. Repair Disk Permissions

Reboot the system.

In Spotlight select only the required types of files and then keep the system idle for a while so that the indexes are made by spotlight.

This has really helped with the battery life on my system. As i am typing my Battery is at 92% and shows 8:25 remaining.

I have even realized running safari is using less battery power as compared to Chrome. I would leave it on the users to choose the best. I just wanted to point out that there is affect of the battery life while running Chrome (dont know why).

Last resort for people whos battery problems are not solved by this is to do a complete clean system reinstall of Mountain Lion.

Cheers,

Adhip Gupta

I to recently upgraded my 2009 MBP to Mountain Lion after installing a new 1TB Western Digital Harddrive and upgrading from 4GB RAM to 8GB. I was worried that my new HD was somewhat of a power monster because my battery life is about 3 hours MAX now, from about 7 previously. I started researching threads recently and saw a few complaints about Mountain Lion, but nothing too serious. A few told me to search out what and this is what I found in my activity monitor: (I'm pretty new to the technical side of things so bare with me, I'm a noob).

• Process "mds" consuming approximately 98-100% of CPU while idle and about 60-80% while using apps like Chrome (which is consuming about 20-30%)
• While idle I'm using 5.78 GB of RAM with about 3.5 GB labeled as "Active"

I woke up this morning and checked my Facebook for about 5 minutes and made one post, while using safari, Battery life went from 95% to 90%. I then decided to check a few news sites and email a friend a few photos I took recently, battery life to 83% by the time it actually sent. Combined total time of usage approx 30 minutes. Seriously Apple?! Battery life was so monsterously important under Jobs but now doesn't seem to matter at all under Cook. If my battery life is going to be worse than a PC with your newest and greatest, *** is the point of upgrading? My laptop has now become a desktop... awesome. Thanks for turning my slick piece of computing technology into a worthless piece of junk. "Apple is the largest mobile company in the world" (steve jobs at the launch of the iPhone 4), well now they've completely reversed that with Mountain Lion. FIX THE ISSUE APPLE!

guptaadhip

I have not tried this on MountainLion but a number of us did when we upgraded from Snow Leopard. You can see from the earlier 170+ page thread.

However, eventually things start going downhill again very quickly, in a day or 2. Maybe it won't with Mountain. I can hope!

The GOOD news is always, these things/tweaks/jigs shows, the same hardware, the same PROGRAMS, CAN see a huge leap in battery life SO surely, it shows APPLE can fix it. We are a YEAR into this problem now.

Please check back in a day or two to tell us if it works for you!

guptaadhip wrote:

Folk,

At last found a solution for the battery life issue. Please read the complete reply for detailed explanation....

Interesting observation.

Way back in Ye Olde Days when cats were kittens or even before, it was customary for any power user to undertake somewhat major disk maintenance on the Mac every so often. Stuff like repairing disks, permissions, clearing caches, and miscellaneous tidying up. And the Macs kept rolling.

Come "modern" times and all these activities fell into disuse. Heck, they were even looked down upon, like quaint dinosaurs of the past. And the Macs didn't roll too good anymore.

Its been around 40+ hours and counting. The initial few hours were bad after the step i had followed as Spotlight took a lot of it for the indexing. I have been watching movies, Games, surfing and youtube vids seems to be going strong. even there is a difference in the speed of the system.

Its always worth a try to use the steps. The are not hazardous if they dont do good, atleast wont do any bad 🙂.

Apart from the clean slate reinstall.

Cheers

I am having the same problem. Lion gave 6+ hours, but ML is giving hardly 3. After reading a few forums, I tried a few things.

1. Reset PRAM/SMC.

2. Close apps like Sugarsync, Dropbox. I also closed Mail app and Messages app.

These two things did increase battery life to about 4.5 hours from 3 hours.

I did a clean install last evening and haven't installed any app other than what gets installed with Mountain Lion. Mail, Messages, Safari closed, my MBP showes 8+ hours of battery life. If I open Safari, Mail, it shows 5-6 hours and then jumps to 7+ hours in a few mins.

I left it on sleep all night, and the battery had dropped by 8 percent in the morning (Not sure if that is normal)

I'll test it out another day or two before installing other applications back.

That's awesome, seems like we've found a few temporary fixes until Apple comes out with an official comment.

What we've tried [and worked]:

Reseting PRAM/SMC will only solve the problem temporarily [1-2 days max]

Closing programs that are incompatible with Apple [so far, the majority who used this haven't come back complaining that it came back]

Repair+Verify Disk + Disk Permissions [refer to guptaadhip's post, seemed to work a while]

Clean Install [has helped some, with no problem coming back]

Has anyone tried all of the above and still has problems?