Battery life dropped considerably on Mountain Lion.

I see a massive power problem too and the activity monitor shows that my Macbook Pro keeps itself pretty busy by generating every few seconds a crash report. I am not experienced enough to interpret these reports.

Overall, however, the system seems too work albeit slower than before and obviously getting very hot and draining battery. I have not yet identified an application that would not work.

For MBP users, use of the discrete, higher-performance NVIDIA graphics card has been—in my experience—the biggest consistent source for battery drain. For more control over this process, I started using gfxCardStatus. Why this helps:

Many apps request use of the discrete chip when the integrated Intel HD 4000 can handle the app's graphics processing needs just fine and with little/no observable performance lag. Reeder is one app I use that's guilty of this. Tweetbot does this as well. These are two apps that work perfectly fine and perform smoothly if I were to use them on a MacBook Air, which only has the integrated Intel chip.

gfxCardStatus lets you override the MBP's dynamic switching and manually select which card to use via a menubar icon. The menubar icon also lets you know which apps are requesting use of the discrete chip.

It lets you set overrides based on your power source: I have my Retina MBP set to always use the more power-efficient integrated chip when on battery, and dynamically switch as needed/requested by apps when plugged in. I'm basically telling the MBP, "Hey, when you're on battery, pretend you only have an Intel HD 4000 chip, like a MacBook Air."

You can set gfcCardStatus to send Growl notifications whenever the computer switches chips. I find this helpful because I now have a better sense of which apps request to use the nVidia card and I get to decide if the request is warranted.

In the event you are using an app where the benefit from using the discrete chip outweighs the power savings of the integrated chip (e.g. gaming, image editing, working with HD video, etc.), flipping the switch is as easy as a few clicks on a menubar item.

Before using gfxCardStatus, I was getting about 4-5 hours of life before fully draining the MacBook. Now, I'm getting 6-8 hours, depending on screen brightness, WiFi use (continuous wireless data transfer—like when you're syncing large files with Dropbox—is another big power drainer), and processor load.

As for increased battery drain since the Mountain Lion upgrade: I'm willing to bet ML is requesting more use of the higher-performance chip than Lion did, or it's been set to be more lax about switching over to it. I say this because I'm forcing my MBP to use the integrated chip while on battery and haven't experience a loss of battery life.

Hope this helps!

hi i was the same the problem and i just done a clean installlation and now its beter again like before .i hope it will work for u as well.

Hi! How many days did you wait before the battery life turned to normal? Im having the same issues and since Im not a techie, this whole battery thing is driving me nuts. Hope you could help me. Thanks in advance!

@ JAlger I'll also try this out tonight.

@ People that are inquiring about installing Mountain Lion:

Have you guys considered creating a second partition on your Macbook, and having a main partition with Lion and a secondary one with Mountain Lion? I'm trying that tonight, and if Mountain Lion refuses to work [well], I'll remove that partition and rededicate the space to my Lion partition, and wait until Mountain Lion is fixed.

i have finally found the problem guys.

u used to close aplication by aplication to see what was going wrong, and i found that ADOBE FLASH PLAYER

its draining the power of battery.

just for knowladge, when i powered up 100% battery charge, in 10 minutes of normal use was on 89%, 2hours maximun battery life, and now, after the change it got back to 5 hours.

soo hope help you guys with the find.

hope that adobe release a fix soon

It's not just Adobe, many other programs do the exact same thing, the problem is finding out which one of those that is default installed on every Macbook with the problem.

Exactly, we all know FLASH is a killer app for resources and battery drain. All my tests I do without flash running. It something else big as well. As least with flash you can see the CPU drain/usage! Whatever is going wrong for most of us, is NOT attributable to flash!

Well,

When i closed ADOBE FLASH PLAYER on TASK MANAGER, my battery just goes back! Just try it! But off course there are other programs that may be causing problems as well. But my major problem is now solved.🙂

The problem is not solved ... these are just tweaks that WE are doing and not Apple.

guptaadhip's post was the most illuminating in this regard. Apple techies should have seen this and acknowledged at least.

Moreover, from L to ML brings us the problem, ceteris paribus. So, this should be Apple's responsibility to fix. I wonder how many of the 3 million ML downloaders are having this issue 😐

Please, take a look at the 'More like this' box in the upper right... 😊

Yes...

Yes.

And I have a brand new Mid-2012 MacBook Air.

This thing just ***** juice now.

It was great before, like 7hrs light browsing and 3hrs power hogging.

Now I just watch the percentage go down every couple of minutes (or less)!

Really bad issue for an ultraportable, especially when you sacrafice on CPU so that you can have a lighter system and then, after a software 'update', it starts burnin' fuel like a beastly desktop.

Please fix this SOON Apple!

Not the system man, this problem is wide-spread. Forbes magazine is writing all about it even.

I've got a brand new Air, which I assumed this OS was built for, and it just drains the battery wayyy faster than before.

re: Fat Cat (Lion)

I had great battery life on Lion.