Battery life dropped considerably on Mountain Lion.

I've gone from 64% to 56% just since beginning reading this thread. (Again, on an Air!)

Back to report on my rMBP that I received today.

With 60% brightness, I get 5 hours right after updating to Mountain Lion. I got 7 hours on Lion, but the thing is, Spotlight is still indexing. I'll post back with results. Still very content with my MBP.

Edit: After Spotlight was done indexing, I shot up to 7 and a half hours. Sorry guys, I'm not one of you, but I'll try to help you out still!

Sounds to me that the battery life is getting drained from defunct function calls or something related due to incompatibility.

The question is just "What is making those defunct calls?"

If they are not happening on all systems with the same configuration, e.g. all 256GB Mid-2012 MacBook Airs, than would that not indicate that the problem is not with driver support but rather has something to do with the applications installed on the user's system and how they are / are not optimized for Mountain Lion.

My first guess was that the new updates and other web integration would be causing a lot of system operations and physical wireless transmissions in the background.

I'm hoping that this is an optimisation problem that will be dealt with via OS and/or app updates.

I'm really hoping that this is NOT the new norm because, if that's the case, I think I'd rather go back to Lion.

The defunct calls are mostly made by spotlight and other disk utility tools or processes running in the background. Please try the step that i had given in the thread and let me know if it works for you!

Mostly I have seen that the disk read and write is usually high as compared to what it should be. Looking at that i can conclude some issues with the disk read/write.

Also Its been more than 12 hrs since the last complete change and a sleep of around 6 hrs during the night. My battery still says 40% and 2:55 time remaining.

The steps have surely made a difference to the speed and the battery life on my MBP 15.

jpengland96 wrote:

I upgraded to mountail Lion and now my battery life is about half of what it was before upgrading. Shouldn't the update improve battery life? Also, what can I do about this?

I think I have your guys' answer. Push notifications. Battery problems were an issue with iOS 5 when it was released along side the iPhone 4S. One of the newest features for iOS was push notifications.

Push notifications isn't only famous for draining battery on iOS devices. Androids and Windows phones are included, just do a Google search for "push notifications battery life" and see what the results are.

It's always connecting and looking for information to bring to the device or computer and in the end may result in low battery life.

I'm sure Apple will address this in the near future, but in the mean time here's some articles I found that may help some of you out.

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT5362

http://support.apple.com/kb/PH11427

http://support.apple.com/kb/PH11433

http://support.apple.com/kb/PH11446

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1446

There may be other settings to take a look at too, maybe just take a look at some of the new options under System Preferences and see what you can find to turn off.

This is my summary, i have a MacBook5,1 13", Intel Core 2 Duo, 2.4Ghz, alluminium, unibody late 2008 with 8GB of RAM:

1. Lion and Mountain Lion are not iOS 5 so there is not the same bug about the battery drain.
2. In Snow Leopard the battery works greatly for me. Not in Lion and Mountain Lion. I have upgraded Snow Leopard to Lion and Lion to Mountain Lion. On the daddy's Mac (white MacBook7,1 13", Middle 2010 with 4GB of RAM) the upgrade from Snow Leopard to Lion has worked greatly and the horrible battery drain not exist (more of 7 hours!!!!).
3. The SMC reset not works. I don't remember the current version of the SMC Framework, so i will try to update to the 1.328f version (http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1237, http://support.apple.com/downloads/MacBook_SMC_Firmware_Update_1_2). Probably i have this version already installed.
4. The PRAM reset not works (so, i can deduce that the battery drain bug is not a hardware problem).
5. Other tricks, not work.
6. With or without FileVault 2 enabled, i have the same battery duration problem.
7. Flash is a "****-app" but the battery drain not depends on it.
8. Battery drain not depends on iCloud or Notifications.
9. Battery drain not depends on WOL, HD sleep or Found My Mac service.
10. Battery drain not depends on Mail.
11. I thought that the battery drain could depends on EFI Firmware (i have 8GB of RAM in my Mac), but maybe isn't, becuse i have the lastest EFI firmware (http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1237). I will try with only 4GB of RAM.
12. Battery drain not depends on SuperDriver Firmaware Update (http://support.apple.com/kb/DL974 when you update your EFI firmware, Apple advise you to install the SuperDriver Firmware Update (http://support.apple.com/downloads/SuperDrive_Firmware_Update_3_0) for reduce the noise made by the optical disk drive during wake from sleep on Mac.
13. Battery calibrations, not works.
14. Battery drain not depends on screen brightness.
15. When the Mac is sleeping, it drain the battery (after 3hours, like 7%).
16. I have FileVault 2 enabled. If i start the Mac and close the lid when the login request appears (it appears before of the white Apple because i'm using FileVault 2), when i re-open the lid after some hours and press the power button, the battery is drained (after 8 hours less on about 3%).
17. The max battery duration with 100% of charge is about 2h and 30min. I have two original batteries, they have the same problem.
18. I have tryed removing FileVault 2 but the battery drain persist.
19. I have tryed with a new blank installation of Lion (i have created another partitions, with FileVault disabled) but the battery drain persist.
20. I will try again.

So... the battery drain is due to:

1. Incorrect EFI firmware installed?
2. OS X hungry deamon or agent?
3. Incorrect RAM support (maybe not because i have installed 8GB when i was using Snow Leopard, without horrible battery drain)?
4. Other ideas????

Same here - late-2008 unibody MacBook here (not a Pro), and battery life is - yep - about half what it was under Lion since the ML upgrade.

G8 Production, thanks again for all the hard work and detailed analysis. This thread is certainly mirroring the thread from the Snow Leopard to Lion. There are some very smart people between these threads. Here is my conclusion from a different angle;

1. Some people NEVER have had the problem

2. Some people, the problem rarely goes away for long (if ever) despite what they try

3. Things you do, often make it appear the battery life gets better, only for it to have been a false alarm

And Apple needs to;

1. Tell us what's running in background - they needed me to send them logs to tell ME what's running!

2. Give us a utility showing what is consuming battery (over a day) as per my Samsung Droid S3

3. Acknowledge the problem (in 3 days, they ackknowledged Iphone battery drain), now it's been a year!

4. Since things do "fix" battery for a while, tell us why. Why were those "hogs" there in the first place!

5. They hired the GFXCARDSTATUS developer - put him on it, there are GPU issues as well

And last but not least, don't you at least get this APPLE?- we are wasting HOURS here doing YOUR job. Out of respect to all of us here - why don't you participate and HELP us. I spent $4,500 on my machine 1 year ago almost to the day - and in all that time, me and YOU have never found the problem NOR ever admitted a problem (or 3 hours is the norm). Now we are seeing tons more and it's even effecting AIR now.

Give us a break - show some respect - PLEASE!

You're absolutely right Franc_Iphone ... every word.

Could we turn to Facebook for "Apple Spring" to get our vioces heard? Any takers???

I know it will drain your batteries even faster. Still, I feel it is rather important to get Apple's attention/acknowledgement.

My problem is "per cent" changing all the time and decrease really fast 😟

frustrating

any solutions?

guptaadhip

Re: Battery life dropped considerably on Mountain Lion.

Aug 1, 2012 7:04 AM ( in response to jpengland96)

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

guptaadhip wrote:

The defunct calls are mostly made by spotlight and other disk utility tools or processes running in the background. Please try the step that i had given in the thread and let me know if it works for you!

Mostly I have seen that the disk read and write is usually high as compared to what it should be. Looking at that i can conclude some issues with the disk read/write.

Also Its been more than 12 hrs since the last complete change and a sleep of around 6 hrs during the night. My battery still says 40% and 2:55 time remaining.

The steps have surely made a difference to the speed and the battery life on my MBP 15.

Thank you guptaadhip,

I've done the verify disk permissions and check disk in disk utilities. It corrected an error with the permission of the core graphics as well as one with java.

I was still having some issues but resettign the SMC seems to have helped.

Also, I think that there is still some difference in battery life from Lion but this is likely due to the push notifications, as I assumed the entire original problem was. I notice that battery life goes down more quickly when I have the Mail app open but, again, looks like it is getting closer to what I'd expect.

The indexing doesn't seem to be a concern for me btw because I'm on a new MBA that reads/writes at 450/400 MB/s. Spotlight never shows indexing when cursored over, even after I followed the steps from your OP.

Thanks again,

phillyry.

MelonPig,

see above per solution from guptaadhip

the guptaadhip's solution NOT WORK (for me)!!!!

Franc_Iphone wrote:

G8 Production, thanks again for all the hard work and detailed analysis. This thread is certainly mirroring the thread from the Snow Leopard to Lion. There are some very smart people between these threads. Here is my conclusion from a different angle;

1. Some people NEVER have had the problem

2. Some people, the problem rarely goes away for long (if ever) despite what they try

3. Things you do, often make it appear the battery life gets better, only for it to have been a false alarm

And Apple needs to;

1. Tell us what's running in background - they needed me to send them logs to tell ME what's running!

2. Give us a utility showing what is consuming battery (over a day) as per my Samsung Droid S3

3. Acknowledge the problem (in 3 days, they ackknowledged Iphone battery drain), now it's been a year!

4. Since things do "fix" battery for a while, tell us why. Why were those "hogs" there in the first place!

5. They hired the GFXCARDSTATUS developer - put him on it, there are GPU issues as well

And last but not least, don't you at least get this APPLE?- we are wasting HOURS here doing YOUR job. Out of respect to all of us here - why don't you participate and HELP us. I spent $4,500 on my machine 1 year ago almost to the day - and in all that time, me and YOU have never found the problem NOR ever admitted a problem (or 3 hours is the norm). Now we are seeing tons more and it's even effecting AIR now.

Give us a break - show some respect - PLEASE!

Franc_Iphone

Did you tryguptaadhip's solution?