Battery life dropped considerably on Mountain Lion.

Yes, I got the call also, the weird thing is that after the call seems my battery got back to normal. I am just testing it now, with 90% it has almost 4 hours remaining. I took a PS from the screen to test if it indeed will take this time.

The good thing is that Apple is watching the forum and investigating the problem.

I just hang up with a guy from Apple in California as well.

He sent me this app to gather information on my system, and asked for a file with the information in the activity monitor.

He also asked questions regards to how I use my MBP on a regular basis.

My advice : keep posting on this discussion as I think this is how they find people to contact, and the more the better for them... and for us !

I am not expecting them to come up with a solution by tomorrow, but at least we are now aware that engineers are working on it 😉

Good night from France !

I second many of the remarks on shorter battery life (MB Air 13"). I have noticed a 20% lower battery life without any usage pattern change on my part: Office, Safari, Chrome is 80% of what I do.

Adding my voice to the thread to get Apple to pay attention.

Jean-Luc

Well since yesterday I have a better battery duration. I don't know why, because I didn't uninstall or change anything... the fact is now on 100% charge it says 5-6 hours left with Adium, iTunes and Mail opened. All at maximum bright of screen.

Apple contacted me too but I'm not going to reply because the issue seems solved. I'm happy they are investigating the problem and trying to solve it.

Hoping this gets fixed soon. Installed Mountain Lion when it came out and my battery life went from 5+ hours to under 2. In fact been on less than 10 minutes and it went from 97% to 84%. All I have open is Safari. I was using my computer as a traveling work computer and if the battery keeps up like this it will become impossible for me to depend on it for work.

Here's to hoping the engineeers get something figured out.

I have a 2011 Macbook Air, pre-update I had about 5-6 hours of good solid battery life with spotify, chrome, skype, mail and various software development applications running at the same time. I updated to mountain lion about 3 days ago and Im now down to 2.5 hours of battery life under the same load. Its a big difference going all day between meetings without charging, to having to make sure I bring a power adapter... I mean thats the reason I traded from a pro to the air.

I have found that my fans kick on every few minutes, when I check the processes 1 jumps out at 100% cpu usage 'jamf' ownded by root. I dont have this software installed http://jamfsoftware.com/solutions/anti-virus/ which is the only link I can find to that process name.

Now, the only thing I can assume is that OSX 10.8 is including some new virus software that isnt optimized and runs in the background. This would make sense given their recent issues with the flashback trojan and their removal of claims around being virus proof.

At any rate when the fan kicks on I go and manually kill that process and my battery life seems to improve.

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, it's a frustrating issue when products don't work right, especially after a major launch of a new and exciting OS.

Apple releases new products and people always have issues with them. Not only Apple, but other companies as well, Samsung, HP, Dell, Sony, Microsoft. It may seem like a huge thing, but just be patient. Their engineers who gather this information need to gather as much as possible in order to get an answer for these problems.

I'm sure they're working frivolously to get a resolution here soon.

Give them a bit of time, they didn't build the OS in a day, nor will it take a day to resolve an issue like this.

Just trying to be helpful. 🙂

So far I've got aboutjust over 4 hours usage of my MacBook and it's currently on 37%. My 14 day grace period ends tomorrow, I wanted to to get everyone's opinions, should I keep this Mac or return it for the same one, or get an Air? I'm not sure if it's normal..

Normally I've had my MBP always on sleep mode without any problem. But since Mountain Lion, the battery life was reduced even in sleep mode. Overnight the battery got empty.

Now I've found a solution for the problem by myself.

First of all I checked the console and looked for some flooding process error. I had one called "SERVER Removing certificate for Apple ID myid@...". I just had to open System Preferences > Users & Groups, delete and readd my Apple ID to my Account. Activity Monitor said 10% less CPU usage than before. Everything works fine now.

Hi,

Since my upgrade to ML a few days ago I've been having clear and quite extreme battery issues on my Macbook (non-pro unibody late 2008). I've not had these from the upgrade of snow leopard to lion.

Below behavior is not constant. SOmetimes things seem back to normal and then suddenly it's back.

- The battery charge drops much faster while working, without CPU load. Something like 20% in 5 minutes. I used to be able to get 3 hours from a full charge.

- Battery management reporting that my battery needs to be replaced soon.

- Coconut (before and after upgrade to ML-compatible version) reporting suddenly a 50% or less battery capacity (while it was around 90%)

- When closing the lid at 60% charge, after opening the lid again after 10 minutes, the laptop wont wake and when plugging into AC, the laptop turns out to have 0% battery and did a shutdown or "hibernate".

- After discharge and charge cycle, battery capacity was back to 85% again in cocnut and battery service indicator had gone. Also drainage seemd better / normal. Then suddenly after closing lid, the battery was empty again and problems were back

In this thread I see both users with similar extreme problems and users that just notice somewhat higher battery drain. These are totally different problems. In my case there is no high usage process apparantly.

I think my problem is likely just a bug in the power management of the OS, e.g. errors in reading the battery charge and concequently erratic behavior of the OS based on wrong charge data.

I can maybe wait another week, but if there is no signal from Apple that this problem is acknowledged and a fix is in the making I will start working on a restore of Lion.

Rgds,

Werner

Hi

I was having the same issue and tried recalibrating the battery - I don't think it helped much. What I noticed though was that iTunes was massively spiking in CPU usage every few minutes so I checked it out and it seems that it keeps updating iTunes match. Once I quit iTunes my estimated battery life increased by a few hours.

It doesn't seem like this constant updating is normal so maybe it's just something dodgy that I've managed to do but I thought I'd share in case it helps somebody else. The battery metre is still fluctuating madly but at least its between 6-7 hours now @ 100% charge instead of 2-3 (this fluctuation may be normal for all I know - I've only had a Mac for 2.5 weeks now).

Hope it helps,

Josh

I can confirm: battery life is indeed (at a maximum) half with mountain lion than with lion.

I´d just bought and installed a new battery: Lion: 6:50 - Mountain Lion: 4:10 at a max without running any application or additional process.

I have resetted SMC and then also PRAM - didn´t improve anything.

I´ve now downgraded to Lion - again 6:50, all is fine.

I will request now a refund of the price of mountain lion, this is indeed not acceptable for me - a new operating system with such poor battery performance for a notebook!

I´m wondering why this has happened @Apple already for the second time - I faced the same problems with upgrading from Snow Leopard to Lion one year ago: 10.7.3 was terrible with respect to battery life, then 10.7.4 was o.k.

aragorn1711

Apple team are working to resolve the battery problem.

Read my posts above.

Have a nice day. 🙂

I have the same problem, I bought Mountain Lion the same day it was released, I use the new MacBook Air which came with Lion. It's battery life with Lion was great, I could do 6 - 7 hours with no problem, but now, with Mountain Lion I get like 3 - 4 hours. This is simply UNACCEPTABLE! I hope Apple will fix this soon or I will demand my money back. I'm not talking about the weird freezes the new Montain Lion has, which I hope is fixed now. Apple, I expected more from you, you released an unpolished untested OS and now your costumers are paying for it.

I'm tired of this battery issue. I called Apple Care and first they wanted me to send my Macbook Air (mid2011) in for a replacement battery. I took laptop to nearest Apple Store, which is 2 hours away, and they told me to wipe SSD and reinstall fresh copy of Mountain Lion. Well I did, and still have battery issues. This time I was very selective on what programs to install.

Here are the results - prior to Mountain Lion, average 7 hours battery. Now, after fresh install, 2.5 hours. I've noticed that within the first hour, the battery will drop 30%. I'm now pushing 2 hours of light use, and it's down to 44%.