Battery life dropped considerably on Mountain Lion.

I'm also facing the same problem. I'm running out of battery very quickly since the update.

Mmm, another unintentional benefit of this particular SMC reset is that the time is takes to charge my laptop (whilst in full use) is nearly twice as fast - which makes sense. I am at 55% charged in about an hour (from 0%). In future it might be easier to measure "charge" time as an indicator that something is wrong. i.e. if I go way beyond 1% charged a minute, I know sucking else is sucking the power as well!!!!

I have a lot of before/after logs to send Apple when we connect later today....

Franc_Iphone wrote:

First guess as plausible reasons (and variability) of the problem(s). Read this and if you can try the SMC reset.

I have done an SMC reset a number of times but for the first time, actually started to read some of the detail of what an SMC reset actually is!! http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3964

You could interpret, after reading this as a "catch all" of "bugs" or things going on, messing with the internal abilities of our Apple Macs to manage itself properly. Apple promote the SMC as a last resort really but many of us found - for a while at least, it can provide a serious increase in battery life. Some find the SMC reset a more permanent fix whilst others see it's a real-short term improvement.

So, on this basis, my plausibility theory is that something going on, with certian machines, with certain enviroments that's causing the system to screw itself up in a way Apple say we need the SMC reset at all. i.e. they don't know enough to catch the cause but here's a solution that minimizes the symptoms. Make sense? It'll explain why this is soooo hard to diagnose!

i.e. for some, not all, going from Snow Leopard *OR* Lion to Mountain Lion, or running some app, or some sequence throws ours sytems into one of these "faults". Creating this same condition *would* therefore be fair to conclude, it's throwing the same "faults" to require the same "SMC reset fix".

My latest reset of SMC has helped quite a bit, although the last 3 times I did this, my battery life crept down quite quickly after a few days. If this conclusion is correct, if I "stay" in my newly segrated Mountain Lion partition, after an SMC reset I probably won't see it get worse. However, if I go to my existing ML partition, I suspect something I do, is causing the problems creating the symptoms in the above link.

Anyone else up for trying the SMC reset a few times over the weekend?

My battery life on my MacBook Pro has dwindled almost to the point of uselessness. It is 3 1/2 year old Macbook, with a 2 yr. old battery. Use to get 2 1/2 hours, now it drains from full in less than 45 minutes, and I mean drains dead.

My Macbook AIr (2011) only managed 3:54 with wifi off and screen brightness low 😟

Same issues. Bought a new MBP 13" on Lion. Used to get ~6 hours of reported battery life. After upgrading to ML, get a reported time of 4.5 hours, and if I'm lucky 5 hours. I'm using the same set of apps with all care taken to prevent useless battery drain.

i have a mid 2010 mbp and my battery life is now useless. it seems like the entire upgrade to mountain lion has just crippled battery life. hopefully there will be an update to fix this before i have to return to college

I am only getting 4 hours 30 minutes (ish) on my macbook air (2011) 😟

Agreed. Safari very intensive and considerably slows my macbook air (2011).

I'm generally working at my desk, plugged in, so I'm not as congnizant of battery life, but I did just notice something odd. My new 15" MBP (non-retina) shows the battery at 98%, yet it hasn't been off wall power at all in at least a couple of days. The dropdown on the battery indicator says "Battery Is Charged." That doesn't seem to sync up, dose it? See attached image.

I just bought a 512GB Retina MacBook Pro. I upgraded to Mountian Lion and noticed the battery life was extremely short. So I run an experiment,

1) I shutdown all applications.

2) I rebooted and didn't run any apps other than Activity Monitor.

3) I then charged the battery to 100% and left the power adapter connected for an additional 2 hours to guarantee the the batteries were fully charged.

4) I have nothing externally connected and no apps other than Activity Monitor running. My CPU ussage is about 11% (operating system and Activity Monitor only).

5) I monitored this during the entire test and it didn't increase appreciably and the average was at 11% or lower.

6) I then removed the MagSafe 2 connection and watched as the battery dropped quickly.

7) The computer shut down in 3.5 hours doing NO usefull work (I didn't touch the compuer during the test, but the video was set to stay on so I could monitor what was happening.

The advertised battery life is 7 hours (I assume doing usefull work). I couldn't hear the fan running and the Activity Monitor showed the 11% or less of the CPU was being used. The graphics was set to automatically switch and the backlight was set at about 65%. I can't imagine where the power is going. But obviously it is totally unacceptable. If the answer doesn't come quickly this computer is going back because it is unusable to me as a portable.

NutCracker - I smile. Not at your pain - for that you have my sympathy. What I smile about is the growing number of people with the same symptoms. I smile because Apple are working on it (since the press started jumping all over it). All good. I doubt it'll be as quick as a fix as it was for the Iphone battery issues when it came out but with so many people, with real symptoms, it's just a matter of time before Apple finds the cause now. After one year (this is from the earlier thread) - we can only hope! https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3194235?start=0&tstart=0

Happy Weekend everyone. 🙂

I got about 4 hours of normal use on my Mid-2009 MacBook Pro 13" on Lion. After the Mountain Lion upgrade it dropped to just over two hours. Today it showed me the "Service battery" notice for the first time. It has been through only 211 battery cycles, so I don't really think it just happened to go worse just after Mountain Lion upgrade. Gonna do a battery calibration now, I hope that will do something for it.

Just adding my name to the list of folks dealing with battery issues. After speaking with AppleCare very quickly I decided to do a fresh install of ML to see if that will fix any issues (that's before having found this forum thread) 🙂 I tried battery recalibration(s) to see if that made a difference. No dice!

I upgraded to ML on the day of release and immediately saw my battery usage flounder. I now also have a "Service Battery" message. I am always thankful I buy the extended AppleCare -- it's worth it.

My MBP is 17 months old (my iMac is having no problem with ML). I'll see how the reinstall does and then try some of the various suggestions offered throughout. I am pretty confident that Apple is hard at work trying to figure out what the issue is. I never like going to the GeniusBars because frankly, they tend to treat me like an idiot. Not a fan of driving the distance to run through all of their stuff and have them tell me it's "my applications" or "reinstall" ... blah blah blah. I would deal with an AppleCare rep on the phone any day of the week.

Sorry, I digress. Just wanted to add my name to the list and say Kudos for all the great suggestions. I'll be following this thread and hope a reinstall works. If that doesn't do the trick, I will continue through some of the other stuff mentioned.

I'm going to suggest my less tech saavy pals not do the upgrade yet on their portables until this is resolved. 🙂

I noticed the exact some thing once I upgraded to Mountain Lion. My battery life is about 50% of what it used to be. I turned power nap off. It didn't make a difference.

Mid 2012 MacBook Air.

Did many folks get the "service battery" message after the install or is that just a much rarer issue? Just curious.