Battery life dropped considerably on Mountain Lion.

I have a mid 2011 Air. I have tried absolutely everything and the battery does not last for more than 2,5 hours, when it used to last for more than 4. I am very careful with the battery and that is to such an extent that my white 2008 MacBook still runs for more than 3 hours without any need to be plugged. So, I installed Mountain Lion on my Air on July 25th and noticed the battery problem immediately. I read the posts and decided to wait for some days. I let the whole battery drain and then fully charged it, three times, but nothing gets better. I am really worried about this issue 😟

So I am going to add my very small two cents to this discussion. It is clear there is a lot of frustration based on the thread and rightly so, given what people pay for Apple products. I upgraded to Moutain Lion Day 1, and right away not only did I notice battery degradation - but my RPMs on the CPU were off the charts. I have a MacBook Pro 13 inch late 2011 model (purchased in Dec 2011).

Before this upgrade, I NEVER, let me restate that - NEVER heard my fans. I know they run but never heard the things going. All of sudden, fans are whirling, RPMs zooming and the tempature is climbing. In addition, as soon as I go off AC my battery tanks. Being new to Mac I have no idea what to do. For about two days, I have been searching the Internet trying to get a sense of how to troubleshoot the problem and subsequently fix it. I thought initially it might be due to the indexing happening from the new upgrade, but all the indexing had concluded so that wasn't it.

In the meantime, I am monitoring Activity Monitor, but there is absolutely nothing or rather no program that seems to be hogging up my CPU. I come to this forum and quite literally stumble upon someone posting about a process running called "bash". This is a process associated with Send to Kindle which I have on my Mac. You really wouldn't think this process would cause a problem because everytime I saw it, it was running between 6-8% of the CPU. Another person Fieldman indicated that this small process was contributing to heating and battery life. The advice was to un-install and see what happens. I un-installed the Send to Kindle app and within minutes, battery life returned, tempature dropped WAY DO and the fans went silent. It was unbelieveable how quickly it happened.

The machine has been running "like new" again and unless I have every app on my computer open, I haven't heard them since. The RPMs is down to around 1500-2000 and quite as a mouse. So I am back to right again, and hope many of you are able to find the culprit of your issues. Good Luck!

P.S. Since this - Fieldman posted and indicated that Amazon had fixed the problem so re-downloaded Send to Kindle app and all is still well!

My 2011 MBP has taken a battery hit since upgrading to ML as well. I have noticed that the RPM of my fan is elevated from where it was before the install by about 500 RPM. I also noticed the biggest battery hit will the computer is sleeping. Hmmmm

Ok I've done a little digging around on my machine as I've noticed similar issues but nothing that's majorly concerning. This is certainly software so everyone, save the trip to the Genius Bar as it isn't going to help much and you will only be told to do clean installs.

Now on my MBP 2009, I noticed systemUIserver running at 14% on average over a 5 minute period of watching it. That over time is going to take a hit on the battery life. I compared this to my Mac Mini 2011 machine and that was 0.0% and 0.4 at it's peak.

I haven't tried to do any fixes yet but I'm going to delv into the library and see if removing that launchd service resolves the issue.

I realise different users may have other items causing it but this is where collaboration comes to play. If everyone could check (I don't have time to go through 18 pages of posts so apologies) their all processes tab and reply to this message with your results, we will see if there's any correlation.

Let's try to find the right solution!

For those that find there Macs are running very hot with Mountain Lion - check the cpu load and processes in the Activity Monitor - if the DOCK is 80-90% then follow the following instruction:

- Go to Finder and select "Hide Others" from the Finder Menu

- Right click (or control-click) on the Desktop

- Choose "Change Desktop Background"

- Select a new picture (I had to click on a few to get it to change)

- Go to Activity Monitor and Force Quit the Dock app

- The Dock will restart itself within a few seconds and presto: no more 100% CPU usage

It's pretty simple - all about the background desktop picture!

Found this tip elsewhere but it works for me and some of my students. The Dock is in a loop trying to find a desktop picture that isnt there

Just chiming in. I have the same issue. My battery is WAY less than before, and I noticed it right away. First time I took it off power, I looked at the battery meter after about 20 min and it shpowed 58%. This is on a 11" MBA, 8GB, 512GB, the faster processor.

I must be one of the lucky ones. Since upgrading from Lion to Mountain Lion, I am seeing much BETTER battery life on my mid-2010 MacBook Pro. In my case at least, I've found that ML does a much better job of sticking to the Intel graphics chipset. Several apps that previously switched me over to the nVidia graphics no longer do that.

I having a battery issue as well. I had GREAT battery life, then I instaled Mountain Lion. The system is telling me that I need my battery serviced. There is a warning icon in the battery menu. Hopefully they figure this out soon!

Macbook Pro 2012... same issues. Major drop in battery life!!

From looking at Activity Monitor, it seems a lot of RAM is being used. After starting up my Macbook Pro, at least half of the system memory says it in use before even starting any applications! To be fair, I was not really monitoring this before the upgrade to Mountain Lion, but it does not seem right. Launching just a few applications and seeing Used memory at 3.5GB and Free memory at under 500MB, something does not seem right at all.

This probably would also explain why I am occassionaly getting system freezes where the only solution is to hard reboot the machine.

A "Check Battery" message almost invariably means that your battery is nearing the end of its usable life. So at least in your case, the problem is probably the hardware itself.

Using an Early 2011 13-inch MBP upgraded the day Mountain Lion came out and noticed that battery life was about 2hrs at most...this morning when I checked my battery life it said Service Battery. THANKS A LOT APPLE!

If you're seeing regular crashes logged by CrashReporter, post them. That might well be a key piece of the puzzle, at least for some percentage of the folks on this thread. (I suspect that there are several *different* problems that people here are having; the experiences I'm reading seem too inconsistent to be caused by only a single problem.)

Sometimes batteries go bad. That said, if a lot of folks with relatively recent Macs are seeing "Check battery" errors, that may indicate that something else is wrong, e.g. a bug in the recent SMC update or something. What does your cycle count look like in System Profiler?

I went from Snow Leopard (rock solid performer... sigh) to ML and am experiencing 1/2 the battery life and much slower response and "feel". I have a 2011 MPB 13" SB i5 with 8GB of RAM.

ML is very nice - I like it more than SL (didn't think that would be possible) - but it does have a beta feel to it. Some quirks and other issues seen as well. But all the apps I care about run nicely.