Battery life dropped considerably on Mountain Lion.

A user over thisaways started having problems when he encrypted with Filevault 2.

An SMU reset fixed it, but the battery life would plummet (and the laptop would get very warm) when he started using his wireless networking.

If the drive was not encrypted or if he turned off Airport and used cabled ethernet isntead, the battery life stayed okay.

Wireless driver causing problems with power management????

It'd be interesting if others can see if disabling wireless or decrypting a FileVault 2 encrypted drive makes their problem go away.

Bill Jacobs2 wrote:

A user over thisaways started having problems when he encrypted with Filevault 2.

An SMU reset fixed it, but the battery life would plummet (and the laptop would get very warm) when he started using his wireless networking.

If the drive was not encrypted or if he turned off Airport and used cabled ethernet isntead, the battery life stayed okay.

Wireless driver causing problems with power management????

It'd be interesting if others can see if disabling wireless or decrypting a FileVault 2 encrypted drive makes their problem go away.

Turning off WiFi will certainly help to increase battery life, but it's not the root problem in this circumstance as folks have tried to enabled and disabled WiFi and a half-dozen other services without really addressing the problem.

AFAIK no one's mentioned File Vault. Based on various posts I'd wager most folks that are still experiencing the issue aren't using it.

Encrypting and decrypting files is CPU intensive and subsequently a high drain on any battery so it's not unusual for things to heat up when File Vault is used, particularly if someone encrypted their entire boot drive.

Poor SMC power management is still the most likely culprit for those left suffering reduced battery life.

The Macbook Pro would heat up when using the wireless on an encrypted drve.

If the drive was NOT encrypted, normal battery.

If the drive were encrypted but NOT using wireless, normal battery.

Both? Warm macbook and short battery life.

Poor SMC power management. Unquestionably! I'm wondering if the FileVault2 and wireless adapter may be reliably triggering a flaw that hoses SMC where other people's macs are triggering it by other methods.

How many people can reset their SMC, turn off their airport and find that they are cured?

Filevault2 encryption, yes, is likely not in common use, but is the wireless driver contributing?

We get laptops to NOT be tethered to teh wall, so wireless may be in use on ALL of them. How many connect with cable to troubleshoot?

This was really weird, just bought MacBook Pro 15'' with Retina display 2 days ago and the battery life sucked. I had something between 2:30 and 3 hours of battery time.

I have reset SMC and NVRAM and it looked like it didn't work until I started writing this post. While writing computer charged the battery to 100% and now it shows 10:36 hours of battery.

It would be nice to know what helped and I'm still considering the possibilty that it will be only temporary.

System: Macbook Pro Middle 2009 15 inch

Battery under Lion 75% about 830 Cycles and still working with a capacity of 4 -5 hours

Upgraded to ML 2 days ago. I lost about 50 % of my battery. So I did a fresh install, still the same.

This in my opinion is unacceptable. I'm going to restore to Lion and hopefully my battery will revert back to the way it was.

Apple please do something about this and don't tell me to bring my machine to a Servicecenter and have the battery changed..

Have you noticed any improvement? I have a new 2012 non retina macbook pro. I installed mountain lion once it came out, saw the battery drain and heat issues and immediatly when to lion again. do you 10.8.2?

Yes. I have 10.8.2.

I've been testing for a little more than a day after I have reset SMC and NVRAM (and also I have disabled Find My Mac in iCloud and one more application which syncs as well). As I've said before I could see the percentage drop instantly and with full battery the estimate was always under 3 hours. Now I see reasonable times i.e. 4-7 hours depending what kind of work I do.

Actually I have a 2012 non retina macbook pro as well and I have upgraded to ML 10.8.2 and haven't had any issues yet (early times, running only for a day).

Well we'll well! Apple have released a new software update for notebooks - and seems to have made an instant difference to my estimated battery time! Obviously I've yet to test things properly, but everyone should go and download this now!

Good luck :)

No! No updates for the Macbook Air Late 2010 so what exactly are you on about Nickholl???

so sorry - its only for macs mid 2012 😟 http://support.apple.com/kb/DL1609

sorry to get your hopes up

as I say - i only had a very quick look this morning before I left home. It went from being3-4 hours to 6.5hrs which looked promising - I have yet to give it a proper check. If it DOES have an effect then id be interested to know what they've changed - as theres nothing specific in the details - only mentions USB handling

Hi Nickholl - looks like that's an update for OSX 10.7.4. Not for Mountain Lion.

Mmmm all I can assume is that it applies for multiple versions and that is the lowest. What I do know is that I run the latest version of mountain lion on my retina MacBook and I was prompted to install this via software update.

looks like its all achademic after all 😟 no difference reported. After that initial spike in estimated battery life its now back down to 3.5 😟

This update also applied to ML, I just had the update installed.

Aslo it mentioned about the graphic card performance and reliability, and its for Mac intro. at June 2012 , I guess its a bug fix those Mac with hardware design at that release.

after install the update, my Battery does indicate 3:15 ~3:49 hr for 46% of battery, I will assume this is to patch the VGA card..

just side note, if you feel your computer is running hot, your battery will drain like crazy... if you dim your screen a bit, the battery life will become longer as u dim it down.. so I would like to assume this patch is more to do with VGA performance, in order to offload the battery...

will update you guys if I have a good result, my system spec is i7 2.3 MBPR, I am on ML

Cheers