Battery life dropped considerably on Mountain Lion.

I rebooted my 2011 MacBook Pro and recharged it this afternoon. I waited for an hour after it had reached 100% battery indicator before I disconnected the power cable, just to make sure the battery was fully "topped off". I disconnected the power cable at 4:00pm (pacific). It is now 9:40pm and I just checked my sleeping MacBook Pro (which has been completely undisturbed since 4:00pm with NO apps running except Finder) and the battery is at 95%. A 5% drop in 5 hours and 40 minutes WHILE IT WAS SLEEPING.

Absolutely, positively, unacceptable!

With Lion (and Snow Leopard before that), at MOST it would be a 1% drop in 5 hours.

Mark

I don't know if you are trolling or not, but 100 hours of standby power doesn't seem bad one bit to me. That's more than 4 days of standby. Why is that unacceptable?

Not sure why so many people are wondering what the problem is with a 4 day standby time. Afterall, Apple advertises upto 30 days standby time... so 4 days does seem to fall a bit short.

An update on my earlier situation: Battery drain issue right after upgrade. Life came down to around 4 hours from 7 hours. Apple changed my battery. Life is now at 5 hours. Still short by around 2 hours, which still does not seem acceptable to me. Guess will go back to the genius bar sometime to have the logic board checked?

Another issue I have noticed on my Air is that when I open the cover from sleep the screen goes black for a few seconds before coming back to life. This was not there earlier, and seems to started after I got my battery replaced. Is it normal?

I guess because it could last about two weeks or more before the battery drained in past situations. Besides my MacBook Pro i7 2.3 Ghz I have a Core 2 Duo MacBook Pro using Snow Leopard as well. This one holds at least 2 weeks in sleeping mode. I know, a different machine and OS but one should expect that the latest incarnation of the MacBook Pro would perform al least the same on this aspect.

But the issue is bigger than only losing power faster than expected. Because the battery drains at least about twice as fast than expected, you have to recharge it also twice as much so the amount of loadcycles doubles. This means the fysical battery life is expected to be at least be half than what Apple promises. That's not a very comfotable thought with a machine where the battery is build in.

P.S. I started typing this with only Safari open and a fully charged battery. Within 10 minutes the battery went from 100% to 95% (4628 mAh of 6859 mAh).

Doc, Apple advertises up to 30 days of standby time for current MacBook Pros. The estimate was the same for my 2011 MacBook Pro. So 4 days is HIGHLY unacceptable.

Look at it this way: At the current battery drain while my MacBook Pro is sleeping, if I woke it up to use it after just 2 days I'd only have less than 50% of the battery left. And with the faster battery drain under Mountain Lion when you are actually USING the computer, <50% ain't much at all.

The difference in battery management/drain is HUGE between Lion and Mountain Lion. It was an overnight change. Faster than overnight. The moment I installed Mountain Lion the battery life on my MacBook Pro got noticeably worse. I used to be able to sit and use it on battery for a couple of hours and be amazed that it still had 75-80% battery left. Now two hours of use drops me down to the 50-55% level.

Mark

Well I do believe that a 4 day on standby while keeping the RAM active is normal. I am thinking that the advertised 30 day standby refers to deep sleep, what is known to Windows users as hibernation. Is not new tech at all, and this was achieved with the PowerBook back day with some openfirmware changes and a simple app for Leopard called Smart Sleep. I have known about issues with ML and deep sleep with some computers, especially if you do an upgrade and not a clean install. Read this, see if any of this info helps: http://basilsalad.com/how-to/fix-mountain-lion-deep-sleep-issue/

I'm afraid that the shortened battery life while the computer is in use is an unrelated issue to deep sleep and well, the only solution is to rollback to Lion until there's an official fix. To be honest, I prefer to avoid ML since I don't know how badly the quick discharges can affect the battery on the long run, and I suspect that is going to be bad.

Doc, You are missing the point! With Lion my MacBook Pro could go multiple days in sleep mode with a negligible decrease in battery life. With Mountain Lion and sleep mode, the battery level drops more in 24 hours than it would drop under Lion in a week. The difference is not small and it's the exact same laptop, just a different OS.

Mark

I'm not missing the point. Trust me, deep sleep is the only way to get those 30 days of standby. Keeping the RAM powered does not! Check the link I posted, it will at least help with the standby issue. RAM on its own will consume at least 0.5 watts an hour on standby. If the battery you have is 50 watts an hour, the result is 100 hours of standby, about 4 days. If the computer is on deep sleep, which basically dumps your RAM contents to your hard drive and turns off the machine, that load can easily be cut down to 0.1 watts, driving it close to the 30 day goal. The only reason for that tiny load is because the machine has circuitry that is live waiting for you to open the lid. But like I said before, that's just handy for the standby issue that you have. A good indication that the computer enters deep sleep, is that the white LED will not even glow.

If a computer were to truly last 30 days on standby without entering deep sleep, it would need a 200 watts battery to keep that RAM active. No such thing exists. Yet!

With that said, yeah, I get it. The OS upgrade started that issue and you want to report it. And as I already mentioned, the link I provided can help about such known issue. Is up to you if you want to open up and try the resolution, or simply live with it. Is not my first rodeo with an issue like this and an operating system, and sometimes you have to take action instead if waiting for the company to solve your problem. I have a feeling that is going to be a while before we see a real fix from Apple for these issues. They would much rather sell you a new computer ;)

Mark, I too own a Macbook Pro 13" (mid 2012). I thought that it should have a 30 days of standby - just like you. But if you read carefully on Apple's website, Apple doesnt claim 30 days standby for Macbook Pro. Only for Macbook Pro Retina & Macbook Air. I'm not sure which one you own though.

Mark Booth2, Doctor Ed, Scratch SF

Thanks for sharing the troubleshooting data, spec background, and technical explanation.

I got more from you guys in the past 2 days than in over a month of monitoring this thread.

One observaton I have about the battery life issue Mr. Booth is having. This issue is critical because he is reporting better performance from older models.

If Apple documented that he should expect serious drain on standby, would he have bought the laptop?

If Apple does not describe features that make such liabilities attractive on balance, will Apple sell upgrades to early adopters at the rate they have enjoyed? Usually, newer, comparable model laptops do at least as well as older ones in virtually ALL capabilties.

User satisfaction and "whining" aside, this is VERY risky business strategy for Apple if deliberate and disatrously misguided if accidental and not being fixed. Fortunately for Apple investors, a fan base like those contributing to this forum might muddle them through.

Beisarius,

Thank you for the very useful data point that you provided: that you personally have rectified this issue three times with battery replacement and logic board replacement when battery failed. (n=3 is a pretty good start)

I've followed this thread for a month. There are 194 pages so far and it is being kept current.

I use technical forums including Apple's constantly in the course of my work.

I can say without reservation 194 posts is extraodinary and indicates a severe problem.

You may consider me delinquent in due diligence if you like, but reading back 40 posts like I did should have yielded the answer you provided: "Defective battery or motherboard, replace one, then the other."

Subsequent posts would say things like "Apple refused to replace the logic board" or some other follow up to your resolution. Probably not 40 pages worth, though. People need to have seen your solution before they can try it. Until they get the suggestion, it isn't "whining" to have complained. (It's an Apple, they expect it to work well, and I think Apple LIKES that customer confidence.)

I saw nothing but uncertainty from the users here in teh 40 posts I read and if there was a needle in the haystack of 110 pages of posts before the 40 I read, it is highly anolomolous to forums that someone does not do the courtesy of repeating the answer or providing a link.

You sneeringly spoke of "parasitic drain" and there is only ONE reference to that phrase on apple's forums and it concerns app drain, not batteries, and it was about iPhones. Truly common knowledge, unfortunately, gets discussed in dozens of threads from people who do not properly use Google and read the threads (even as much as I did.)

Please. I do NOT mean this to be a hissing match here. You provided terrific critical data to the readers here. If you'd been more charitable about it, I could have done nothing but sung your praises. When there are 150 pages of posts, do you never "cut to the chase"? You can spend a LOT of expensive time reading a lot of false leads, wrong information, "me toos"s, and tangents reading every single post of every thread.

Case in point. If I'd done today what I did a month ago, I would have been done in ten minutes thanks largely to YOU. In the grand strategy of cost efficiency, your criticism can lead to an awful lot of wasted time. I put it to you that if a person spends the time reading 110 pages of posts every time they have a sticky hardware problem, they may be spending their customers'/employers' money lavishly and that behavior runs risks all its own; worse risks than conceivably annoying some helpful, but grumpy guy on a forum with no stake in their employment / sales. People skim. It happens; and not without good reason.

Follow up / nag:

Has anyone with the ML issue shut OFF their wi-fi/Airport and then performed an SMC reset to see if there's any improvement? My user did and I'm begging somebody to confirm. I'm going to look into the battery replacement suggestion though.

I recently upgraded my mid-2009 MBP 15" fom Snow Leopard to ML 10.8.2. Instantaniuosly my maximum battery life went from 6.5 hours to 2.5 hours. This started litterally the minute after I installed ML. I have been reading this and many other forums and threads over the past month or two and have tried many solutions and suggestions. I know it is not my battery, since this happened immediatly after installing ML. After applying some of the suggested fixes, my battery improves, mildly, for only a day or two, then it is back to a max of 2.5 hours and has been declining from that over the last month.

I have not done a complete whipe and clean install as only about 50% of people, it seems, it works for. My "service battery" warning comes on from time to time, but not always. I have also noticed my computer gets extremely hot now. It never used to do that with leopard or snow leopard and I fear, that when this issue is resolved if ever, that my battery will have suffered tramenduos trauma.

I have also noticed, that with only safari open, my computer now runs at 40% idle. Since updating to ML, i have not changed anything on my computer, no new apps or programs or changed any settings. I am quite disappointed in ML and wish I had not upgraded, cause the battery issue is far worse than the few features I gained over SnowLeopard.

Does anyone have a real solution to this problem that apparently has been plagueing quite a few users for almost a year?

Obviously you have not read the thread. Short answer? No. Try a clean install is all you can try.

Clean install not works (macbook5,1 late 2008 unibody alluminium with 8gb of ram with Mountain Lion).

I tried clean install with journaled fs, with case-sensitive journaled fs, with journaled fs and time machine... nothing.

EFI, SMC, Battery ecc... are updated.

SMC and PRAM reset not change the battery drain.

I have 2 batteries, the first is in service mode after the LION update.

Battery drain during the stop.

2h and 30min is the max charge available.

😠

g8production, I have the same machine and can only muster 2.5 hours running Safari only. I have tried every solution but have seen no improvement. I guess that I'll wait for the new MBP that runs on AA batteries because none of the OS updates have helped.

Apple, thanks for making a superior product. I love my MBP, but I do have this same problem.
I'm replying mostly so I can see future developments. I've been checking activity monitor and nothing is running away, it simply doesn't have the battery life that it did with lion. This i a huge bummer for me, as the battery life is what I have loved so much about my MBP. For the record, I'm a web and graphics guy and use my mbp 10-12 hours a day mimum. Having to hunt for outlets during meetings is rather annoying.

I look forward to a solution like all the rest.
Thanks for looking into this for the rest of us.

Have an awesome day!