Battery life dropped considerably on Mountain Lion.

This night (i'm in italy) i will try with a clean Snow Leopard installation so after i can confirm if the battery drain is caused by the OS (Lion or Mountain Lion) or by other (ex. ram, EFI firmware, SMC version, ecc...).

Stay tuned 🙂

I'm just now reading up on any disscussion on low battery life with 10.8, but just wanted to share that this has been my experience too. I'm using a MBP with 2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo; after installing Mountain Lion, it seems that the battery life has been reduced to maybe 1.5 hours (and that isonly with Firefox open, wifi on, and screen dimmed to lowest setting and w/o keyboard lights). I'm watching the percentage of battery power remaining tick down minute by minute as I write this!

Is it that the hardware of this few-years old MBP aren't effecient enough to run Mountain Lion? Any tricks/guidance to extend battery life?

Thanks!

I bought a 13 inch MBP a few months back (Sep 2012) and bumped up the Memory to 8 gigs and HDD to 750 gigs. It came pre-loaded with ML and I opted for that since it has iMessage too. Am a heavy user of iMsgs and most of my family members have an Apple device for imsging.

It's been more than 2 months now and whenever I charge it fully, the total time remaining does not go north of 3:45, which is almost half of what Apple promised. Reading all these forums, I did all the so-called 'efficient' settings to not use keyboard lighting, display less than 50%, BT off, but it did not help.

I got the Battery checked from a Store Genius and he did reset the SMC and confirmed that the Battery is fine and does not seem to have any defects. However the performance of the Battery did not improve. I usually get a net total of 2.5 hrs of battery life with normal browsing on Wi-Fi. Some of my friends have MBPs with Snow Leopard and their laptops seem to run longer than mine inspite me having a newer model. I agree that 7 hrs is too ideal but the software should atleast show a similar number after a full charge, but for me, I don't seem to remember having a 4 hr plus count on my MBP.

I too suspect that ML is hogging a lot of power and degrading battery performance. I don't know if the latest OS X update has a fix to improve battery life. I will be visiting the Store again to ask for a refund or exchange since I am completely disappointed with the battery life of my MBP. Thanks!

Meanwhile I think that Apple will never solve the problem and if they to it is just luck in one of the coming updates.

I can advise you to contact Apple discuss with them 2-3 weeks and you will get an iPod for compensation, because they can't solve the problem. Than sell it und install Lion. There is no other solution. No new battery and so an. Sorry, but I think this is the fact.

well i went into a store today, i described how i went in before, and it was not a hardware issue, i also suggested going back to lion, they did not complain. they didnt either say maybe it was something else, i think apple may have given in to admitting that there is a MAJOR integral floor in 10.8, which may not be fixable unless the OS is re written.

I'll be sticking to Lion on my 2012 macbook pro, won't consider going back to mountain lion

disk indexing is a huge system resource that can be turned off... bluetooth as well if you aren't using it... reduce brightness and do the normal tricks of SMC reset and hope for the best... It's a darn shame this company can't cough off "oops we messed up" people OVER PAY A HUGE PREMIUM and i am one of the customers of apple that purchased a 2012 macbook pro and immediately got rid of mountain lion

jbizzel14 wrote:

well i went into a store today, i described how i went in before, and it was not a hardware issue, i also suggested going back to lion, they did not complain. they didnt either say maybe it was something else, i think apple may have given in to admitting that there is a MAJOR integral floor in 10.8, which may not be fixable unless the OS is re written.

Then why are millions unaffected by this Major Integral Flaw (you did mean flaw I assume) in 10.8?

same issue here, thankfully i had a time machine back up copy of lion, i'm going back to lion. I have a late 2011 macbook pro. Battery lasted longer while using lion.

I have a mid-2009 MBP and the battery had degraded to 60% of its original capacity (according to the coconutBattery utility). I couldn't keep the laptop running very long, so decided to swap the battery last night with a new A1321 model. The SMC was reset afterwards, as recommended by other posters.

In 2009, the MBP batteries were advertised as being able to last 7-8 hours under normal use and I didn't have a problem with battery life. Doing my own test in an hour's timespan tonight with the new battery yields the following results (using iStat Menus in 10-minute increments):

Begining of hour: battery shows 4:19 remaining, 100%

10 minutes later: 3:03 remaining, 95%

10 minutes later: 3:14 remaining, 89%

10 minutes later: 2:15 remaining, 84%

10 minutes later: 3:01 remaining, 79%

10 minutes later: 2:00 remaining, 70%

10 minutes later: 1:51 remaining, 65%

What this means is that I can't get 3 hours uptime on a brand new battery. coconutBattery also shows me that the new battery has already degraded to 98% of its design capacity in less than 24 hours of use, while I still had 100% design capacity after 2 months when using the original battery.

Apple, please help.

are you saying that battery might have been damaged!!

All that I am saying is that Mountain Lion has been causing power issues for me.

The very first version of Mountain Lion caused my MBP not to sleep when the lid was closed. 10.8.2 seems to have fixed that. Now we need to fix the power drain under normal use.

Note that the test above was performed doing mostly web browsing with 2-3 other open programs. None of the open programs were CPU-intensive, both user and system CPU seem to hover around 2.5% each with occasional spikes around 16%-20%.

I am not sure what I am saying about the effect on battery capacity. I will continue to monitor and let you know. Because this is a home-use laptop, I would have hoped to have more than 60% capacity remaining after 3 years.

Aswick, would you be willing to do an experiment?

1. When on battery power, in addition to tracking how much time you have left in 10 minute increments, can you also capture your power (watts) and current (mAh) levels? I speculate that the current and power is higher than those on Lion or those on ML who do not have the problem.
2. In Activity Monitor, which applications are running at more than 10% of CPU. Be sure to filter on "All Processes" so that you can see everything. I know you say things are hoving around 2.5%. But, which are the processes that spike?
3. How does you battery life behave if you turn off wi-fi?

In terms of thing to try to get the battery life lower, here are some things to consider - many of which are communiated in this thread.

1. Turn off iCloud and disable the new Notification feature (either disable it, which you can find how to do in this thread somewhere, or just configure it in system preferences so that it's not associated with any apps).
2. In Audio MIDI Setup, make sure that the "Built-In Output" is set to 44100 Hz and "2-CH 24-bit Integer" (note: 16-bit and 20-bit integer are also OK). Not all machines can handle 32-bit Float for some reason. I found that my frequency setting wasn't 44100Hz either. This will affect an application called coreaudiod that some people are having problems with. This isn't covered in this thread but appears in another thread.
3. In System Preferences -> Sound -> Input, turn off "Use Ambient Noise Reduction". Again, this one seems to affect coreaudiod. Some people have found coreaudiod running at number far greater than 10% of CPU and these are are few things that have helped *some* people.
4. Download "OnyX" and clear all of the caches.
5. If your battery life improved after you turned off wi-fi, try this: http://osxdaily.com/2012/11/30/resolving-stubborn-wi-fi-connection-problems-in-m ac-os-x/ and see if it helps.
6. Try installing the 10.8.2 (current version) Combo file over your existing install. It might help. http://support.apple.com/kb/DL1581
7. Perform another PRAM/NVRAM and SMC reset. Do both 2 or 3 times.
8. If none of the above helps, consider dropping back to Lion until if/when Apple fixes this one. I dropped back to Lion because my battery life had dropped 4% in just a few cycles and I didn't want to risk it further.

I think that's a summary of the items if found in this thread and in others that people have taken to try to solve the battery issue with ML. Personally, even if this improves your battery life, I still belive ML might have a charging issue affecting battery life. Not clear if any of these steps will help address that since not everyone is experiencing this issue.

Good luck.

When I'm using my MacBook Pro, the battery most definitely drains more quickly under Mountain Lioin vs. Lion. And tips on how to improve that battery life are appreciated, thank you! HOWEVER...

The battery drains more quickly (ML vs. Lion) WHEN THE COMPUTER IS SLEEPING! No apps running, no iCloud access, no Notifictions going on, no Power Nap. NOTHING is running. The computer is simply sleeping and all that is "running" is Finder. Yet, the battery drain is SIGNIFICANTLY higher under Mountain Lion vs. Lion. What the heck is going on with Mountain Lion that needs so much battery power WHEN THE COMPUTER IS ASLEEP???

Apple really screwed the pooch on this one. This is more annoying than the whole iOS 6 Maps debacle. I'm waiting for a letter of apology.

I grow increasingly disgruntled with my favorite company in the world.

Mark

Mark, Some have suggested that there is a problem in the firmware; something that also seems likely. Have you tried disabling the Power Nap feature followed by a SMC / PRAM reset and Combo pack install? http://www.askdavetaylor.com/enable_disable_power_nap_on_new_macbook.html

If that's not helping, perhaps rolling back to Lion might help. (Keyword is *might* as rolling back hasn't always worked for everyone).