Battery life dropped considerably on Mountain Lion.

Nothing is fetching data. I know the difference in a flash webpage and not.

Snow Leopard had great battery life. Lion sucked it down to about 5 hours. Mountain Lion has dropped that down to about 4.5. I might as well install Windows 7 on it.

I assume they've added a patch already, I admit lion drains bettery like ****. I have an early '11 MBP 13" with 8gb ram. I installed ML a bit late after I finished the day (didn't get up early enough as planned) at around 18:00 NZT and after all the indexing and updates were done I unplugged the power, it shows a bit more than 7 hours which is a number I never seen in Lion. I only open Safari with around 10-20 tabs open at any time without flash, notes, calendar, activity monitor, stickies constantly open. its been just over 1 hour now and battery shows 85%. My screen brightness has dimmed to a bit more than 50%. and bettery health ~90% according to istat nano.

Just for your reference.

I'm still timing, but so far I feel its actually much much better than Lion and I guess it should ultimately ran out at just below 6 hours based on my observation so far.

I couldn't remember how the battery used to be in snow leopard, it's been a long long-time.

Do you use TimeMachine? That is probably the issue. TimeMachine has to back up ~18GB after an upgrade.

The last time I checked Activity monitor, TimeMachine was using about 80% of my 11" MacBook Air's 1.8GHz i7.

And yes, my battery drains like a bottle of jack in an alcohol rehab center.

I'm not using Time Machine.

I just updated to the latest version of ML (10.8 had a patch). But that does not resolve the battery issue.

Is there any help from apple on this?

A

I am having similar issues with my battery after upgrading to Mountain Lion. It was working fine on Snow Leopard, but now, after the upgrade, the battery charge drops like crazy and, worse, I see a "Service Battery" message, which I had never seen before on Snow Leopard. Also, Mountain Lion seems to run a little slower than Snow Leopard, even though my MacBook is running with 8Gb RAM.

My guess is that Apple will soon release an update to fix the battery issues, as it appears that many people are experiencing the same problems.

By the way, it took 6% of my battery charge to write this post.....

I got the same issue, and I found out if the Mail application is turned off, the battery time will increase a lot. From my 13' Mac Pro, it increased from 2 and a half to about seven and three quarters....

must be something wrong with the new Mail!

Might indeed be mail

I've noticed significant battery drain while Mail is running

Can anybody else validate this?

Same problem here, updated two days ago on my early 2011 MBPro with 95% capacity and the battery life is like a half then before. (Maybe he doesn't switch the graphic card?).

i used to get about 6 good hours out of my battery on muy 15 MBP Retina but since i installed ML, it's down to 4 hours at a push.
you need to sort this out apple. for laptop users this is terrible!

Same problem. I am using early MBP 2011 with SSD. Before with Lion battery life was around 6 hours, while after upgrading to Mountain Lion the battery life with 100% gives only 2:53 minutes.

Note that I have now upgraded to ML, and my battery life is, in preliminary testing, the same as it was in Lion. Be cautious about making too many assumptions when participating in a topic like this one. There are many reasons that battery life could be impacted that do not involve bugs in the OS, and topics like this one, with lots of me-too posts, often give a mistaken impression that the problem is caused by bugs. Don't wait for Apple to fix the problem for you, because it's almost certainly not a bug.

Bad third-party software is always a possibility. Look for anything in Activity Monitor that is using large percentages of the CPU. Try using the computer in safe mode for a while (within the limits of that mode) and see how your battery performs. Don't make assumptions based on the estimated time remaining, make sure to run it long enough to see if those estimates are accurate... they often aren't.

You could also try some of the other fixes listed in Understanding upgrade nightmares.

ya, i facing the same issue, battery drop faster than lion ver....

Same here! I got about 2 and a half hours with a full charge, screen about half brightness and backlit keys completely off. Was using it for internet browsing and Powerpoint.

2.2 GHz Interl Core i7

4Gb

OS X 10.8

I have the same problem. I upgraded my "MacBookPro Mid2010" from Lion to Mountain Lion three days ago and battery life is 3:18 at full charge with only Firefox, Adium and Mail running... the Activity Monitor shows 97,13% iddle and all applications I have installed are perfectly compatible.

It used to be 5-6 hours with Lion, till three days ago... so it's definitely Mountain Lion, there is no other option. So I expect there will be an update or a patch to solve this problem.

Note: I did not install from zero, I upgraded from Lion. I don't know if that could be the reason too... but there is no excuse even in that case to that decrease of battery life.

CPU: Intel 2.8Ghz Core i7

RAM: 8 GB 1067Mhz DD3

HDD: 500 GB SATA2 7200rpm

Graphic Card: NVIDIA GeForce GT 330M 512 MB

Mid 2012 MBP (less than 1 month old), installed Mountain Lion yesterday morning, battery life is suffering horribly. Activiity Monitor doesn't indicate anything out of the ordinary, so don't know what is going on.