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Battery life dropped considerably on Mountain Lion.

I upgraded to mountail Lion and now my battery life is about half of what it was before upgrading. Shouldn't the update improve battery life? Also, what can I do about this?

MacBook Pro, OS X Mountain Lion

Posted on Jul 25, 2012 8:39 AM

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3,397 replies

Aug 3, 2012 10:17 PM in response to jpengland96

My battery is also draining very fast on my early 2011 13" MBP, since i upgraded from Lion to Mountain Lion. With no current open applications or programs besides Safari.

Aug 3, 2012 11:16 PM in response to jpengland96

Well after I got all worried about this, I decided to run my MBP on battery for a while to see what would happen.


It was a little disturbing to see it drop 3% in the first minute and a half after startup, but after that the battery behaved more sensibly. I went from 85% to 80% in about 25 minutes while doing not much of anything except opening and closing apps, turning the camera on (opening photobooth), etc..


So I shut down at 80%, waited a couple of minutes, and plugged in my power adapter, and the light turned orange after a few seconds, as usual. It looks like it's charging just like it always has.


I really hope there is nothing bad about Mountain Lion that can't be fixed, because I really like the OS. I hated Lion, but this release really surprised me. I wasn't expecting it to be slick at all, but it really is.

Aug 3, 2012 11:24 PM in response to jpengland96

Just to chime in, I'm running an early '11 MBP (specs below).


Overall battery life in Mountain Lion has been consistant with Lion and Snow Leopard, no changes.


As an anecdote, in Lion, however, I did notice a significant battery life drop that seemed to be related to using Google Chrome. I stopped using Chrome, switched back to Safari, and battery life has been fine ever since. Upon further investigation, it appeared that Chrome preferred to use the discrete/dedicated Radeon GPU in my MBP as opposed to the integrated Intel HD. This made a huge difference in battery life for me. I do not know if Chrome has since been updated to address this I stopped using Chrome approximately six months ago and battery life has been fine. I also run Firefox (FFX) as a backup browser for specialized websites (namely academic stuff) and it does not replicate this behavior as was seen in Chrome. Safari 6 has been running fine and battery life has held steady at around 5-6 hours of namely web browsing, e-mail, writing/typing, music, etc.


Also, I installed the "Click2Flash" Safari extension to turn off external flash sites by default

Aug 4, 2012 4:08 AM in response to jpengland96

The much higher CPU usage of mountain lion applies to my iMac as well. While with lion the fan was hearable very seldom, now with moutain lion it's running permanently a high speed. I'm looking for a path to downgrade to lion.

Battery life dropped considerably on Mountain Lion.

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