Battery life dropped considerably on Mountain Lion.

"Apple Support Communities is here to help people use Apple products and technologies more effectively."

At 205 pages .... it is not happening .... is it?

scartacus wrote:

Out of the 6 charges, I allowed the battery to cut out at 0% twice.

Try not to.

Mac 101

Scartacus,

Someone (csound1?) previously had suggested that revamped battery charging algorithms built in to Mountain Lion were in play causing our issues

I had suggested that a subset of batteries from Apple failed to have the tolerances necessary to properly use the algorithms of Mountain Lion. The shortcomings of this subset would not have been an issue using charging mechanisms of previous OS versions. You say you've been using the same motherboard without issue with previous OS's but perhaps there's something in the firmware that is ill equipped to handle those algorithms? I find this LESS likely as I'd expect firmware to be less likely to get glitches than a battery pack of physical, sloppy, delicate, electrolyte goo, but is it impossible? Maybe not. Some motherboards may produce issues with the algorithm while others work fine. Beisaurus found batteries cured 3 charging issues while a motherboard was needed on a fourth.

In practice, I find problems with multiple causes can take a long time to solve. Perhaps this would explain 205+ pages of forum posts.

UPDATE

An Apple Certified Vendor ran my user's Macbook from the internet recovery partition (there was no partition installed on the drive) and watched as the battery drained away before his very eyes.

It is pretty hard to see how any third party software can be to blame for the low battery life symptom, so asking what people are running when they get battery draining issues is irrelevant in at least SOME cases. If there's doubt, users can use the recovery partition to eliminate the variable. (Newbies: hold down Command-R when you hear the bootup chime)

Still banking on OS 10.8.3. We've heard of one success and one failure reported so far.

<crossing our fingers>

Bill Jacobs2 wrote:

Scartacus,

Someone (csound1?) previously had suggested that revamped battery charging algorithms built in to Mountain Lion were in play causing our issues

Errmmm, No.

Got tired of the crazyness of my Mac Book PRO battery behavior which started imidiately after the Mountain Lion upgrade.

After the upgrade to Mountain Lion my Mac Book Pro drained the battery within an hour, overheated even while browsing the internet as only activity while desperately trying to cool down with the fans at maximum speed.

I followed the advise to reset the NVRAM (PRAM) you can find how to do this on the internet.

And guess what: It did the trick. Now the battery performance is ok again, and the Mac Book Pro do not overheat anymore.

My Mac Book Pro is a primo 2011 15 inch version, 2GHz Core I7 with 8Megs of Ram. It was originally delivered with Snow Leopard, then updated to Lion online and finally to Mountain Lion online. It has been upgraded from 4megs of Ram to 8Megs of Ram. The memory upgrade was done while the Lion OS was in operation.

I hereby suggest that Apple developers gets more in control of the parameter settings in the NVRAM when they design the upgrade procedure for future upgrades.

Thanks for the advise I found in this forum to reset the NVRAM🙂

Yup! So... I upgraded my MBP 2009 running SL to ML 4 weeks ago and, after reading all these posts here, decided to explore the battery life problem using a trial and error method. Did all the logical stuff like reinstalling with just the pre-intalled apps... Surfing with no added frills... and... guess what... battery life sucked!! It lost approx 40+% of it's time! From 5-6 hrs (considering it's a 3yo battery with 311 charges) to 2-3 hrs.

Tweaked the system and persisted with attempting to find a cure - but all to no avail.

Yesterday I did a fresh re-install of SL and battery is back to 5-6 hrs!! Idleing it even showed 8hrs!! Not seen whilst I was using ML!

So... For all you nay sayers.... Good Luck! The problem is defininetly with ML!

If you're running ML and are having battery issues... do youselves a favour and install SL. Take a look at the difference and decide for youself 🙂

Until there's a fix I'll remain with SL. I miss the added extras... but not enough to warrent the loss in portable use!

Apple - Batteries - Notebooks

No problems here as regards searching & reading;) Took a good look at that link way before I posted here...

Thanks though... but I think I'll stick with SL until the ML issue is fixed...

What about the new version of ML? will fix this problem?

I can't even see a movie with my macbook's battery :\

Hi guys! I just updated something about the battery. I too have been so frustrated about the battery issue since upgrading to ML the moment it became available. Apologies for not being able to take screen shot of the said update and cant remember the exact name of it, but its for the battery. I hope this thing works. Im currently charging my MBP early 2011. Did anyone do the said update? Waiting for your opinions. Lets all pray and hope this will fix the problem.

James from Dasmarinas wrote:

Hi guys! I just updated something about the battery. I too have been so frustrated about the battery issue since upgrading to ML the moment it became available. Apologies for not being able to take screen shot of the said update and cant remember the exact name of it, but its for the battery. I hope this thing works. Im currently charging my MBP early 2011. Did anyone do the said update? Waiting for your opinions. Lets all pray and hope this will fix the problem.

That's SMC update. This update is for the users who got caused the charge cycles that has goes above 1000 and it forced the user to shut down the laptop or stops functioning and Apple fixed that for small numbers people. This is different update and not a relation to this thread.

But hopefully Mac OS X Mountain Lion 10.8.3 can bring possible improvement on Battery Life draining issues. Plus i heard few beta testers has solved their battery life by upgrading to 10.8.3 latest build, i hope this will be a good news for everyone who got caused the issue.

PS: The SMC update didn't resolve the battery life issue it's still the same and there is no improvements yet.

Here it's the screen-shot:

I have posted before and I will repeat.

1. I have the latest seed builds of the latest version for many weeks but can say little else

2. I had the problem for 18 months

3. I tried EVERYTHING on these boards (mostly)

4. I was deeply invovled with the tech team through the office of the CEO

5. Sometimes, somethings appeared to fix it for a few days, no more

6. So many things was suggested, blamed, accused, re-blamed, finger pointing

7. MY battery would last little more than 2 1/2 to 3 1/2 hours

8. It would often run hot, for no common pattern (mostly flash/video)

Then

1.. I installed the seed

2. I didn't do anything else

3. I didn't change the battery, I didn't change the way I worked

4. l have LOADS of apps running all the time, the same apps I've always run

5. It rarely gets hot, the fan is rarely heard

6. I won't be calling Apple again anytime soon. I regularly get 6-7 hours and did I say, I have'nt changed ANYTHING else.

You figure it out. Apple makes no promises and nor can I - but I say, just hang in there guys. I'm rooting for us all here.

Oh. Darn! This made me sad. 😟 But thanks for enlightening me. I guess the only choice I have is to wait for 10.8.3.

Franc_Iphone wrote:

I have posted before and I will repeat.

1. I have the latest seed builds of the latest version for many weeks but can say little else

2. I had the problem for 18 months

3. I tried EVERYTHING on these boards (mostly)

4. I was deeply invovled with the tech team through the office of the CEO

5. Sometimes, somethings appeared to fix it for a few days, no more

6. So many things was suggested, blamed, accused, re-blamed, finger pointing

7. MY battery would last little more than 2 1/2 to 3 1/2 hours

8. It would often run hot, for no common pattern (mostly flash/video)

Then

1.. I installed the seed

2. I didn't do anything else

3. I didn't change the battery, I didn't change the way I worked

4. l have LOADS of apps running all the time, the same apps I've always run

5. It rarely gets hot, the fan is rarely heard

6. I won't be calling Apple again anytime soon. I regularly get 6-7 hours and did I say, I have'nt changed ANYTHING else.

You figure it out. Apple makes no promises and nor can I - but I say, just hang in there guys. I'm rooting for us all here.

Glad to see that result! I'd await for public release. I'm afraid to test the beta version because it's very unstable.

Hopefully this result might apply to everyone.

Thanks for your post.