Battery life dropped considerably on Mountain Lion.

Do you (CT) mean that Apple doesn't have a proof?

Arun Lal wrote:

Do you (CT) mean that Apple doesn't have a proof?

At this point of frustration i would install and try it. But before you do that, have you tried disabling notification centre? looks like some people have confirmed success!

I also think, Flash Player is a huge battery drain!

I'm using macbook pro mid 2010. I recently upgraded to Mountain lion from Lion OSX I feel like my battery is draining out so quckly compared to lion OSX. BTW, it very new battery I got it replaced by apple . I used Lion OSX few days before installing Mt LION OSX. My behaveriour in usage and system setting didn't change.

Same problem here.. I have a MacBook Pro mid 2010 too. My battery life has more than halfed after upgrading from Lion to Mountain Lion... I wanted to downgrade to Lion again but this comes with a lots of problems when I tried to backup from Time Machine. So i am on Mountain Lion again and hope for a patch...

your battery could be the primary issue.. what is your charge cycle count?

I faced this same battery issue, went to the Genius Bar for the 4th time after having replaced the battery previously. Genius reinstalled ML 10 8 2 and my battery is back to the 7 hr levels, it never went above 3:44 earlier. So it looks like my issue was resolved by just reinstalling a fresh copy of ML.

If I work offline on MS Office and also switch off the Wi-FI, the time remaining went up to 8:33.

Another positive that I could see was in the reduction of heat generated by the unit. My MBP is now super cool as against a hot pan earlier. Am sure there must be some runaway process that was the culprit and responsible for draining the battery as well as heating my MBP.

Mine is a mid 2012 piece that came pre-loaded with ML. Hoping that this battery life is here to stay and 10 8 3 only improves performance.

Cheers, Ketan

I have a late macbook air 2010 and I just upgrade to mountain lion and I only get 2 hours max. When I used to get 6 hours and a little bit more on snow leopard :/. This is horrible bc I'm in college and I have back to back classes and I dont have time to charge it. PLEASE FIX THIS APPLE

What ever happened to the days when there were Lemon Laws and when Companies were required to advertise

in honesty, frankly Apple cares more about estetics than quality thus everything is manufactured in China for the sake of profit. I used my MBP for general browsing and my battery is @ 33% after 65 minutes of use this is a disgrace and what need to happen is Apple needs to not care about f...n money and take care of the clients that put them on the map to begin with. Improved battery life? I had a better battery liofe on my old MacBook Pro pre 2007. And the batttery was already 2 years old. Just a thought.....

buddy,

You're talking about bringing thumb upon Apple .... not sure CT/moderator would like that .....

Count on your comments being removed .... they removed mine ....

Talk about flagrant autocracy .... people being ignored ... nice penance for liking Apple eh ....

Hope it works for you somehow through some divine intervention....

Cheers.

saber540 wrote:

What ever happened to the days when there were Lemon Laws and when Companies were required to advertise

in honesty, frankly Apple cares more about estetics than quality thus everything is manufactured in China for the sake of profit. I used my MBP for general browsing and my battery is @ 33% after 65 minutes of use this is a disgrace and what need to happen is Apple needs to not care about f...n money and take care of the clients that put them on the map to begin with. Improved battery life? I had a better battery liofe on my old MacBook Pro pre 2007. And the batttery was already 2 years old. Just a thought.....

Yes, especially for new comers like myself, i fled to mac from pc because battery was one of the issues. Apple doesn't want to admit the problem because that's a lot of laptops to recall, but we alreay paid a big price to get a mac, might as well buy a cheap laptop PC and upgrade to a new one every two years!!

Have you tried disabling notification centre? few users confirmed that it drains the battery.

It' s not necessarily the laptop that needs recalls.

Often, it's been the battery.

There are not uncommon reports that replacing the battery has restored battery life.

Only when the battery swap fails does Apple essentially replace the [warranty covered] Macbook (motherboard swap is almost like getting a new one.)

I'm an ACMT and the training one takes to get certified repeats ad nauseam that when working inside a laptop to cover the battery. The batteries are downright fragile. Expecting users to protect the battery by monkeying around inside their laptops is likely foolish so making macbooks very difficult to get inside serves the purpose of protecting users from themselves.

Problem is, when a known hardware issue like this cannot be solved by the end user, it can prove to be magnitudes more expensive if it's going to take professional, HIGHLY skilled intervention to solve it.

I'd like to take this opportunity to encourage Apple to take this experience into account in future designs to return Macbooks to their roots a little and make more components user replaceable / repairable. I won't be so cynical as to imply that making their products "black boxes" is deliberate to sell more product, I prefer the "paternal protection" hypothesis, but the case stands.

If batteries were user replaceable, then the Mountain Lion battery life issue might not have been so daunting. The nasty shock people had when they discovered their iPods would die when the battery did wasn't the devastating blow it could have been, but the tolerance people have for "disposable" electronics may have a limit. It's NOT environmentally sound to build product like this and dissuades value shoppers. Resale value could plummet and resale has been a selling point I've always mentioned with Macs. You just do NOT save that much buying used because people tend to keep them until they die. If they die quickly and irrevocably, you've gone from high resale to none and the value of the purchase is jeopardized.

I have not yet heard a refutation of the idea that Macbook batteries have design tolerances that present no problems for Mac OS through 10.7 and something in OS 10.8 pushes batteries to performance levels that causes otherwise good batteries to malfunction. Batteries in production now may have solved the problem, but replacing the existing ones will be pricey.

Even though 207 pages of responses indicates a serious issue, Apple has sold millions of these things so the problem may be relatively minor, speaking in terms of raw numbers of incidens, not in emotional trauma, or reputation to the brand.

Closing shout out:

Csound1: Do you have any guesses as to why OS 10.8 triggers the problem? It seems you find the concept of "charging algorithms" to be manure. It may well be. I do not profess knowledge of the engineering involved, but maybe you do and wouldn't mind sharing either information or wild guesses?

Bill Jacobs2 wrote:

Closing shout out:

Csound1: Do you have any guesses as to why OS 10.8 triggers the problem? It seems you find the concept of "charging algorithms" to be manure. It may well be. I do not profess knowledge of the engineering involved, but maybe you do and wouldn't mind sharing either information or wild guesses?

I do not think that 10.8 does trigger the problem, try as i might I am unable to replicate the issue (using 3 seperate test samples).

I have seen varying battery lives on OSX from 10.5 onwards.

However I do see a small number of people making claims based on what the estimate tells them, and that is no evidence at all (fo me).

I am also bored with this, if users refuse to actually test for results they will have nothing but guesswork to guide them.

🙂

Csound1 - You bored? - lol - how else do you get level points up. If you are truly bored, go away. Some of the people here have spent 1000's of dollars on machines that had great battery life that simply disappeared when they upgraded to ML. Some even were able to go back to Leopard and restore battery life. Testing, results? I have spent man weeks testing as have many others. Bully for you that you have 3 machines that do not manifest the problem. My wife's $1500 MacBook Pro lasts pretty close to the same as before the upgrade (7 hours). My $3900 MacBook Pro lasted 3 1/2 hours max. I ran tests / tweeks for 6 months trying to improve it permanently, I followed all the advice, good and bad. Some things worked for a few days and some didnt have any effect at all.

The battery indicator on the MAC is and always HAS been awesome so stop being an idiot. EVERYONE knows, if it shows 5 hours and you do something dramtic, like watching a VIDEO or adding a USB device or something, the 5 hours will be a useless indicator until the MAC has a chance to settle down again. And then, once settled, it's an awesome indicator. You even had ME second guessing that we needed to let the MAC battery drain to really be proof so I did this at least 30 times! Yes, because YOU made ME doubt myself on what I knew. I've been a MAC Book Pro user for 4 1/2 years, for my global travels, presentations, coding, business and personal usage. I have had laptops since they first came out (I am 50 years old and in IT) so I think I know a thing or two about battery life, usage, consumption, indicators, CPU, resource hunger, disk thrashing, bench marking, performance - and yet you seem to be an academic who reads too much and understands little.

Now my story is close to an end to prove you have been wrong for this entire time. For the last 8 weeks or more, I have, using the same machine, the same applications, the same battery, EXACTLY the same work as the prior year, and am NOW getting a consistent 7 hours, sometimes longer. I have just come back from 4 weeks overseas business travel and it's been as consistent as a rock. People who have read my earlier this year posts will know why. I am hoping what worked for me, will work for them becuase something changed that fixed it, and it wasn't me or my hardware. - It was the Apple guys, working on addressing it.... we shall see.. watch this space and fingers crossed for all..

What is your question?

Cosund1 - forums are not JUST for questions. But since you asked Csound;

Do you believe upgrading to ML does at least effect some people battery life?

Do you believe downgrading ML backwards could give some people their battery life back to pre ML?

Do you believe the battery life issues could be a software/firmware bug that COULD be fixed by Apple?

Do you think ALL or most of us are using using the machines / hardware incorrectly?