Battery life dropped considerably on Mountain Lion.

Franc_Iphone wrote:

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?

Apparantly some people believe detrimentally so. I have yet to see 1 occurence in real life.

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

Changing the conditions under which the battery runs will usually change the runtime, what do you expect?

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

Yes, they could be, (which is not the same yes as they are)

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

I do not know all of you, and as you just made the jump from reasonable (some of us) to fantasy (all of us) I have no interest in playing.

I think that's clear, misquote me if you need to.

Csound. Thanks, perfect.

Bill

I believe you correct on all counts. As I have myself texted ML vs L vs SL, on 4 yr old, 2 yr old and 2012 units, already posted the following:

- Found no evidence ML was to blame for the battery issues I noticed. In all cases, replacing the battery with a genuine new Apple one solved it

- Found evidence that, regardless of age, ML ran better and more efficiently than SL

- OS change may simply expose the issue with a battery (as it settles), but no evidence that changing an OS actually compromises an existing battery. No evidence that a battery tolerance is affected by ML.

- Plenty of evidence that how someone uses an OS, or ML, may affect a battery life. Power Nap will affect a battery life more than a machine with it disabled.

- Caveat: ML 10.8.2 was indeed better at power management than 10.8.1, and better than SL. But performance aside, I do not believe any OS version actually messed up a battery or lowered its health

- Battery health is relative to specific unit, how it was shipped, stored, etc,. My 2nd MBA Air, 2012, was returned as it was bent. The battery was draining. turns out it was also swollen inside, hence the bend. And that was straight from the factory.

- Got about 50 cycles so far, battery health a good 6-8 hrs, or 4 hrs video (VLC) if you wish. oscilates 98% - 96.5- 98%

Equally agree with the point your brought about millions. Months ago i argued that the issue does not exist, except maybe a tiny fraction ( way less than <0.001) of the population and in that case the issue is the battery. 208 pages vs millions of ML shippments speaks for itselft. Anyone getting a 3 hr macbook got some lemonish hardware, as millions of others get the advertised time or 6 to 7 hrs. Apple techs are not aware, Sr advisers do not come across (from their own input anyway) so it is a non issue , or on par with other reasons people returned their units (like the defective Sharp screens). I got one MBA with a defective trackpad (replacement pad never fixed it), a second with the swollen defective battery, a third with the defective LCD backlighting, all in 2.5 months fromthe Shengzhou factory. All issues are unrelated yet, were I to google them, there are forums for each. It was bad luck. My 4th one is on spec. In the end, Apple products are as they claim, and a tiny minority will get lemons like in any other business. But for my troubles (back and forth pickps or returns of these lemons) Apple compensated me beyond any expectations, i cannot disclose how.

The most important argument I made, and others as well is that OS fiddling is useless and pointless. The first reaction upon seeing such a low battery capacity is initial reformat followed by genius bar appt and battery replacement. No OS fillding, turning off features etc, make any difference other than wasting the user's time. Enough people have experimented and arrived at the same conclusions (for all our arguments even Csound admitted finding no issues on three separate units). So why recreate the wheel? if its the battery then replace it. If again, do it again (if bad batch). A third time new logicboard and in the end it will be on spec.

This threat should perhaps be renamed "Defective battery on macbook- ML not to blame" (hihi 😀 ) and thats it. Over the years had a a few irerespective of OS type.

So how, do you explain 1 year of 3 1/2 hours (2 hours for VMC) for a brand new MAC, then 4 1/2 hours (2 1/2 hours VMC) after upgrade to 8.1.2 and* NOW, for 8 weeks since being on the latest "seed", I get 7-8 hours (4 hours on VMC), each and every day. Same hardware, same programs. I guess it's just a miracle but a miracle that the same machine does what I paid good money for.

For a group, that doesn't have the problem, that frequently beats people up for not "calculating" battery usage correctly, I love the 0.001 of the population has the problem statistic spouted 🙂 Taking into NO account for;

* < 1% post on forums

* < 10% of those people stay on battery frequently for a lenght of time long enough to care

* or whatever random number you want to make up. It my household, it's 50% of the MACbooks have the problem - that doesn't make it a good stat to use either.

How do I explain your 3 1/2? You let it be so. Not only I do not believe your numbers but, the alternate hypothesis, if I do believe you, the conclusion is that you deliberately watched and monitored those 3 1/2 hours on your own. Also that implies you took no trouble steps to adress , or a genius bar would have cut your 1 year to 1 month.

Each new install or yupgrade (even so) is essentially a new variation of the OS so equivalent to a new install. It may save settings etc, but theere is quite aleap from 107 to 10.8.2 (since 10.8 came last august, your stat of 1 year is again in play). ML was released 6-7 months ago.

Yes 0.001 is a very high number (it should be much lower), and I proved, mathematically, why that is on the high side. At 0.01 you would have hundred of thousands of affected users, to varying degrees, many of them bugging Apple. A repair/general recall would be over USD 100 million +. Or, since apple is not involved in any battery related class action or so on, plus only 208 pages here, invariably extremely few users are affected. And those there are, are so by trouble batteries. So multiply 0.001 x 30 to 50 million macbooks shipped last three years, and do you really believe that 30 000 users out there have poor batteries? Cost? 6 million repairs. 0.01? 300 000 or $ 60 million repairs. 0.1? 3 000 000 or $ 600 million. Hence the numbers must be small. If the issue was big its stock price would take a fall with claims/operations losses. Basic accounting.

I do not believe that most people see the issue and do nothing. Esp in the USA? Also, there were enough articles published that had more people identified the issue, a torrent of posting would have followed. think of the scratched ipod case... or the iPhone price drop after 6 months Torrent of complaints in instants.

Most macbok users I see are mobile types, on the go, as myself, so if anything your householdf usage of mobile macbooks and charging may not be representative of most people's uses.

Umm, replace your household batteries first, then let us know how that turns out. Oh, and let the geniuses do it, for free.. 😉

Belsarius, email me directly and I will discuss my emails exchanges with the office of the CEO, Tim Cook. Of course, he doesn't answer directly but his executive, escalation tech team are second to none. They escalate straight to a dev team with far more in-depth experience than the genius teams. The follow-up calls and emails I have recieved on this issue show they really don't assume we all lie and actually in fact, help because they too, can see first hand the issue! They even remoted into my machine 4 times. I had more exchanges and dumps from my machine (after 4 earlier visits to the Genius Bar). What I will give Apple is, an A1 for effort and soon I hope, A1 for the final resolution.

Of course, your email implies I am a liar and have not been in IT for my entire working life (and I'm now 50) and successfully have started multiple successful technology business. I'll put my money where my mouth is and email you the exchanges and system dumps if you like!

Its people like you that are more of an embaressment to the IT world than anyone else.

Instead of calling people liars, try to be helpful.

Dear Beisarius,

In order to contibute to the significance of the issue and contradict to your useless attempt to depreciate the popularity of the subject, I was wondering, why don't you consider the simple to be observed fact of the over 300k views on the discussion, into your "basic accounting"? Moreover, Franc_Iphone gave you, already, some, common sense clues, which you should include in your otherwise grocery-store-maths (as we would call it in my native language). However, what is the scale, according to which we can measure and judge if a problem should be resolved and not be skipped or masked (bying a new battery(?!))?

It has happened to be an issue appearing to several users, who all have noticed from similar to identical behaviours, after upgrading to ML. Is it a coincidense? I doubt, but I'm sure the majority of these users would be pleased enough to know the (most comprehensive) cause, even without getting the easy solution. If it will be proved that replacing the battery, in order to run ML, is the only method to solve the problem, then they could consider of bying a new one. But only then! Until then, it is obvious to me that people should be wondering, testing (as Csound1 has stated this correctly) and expecting some official diagnosis and opinion. After all, there cannot be stupid questions, but answers can...

dikafe,

Couple of months ago, I have followed Beisarius's instruction which he ordered me to change the battery for the laptop in order to run the Mountain Lion as advertised. But unfortunately his instruction didn't work as advertised and i wasted my money on buying the battery they didn't give me for free because they said it's not part of the warranty, I'm using MacBook Pro early 2011 and it works well under Lion before the upgrade to Mountain Lion and i surely noticed the battery difference after upgrading and before the upgrade.

At the Service center these guys suggested me to wait for the Mountain Lion 10.8.3 and i don't know if this may fix the battery life issue. But i'm hoping that may fix this issue. At least i heard that Franc_Iphone tested the Mountain Lion 10.8.3 and it worked as advertised.

Also i have tried to email Mr. Philip Schiller in regarding the battery life and he never responded my message, I felt the Apple are too greedy for money they never help the users to resolve their cases which has been left opened in past month. I know this thread has over 300,000 views and Apple should make this case as top prioritized in order to fix this issue for all the users who've been caused the battery life.

I have been Apple user since 5 years now. I loved their product and i have never found any issue during these years (under Steve Jobs' Era). This is my first issue that i've been caused. 😟

Belsarius, do you have a job ? I really wonder that...

By the way, for so many months, my MBPr still has the problem of battery been drained too fast, I didn't reply is because there isn't a REAL solution to comment on yet.

I do have work to do

Sorry to hear you that have an extra battery for nothing, I believe Apple is scratching their butt trying to fix the problem for sure, because overheat and frequently recharge will also damage other parts too, including screen air leak, fans noise and PCB curve or similar problem to cause further problems on logic board.

I hope you learn from your lesson, simple put, if not an official Apple employee clarify the problem or answering your questions, you can always safely throw those other's comment into the rubbish bin, don't spend your money again :)

lovejam2012 wrote:

Sorry to hear you that have an extra battery for nothing, I believe Apple is scratching their butt trying to fix the problem for sure, because overheat and frequently recharge will also damage other parts too, including screen air leak, fans noise and PCB curve or similar problem to cause further problems on logic board.

I hope you learn from your lesson, simple put, if not an official Apple employee clarify the problem or answering your questions, you can always safely throw those other's comment into the rubbish bin, don't spend your money again 🙂

Thank you for your advise. They're Official Employers but not Geniuses, They're Apple Authorized Resellers which they have provided support for the hardware but i think it's very similar to the Genius Bar.

Let's hope for the best and see what does Apple doing for the upcoming update. If they still haven't fixed, All of the users and the viewers of this thread can easily threat Apple to fix the issue. Because all of us we're spending lot of money and this products aren't cheap like Dell or HP. Apple MUST provide outstanding support for the expensive products.

For example if you buy Mercedes Benz car or Roll Royce car these manufacturers offers excellent support coverage for their customers because they know the customers are pay lot of money to buy the car. Same thing applies to Apple and Apple is like Mercedes Benz and Apple is the most valuable companies in the world but still their support is rubbish 😢.

Sulaiman.K,

I share your thoughts and your experience (unique or not, it has to be respectful) can only prove how Beisarious is misleading. Also, thank you very much for reviewing, more or less, the outcome of the discussion so far. I have read myself several pages of it, while having the issue as well. I am actually the example, of someone, who fits to the discussion, but I had not contributed, while some other user(s) has/have stated similar behaviours already. However, after several Beisarius' posts, i felt the need to notice his unecessary comments. I'm aware that even these last posts of mine, do not offer much to the solution, as well, but I hope I am excused, for this being a forum, not a Q&A place. Looking forward to the fix, too!

By the way, lovejam2012, this potential, further stress to other systems is what really worries me, and not that I depend on the battery life, since I mostly use my notebook plugged in power. Although, it doesn't seem that I have problems with overheating so far and it's been only a few days running on ML, it has been very wise from you to underline it. Also important, both for users and Apple (regardless if the former are covered by guarranty from the latter).

Franc_Iphone,

Just out of curiosity, did you perform clean installation and then applied the update?

Or did you update from Snow Leopard or Lion and then applied the update?

Thanks in advance for you reply.

Yangy. I had a 17" Pro for 3 1/2 years on SL. Even after 3 1/2 years, I was getting >4 hours on 1 charge. I then brought a brand new 15", 512GB SSD, 8GB ram, in August 2011 - that was running Lion and the battery life was totally unexpectedly poor. (Yes, I did migrate (as Apple advised) from the old machine to the new). Going to ML didn't help much. A few things helped for a short time (days), like SMC resets. As of end of December 2012, I get 6 1/2 to 7 hours. Exactly what I had expected, based on my usage, knowledge and technical input from Apple store when I brought it back in Mid 2011. Hope that helps.