Battery life dropped considerably on Mountain Lion.

Just updated and mines looking great too.... 97%, 9:32 minutes!! I know that's rubbish, but I've never seen such a huge figure before.. I'll keep it going on battery and see how it does.

Well I updated and nothing significant yet..5:17 is listed, Im wondering what does everyone have running in the background?

I have Better touch tool, Dropbox, Boom, Alfred, evernote, and iprocastinate. I dont show any of those being a runaway app...

I have, Safari (3 Tabs including this), MS Excel, DropBox, Google Music, Evernote, Jabber connect, Google Drive, Adium, Mac mail, ICAL, Powerpoint, Word and Skype (oh and also Outlook (Exchange). Bluetooth is on and I'm on WIFI.

The FAN now hardly runs unless I do something Graphic intensive (VMware can kick it up as can Video).

This is the MAC I brought, NOW at last performing exactly as I expected to back 18 months ago. 15", 512GB SSD with 8GB Ram

I saw the results as many are posting immediately after the update to 10.8.3 which I've now been running for 2 months. Never done, nor had to do, an SMC reset or Disk cache clearance or anything. As I also said, many on the seed program saw great results.

Now, we know, many people have NOT experience battery loss with Mountain Lion as well so there's no guarantee it will work for all, nor can we say it won't degrade some.

BUT we can conclude, there was a bug (for me and others here), that has been fixed.

BTW - Currently showing, with all of the above, about, 5 hours and 45 mins. WHich is spot on what I get when running all of the above. I have found the estimated time/% to be pretty darn good for most apps that are not obvious CPU/Memory hogs.

Well this is very promising.... been on battery about an hour.... now reads 90%, 6h 06m remaining. Battery Health gives it 6h30m.

Display on about 50%, running Battery health, Safari, Mail only. Using a mid- 2011 Air, i7, 4gb ram, 256gb SSD.

Something's changed, for sure.... will report back when run down.

Mountain Lion is the most battery intensive OS I have ever had. On my other computer, which runs 10.6.8, I can watch videos on the internet and play games for much longer than on this computer. AND, that MBP is about 3 years older and has specs worse than this one. My current MBP is Mid-2012 8GB RAM 2.6GHZ intel i7 Nvidia GeForce 650M with 1GB GDDR5 memory. On this new one I can run games for about an hour to 2 hours and my battery is down to 15%. Fans start running like crazy after about 20 minutes and my mac heats up so much i can't hold my hand on it for long. I can watch videos on the internet for about 2 hours and my battery will be almost dead. Also, writing this post lowered my battery about 4%. I've read a lot of reviews on having mountain lion slow down your compute and make your battery life decrease. I definitely think this is all true. Apple you really need to read your reviews and actually think about doing something.

Well it has been a while since I posted anything, but here it goes. The ML update 10.8.3 did resolve my battery issue. I upgraded to ML again, applied the combo update. The system as a whole is at 10.8W of use, battery life went to 5 hours (considering how old it is), the computer is cool to the touch and the fans do not go at full blast anymore. So Apple did fix the issue with this update, at least for me.

Hi to all guys,

This is my first post in this matter, but I'm reading almost daily the updates of this problem with battery on Macbook Pro's.

I do also suffer from the same problem, I got a Early 2011 Macbook Pro 15'' (750GB HDD model/AMD HD6750 GPU) and I have it since about 19 months. It came with Lion installed and so far the Lion experience was really good with no issues worthy to talk about.

When Mountain Lion came out I rush into buy it and install it to use all those wonderful IOS-port features, specially cause I use other Apple products like iPad, iPhone, Apple TV, etc...

About 2 or 3 months ago I notice the message that my battery needs to be replaced, I'm a system dev engineer and I now how I use my computers. I was really worried cause the way I use was not near the same heavy-work I do on some other Windows laptops I'll have in the past.

I started my research and end up like most of you guys in this post of the forum, wondering if someone would have the same "luck" i have, but manage to get some word-around, cause in my opinion... everything start-up with the Mountain Lion upgrade.

I was really interested in Franc_iPhone's experience and hoped it would help me out, cause my battery was losing the amount of charge FAST... I use to have 7 hours with Lion, and with this problem I now have a battery that only charges 962 mAH, which is less than an iPhone battery (as a note I use the Sistem Information App and go the Power... there is a lot of information there that CoconutBattery app use to display). Varely that amount could only for 25 minutes. It began losing mAH from the original amount which is 6900 mAH almost daily and sometimes abructly (once I just turn it off and was in about 4200 mAH and when I turn it on was only 2900 mAH).

TODAY, yes (just before the release of the 10.8.3 patch) I was really **** off and read that someone else does a clean install of ML and got lucky. I made the same procedure, erase all the partitions (except the recovery) in the HDD (even bootcamp) and install from Internet again the ML 10.8.2 OS. The result was the same, it change only a few mAH (no more than 10). After I finish and went to see any updates I was amazed about the fact the 10.8.3 patch was out today (kinda crazy for me at that moment, after i wipe out everything). I install the patch and the result... WAS THE SAME, my battery is only at 962 mAH. I make some test (use it with the battery, use it with the power-cord, turn it off, reboot, etc... etc...), the end result is the same and sadly it seems that my problem is hardware related and (to me at least) the ML could have trigger some malicius behavior on my Macbook that end up with this issue.

I live in Latin America and here a Macbook cost almost the double than a similar computer on Windows OS. I have a Asus 3D Laptop that after 2.5 years it still give you the same amount of battery life, even though was only 2.5 hours... and I use it for work and also for playing games (something I avoid in the Macbook, so Mac was in an easy ride). IMO, such price for this type of products should give you a much much much better experience that other products less costly.

As Metallica song says... "its sad, but true". At least for me I think my ride on Apple laptop is over, I can't handle myself to think it would be wise to invest more money on a really pricy piece of equipment and get issues I don't have on less-costly equipment, that in many cases does get the job done.

Hope anyone else could get better result than me... sure there is a lot people out there with issues, this moment the thread got 325699 views, which surely Apple SHOULD put attention to it if it cares of its customers.

Ciao and good luck,

Hope anyone else could get better result than me... sure there is a lot people out there with issues, this moment the thread got 325699 views, which surely Apple SHOULD put attention to it if it cares of its customers.

Ciao and good luck,

Sorry to hear about your experience. I think Apple might well have fixed it. I've been on battery for 3.5 hours, it's showing 56%, 3h31 remaining.... it's never been that good before!

I was going to wait until the battery died, but it's taking too long. Goodnight all!🙂

I really don't know what to say! I'm very disappointed with this update for which I've been waiting for months. Battery life has not improved but decreased on my macbook air late 2010. I've done a full discharge of 2hours 30mins down from around 4hours previously, the battery icon still isn't reading accurately and my machine no longer supports windows 8 installations despite already having one. Apple died with Steve Jobs, its all down hill.

Alright so, yesterday I uprgraded my Mountain lion from 10.8.2 to 10.8.3. This seems to have increased my battery life a small bit, but not by much. Something that I did notice, was that my MBP loses battery power very quickly when it is closed and sleeping. After leaving it closed for about... 6 hours, my battery drained 10%. On any other laptop I have used it would only drain 1 or 2% tops.

Acid_Myst wrote:

Alright so, yesterday I uprgraded my Mountain lion from 10.8.2 to 10.8.3. This seems to have increased my battery life a small bit, but not by much. Something that I did notice, was that my MBP loses battery power very quickly when it is closed and sleeping. After leaving it closed for about... 6 hours, my battery drained 10%. On any other laptop I have used it would only drain 1 or 2% tops.

Same here, There is only 2% improvement slightly through the latest update (Mountain Lion 10.8.3), But this update is definitely not fixed the battery life i'm sure that Apple aren't aware of this issue they're keeping the users to waste their money on Apple for no reasons. I was hoped that Mountain Lion 10.8.3 will fixed and this is not yet fixed.

On Lion i used to get at least 6 hours of real time usage not estimated remaining. But on Mountain Lion the estimated remaining shows 7 hours after the 10.8.3 update which is not real my laptop when to shutdown after 4 hours of usage which is not enough and this is not advertised specs.

I actually run iStat Menus, Mail.app, Google Chrome, Text Expander, MiniBattery Logger (to test the battery life), Dropbox and Skype every day and also in Lion i used the exactly same apps but i got 6 hours of normal usage and 4 hours of heavy usage. In Mountain Lion (10.8.2 not 10.8.3) for normal usage i get 2 hours (sometimes 3 hours but not too often) and for heavy usage i get only 1 hour and 30 minutes.

I don't really know what is Apple doing right now about the Mountain Lion and nearly there Apple are planning to bring the 10.9 and i'd think this might get the worst update for everyone but there will be only few awesome feature that's not needed for a computer (those features are from iOS also Siri alike will be implemented) but it's worth to have those features.

Under Tim Cook Era i'm very disappointed with their support in AppleCare outside the US they're not useful for the non-US customers. But under Steve Jobs i never experienced such issues on Lion or Snow Leopard even the Leopard Steve the one who changed the whole world into the happiness not Tim.

I don't know what can i do more to fix the issue from the user-end. 😟

Nelcab 507, Brianx87, Acid_myst, Sulaiman.k, and anyone else that found 10.8.3 to NOT be the savior of bad battery life.

Not everyone has had battery life problems with version 10.8-10.8.2

SOME users found a battery replacement to restore full battery performance even using version 10.8-10.8.2.

Several users using version 10.8-10.8.2 made note of severe degradation of battery health.

I've suggested a hypothesis that the problems with version 10.8-10.8.2 that caused the battery life to be low could also be damaging the battery.

For those that receive no improvement from version 10.8.3, it may be fruitful to get to an Apple store (or whatever resource may be more suitable) to get a battery replacement. Your old battery may be defective or may have been damaged by version 10.8-10.8.2 to the point that the fix included in 10.8.3 cannot act on the malfunctioning battery.

Perhaps one or more of you is still on warranty and can swap out the battery to see if that, combined with 10.8.3 brings joy?

@Bill Jacobs

I've already tested my machine on Snow Leopard 10.6.6; Lion 10.7.5 and my existing Mountain Lion 10.8.1/.2.3 and can tell you this problem resides from 10.8.1 onwards. There is no problem what so ever with the battery while running SL or Lion and I've already been to the Apple store were the battery was tested and had found no problems. What's even more incredible about this issue is that their are users that have had their batteries replaced only to have the issue attack their macbooks again, with a brand new battery, there are a lot of pages to get through but users have posted this here on this topic. Personally I believe that this problem is more wide spread than we are lead to believe and has been played down by Apple and loyal users upon the forums considering that the issue is seen across all macbooks operating ML, even the employees at Apple have told me that their batteries on their brand new retina macbook are not operating as expected. This very same issue was brought to the media's attention in Lion and can be seen referenced on my sites and forums but somehow not with ML, another failure from Apple with the new management .

Bob,

I changed my battery recently and this didn't help to resolve the battery issue as well you see what Brian said He already took the laptop to Apple Store and checked there is no issues for Battery, I've also done the same thing what Brian said, I'm not going to replace the battery again they might charge for this.

There are over 326,278 viewers in this thread and those viewers are still awaiting for the feedbacks from the existing user who've experienced the battery life issue so far there is only few users are happy with their battery performance some of them don't understand what's the exactly issue.

I think you're too new in this thread i've been posting this numerous of times i repeated that i changed my battery after upgrading to 10.8.2 and worked perfectly for just for a week after a week the battery got drained again faster.

Again changing the battery it might help to resolve ONLY for few users and not all, This could likely to be logic board related issue or probably i need to replace MacBook but my local Apple Service Provider doesn't allow to replace the MacBook since there is NO issues found for the battery and they said they are not able to change the laptop for me or replacement the logic board will cost me lot of money even i'm still in AppleCare warranty, Apple customer support they've told me that the battery replacement is not related to warrantly as for logic board i have no issue i think so.

If you sincerely believe this issue wouldn't have happened had Steve Jobs been running the company, then you are sadly mistaken. Issues such as this one, and worse - batteries exploding, Time Capsules dying immediately upon expiration of warranty - have happened before... yes, while Steve Jobs was alive. Not even then had they advertised their issues from the rooftops, though.

Nothing in this world is perfect, including Apple. Apple simply makes much better products than the others, and in my experience tries to eventually fix the outstanding issues. You have every right to be dissatisfied and demand whatever remedy is available, but these things simply don't have any connection whatsoever with Steve Jobs being dead or alive.