Battery life dropped considerably on Mountain Lion.

@Saber540, can you tell us what you power profile is in terms of current (mA) and power (watts). If you have voltage, that would be good to capture too. If you're dropping from 97 to 77 in 12 minutes, that isn't right. Assuming you haven't taken it to an Apple store yet, any additional metrics you can post would be great.

Becuase it seems to fix machines for some and break machines for others, I lean toward a configuration problem. It isn't firmware (and least not directly) nor is it battery (at least not directly) or you would have experienced the problem under 10.8.2, which is where, I presume, you upgraded from.

Also, the first boot could have a ton of stuff going on in the background. Are you still seeing the same drop now?

@Chris_gr, You made a jump from SL to ML. Wondering if some of the new features are part of the issue. Can you turn off iCloud, Bluetooth, and Notifications and see what happens?

Yes, if you can post your power profile, that would be great (mA, mV, and W). You can get it through System Information, which you can do via the Apple Symbol -> About This Mac... -> More Info -> System Report -> Hardware -> Power. Or just look for System Information in the Utilities folder within the Application folder in the Finder.

@ScratchSF

thanks for the reply.

Is there any app to measure realtime the energy used per application ? (or sth?).

I am now 95% - 3:35 remaining - 92 percent of battery life in 225 Cycles (thanks to Apple!)

I am only using MS Word, Safari for browsing.

No flash installed, java yes but not using.

No dropbox or Skype (just to test if anything changes)

NO iCloud, Noteification centre or bluetooth (NEVER USED THEM)

Lately, I use only MS Office and Safari for web browsing, no videos or music, no flash

Model Name: MacBook Air

Model Identifier: MacBookAir3,2

Processor Name: Intel Core 2 Duo

Processor Speed: 1.86 GHz

Battery Information:

Model Information:

Serial Number:

Manufacturer: SMP

Device Name: bq20z451

Pack Lot Code: 0

PCB Lot Code: 0

Firmware Version: 301

Hardware Revision: 000a

Cell Revision: 162

Charge Information:

Charge Remaining (mAh): 6095

Fully Charged: Yes

Charging: No

Full Charge Capacity (mAh): 6153

Health Information:

Cycle Count: 225

Condition: Normal

Battery Installed: Yes

Amperage (mA): -5

Voltage (mV): 8339

@dikaf

>While checking the battery usage, I noticed that when closing Skype (while idling), for example, the >battery usage fell from around 1200 to about 900mAh.

Maybe a naive question: how can I get the mAh used by an application (or even aggregate by all my running apps) ?

Contact the suppliers of the apps you need answers for.

chris_gr,

I'm sorry for not clearing this out and I haven't replied already to your inquiry, because I didn't know the answer. As I can recall I had looked in the past, for quite some time, to find an app to do what you also ask for, without any positive outcome. In my case, I just had the "Battery Health" application on and I was toggling stuff on and off and watching the current overall energy use (in mAh) of the system. By the way, I don't know much to judge precisely and I'm only making assumptions. About Skype in particular, the fact is that it doesn't use a lot of CPU in idle mode (otherwise it's greedy), but I thought there was a significant difference in energy consumption by having it on or off. I have tried also ooVoo, but it seemed to be more demanding in idle mode. With some better video/sound quality though during calls. Anyway…

CSound1,

I believe that what you suggest doesn't seems practical enough, since what chris_gr asks for is to locate which applications are using more power and not that he's suspicious of one or two and he needs to know if their consumption is normal.

I once used a terminal command, which, from what I understand, displays somehow how often a process writes on the hard disk. I tried to find out this way for processes repeating that very often and indirectly consider them responsible for high energy consumption. The command is:

sudo fs_usage

and since it runs constantly you can stop it by pressing Ctrl+C. Other than that, I know zero regarding the exact usability of the command.

dikaf wrote:

CSound1,

I believe that what you suggest doesn't seems practical enough, since what chris_gr asks for is to locate which applications are using more power and not that he's suspicious of one or two and he needs to know if their consumption is normal.

I once used a terminal command, which, from what I understand, displays somehow how often a process writes on the hard disk. I tried to find out this way for processes repeating that very often and indirectly consider them responsible for high energy consumption. The command is:

sudo fs_usage

and since it runs constantly you can stop it by pressing Ctrl+C. Other than that, I know zero regarding the exact usability of the command.

And it does not tell you the power consumed by individual processes either, which is what is wanted here.

Fully agreed there. I just shared this experience which I recalled from the times looking for the kind of application in discussion..

Get a Kill-a-watt and use it to monitor power consumption as you stop and start various apps.

(UPDATE) So something unusual has happened after I decided to downgrade to 10.6.8 and this being the second time since the 10.8.3 release. Initially the 8.3 release worsened by battery life so I did a downgrade to 6.8 to see what the difference would be like and it was a significantly expected increase. So I let my macbook air 3,1 sit for a few hours on battery and it ran smoothly with out any signs of battery deterioration then I upgraded to 8.2 again with which I received the expected loss of battery life of around 40-50% which quite frankly I'm fed up with after two updates and months of waiting!

So again I decided to downgrade to 6.8 as a means to an end and sit comfortably with a smoothly operating machine but I gave the 8.3 update another go just to see what difference it could make if any but this time it was worse than it previously was. The service battery notification in the battery status icon had reappeared as it did with 8.1 and battery life had dropped to around 30% which after an hour of use and multiple SMC and PRAM resets there was no improvement. So back to Snow Leopard.

Now previously when I downgraded I found no problems with the battery after a few hours of use and no erratic time or percentage outputs in the battery icon but on this occasion the same cannot be said. I've downgraded to 6.8 and at 100% battery charge the readout is 2 hours which can move up and down slightly even though I'm only using safari via an Ethernet cable.

What should I do now?

Just a note to say that 8.3 is now an impossibility for me as the idiots at apple have decided that my macbook is not allowed to run windows 8 as the latest version of bootcamp renders it impossible to install it so I'm really at a loss about what to do.

I'm new here, from the UK. Battery life on Mountain Lion is a complete joke. I have an early 2011 17" 2.2 i7 with a Samsung 830 256GB and the original 750GB in a caddy. The battery life is appalling. I'm about to go back to Lion. Will report back.

chris_gr wrote:

@dikaf

>While checking the battery usage, I noticed that when closing Skype (while idling), for example, the >battery usage fell from around 1200 to about 900mAh.

Maybe a naive question: how can I get the mAh used by an application (or even aggregate by all my running apps) ?

Amperage (mA): -5

Voltage (mV): 8339

I don't know of a tool that will do this for you. But you can do exactly what you've done by running an application, capturing the total current, and then terminating the applications and seeing how far it drops. Not an exact science, but the difference will give you a feeling of how much current each app draws. But don't try to sum various apps in this way, I doubt the sums will total properly.

Also, in your power profile, can you run it again. Doesn't look like you refreshed it right after unplugging it from the wall. I'd expect to see the current around the -1200 or -900 (based on this post) and not -5. That said, what I find interesting is your voltage reading of a 8.3V. To the best of my knowledge, LiPo batteries have a voltage range they need to stay within per cell, which is 3V (low) and 4.2V (high). The LiPo, I have assumed are 3 cells which gives us arange of 9V (low) to 12.6 (high). Your voltage of 8.3 falls below the low. But since I know the -5 mA is wrong, I'm going to assume that this one needs to be refreshed too.

@brianx87 - try clearing out all of your cache files. I've done this using Onyx, but there are other ways to do this.

I'm grabbing at air here, but what are your output MIDI settings? Mine are 44100 Hz, 2-Channel 24 Bit. You can find this setting under Finder -> Applications -> Utilities -> Audio MIDI Setup -> Built-In Output.

The reason I ask is that one one of the earlier updates to ML, it changed my settings to something my hardware couldn't handle. I don't remember the Hz, but I do remember it was 32-bit, not 24. Now, on 10.8.3, 32-bit isn't even an option. Like I said, I could be grabbing at air, but take a look and see what your machine says and consider making it something lower as a test. 44100 Hz is good, but try 24-bit or 16-bit and see what happens - if that improves battery life at all.

P.S. Also set your Input setting to be the same.

These are the facts for me.

2010 13 inch Macbook Pro.

Last October, after 2.5 years on Snow Leopard I upgraded to Mountain Lion.

At the time of switchover, my battery was 87% after 1200 cycles.

After two months of mountain lion, the battery health dropped to 80%...and then promptly died.

I bought a new battery in Jan 2013, at the cost of £100.

After three months of use on Mountain Lion, that battery is now showing only 87% health. on 89 cycles

Mountain Lion is a battery killer.

I did explained this in the past, I'll try once more. There's an app called CoconutBattery that will simply tell you how much battery load there is when not charging. Is the last line of info, simply being fetched from the computer itself. Here's a good example:

If your battery is 50 watts, and your load is 10w idling while on battery mode, give or take, your estimate on doing very light work is to be 5 hours since these measurements are defined per hour. If your battery load is 20w, you will get 2.5 hours.

Now, no such thing as measuring how much power each app uses, that's not how computers work. It doesn't matter how many apps you have loaded, is how active these apps are and if the processor decides to speed up for them.

With that said, if your Mac is idling, CPU is at 0 to 3% load, your Mac is running somewhat warmer than usual and your battery load is quite high (assuming your monitor brightness is very low), then your CPU is not stepping down on voltage and clock speeds. Look up what speedstep is on an Intel CPU and you will understand. Battery capacity and CPU load are NOT related. As long as your battery capacity is at 90% or more, this info applies. Anything lower than 90%, you already lost at least 30 minutes of battery life when fully charged. A good battery load with brightness near 0 on an LED lit display and WiFi turned on, Bluetooth off, is around 12 watts in average. Use that as reference.