Battery life dropped considerably on Mountain Lion.

We're a lot, I think I'll downgrade to 10.7

Good luck and hope you kept a Lion installer handy. Cause the store now only lists ML in the OS section...

Coconut Battery shows today 88% design capacity on my battery and yesterday was 90%... 90% after 17 months of daily use... Thanks to Apple, my battery now loses the same design capacity 100 times faster.

I'm not going to buy a new battery next month so I'm seriously thinking about downgrade to Lion. But there is no "Lion" installation on AppStore... Any sugestion?

So, most of us are in agreement. There is probably some hidden process draining the battery, which i unique to ML. What does apple say about this?

Absolutely nothing has changed on my MBA, but I've noticed that now, certain programs eat more CPU. For example, Microsoft Outlook now idles at 5.3% CPU, when it's not doing anything. And before everyone gets their panties in a wad, go ahead and open up Activity Monitor. Google Chrome (no flash pages)? Right up there at the top too.

I'm betting Apple has changed something with the way programs idle that hasn't made it into 3rd party program patches yet.

Resetting the SMC & pram might've helped. after doing so, I see the battery displaying about 14 hours.

This is what did:

1. Fully charged the battery.

2. once the battery was 100% charged, I disconnected the power cable and reset the SMC and the Pram

My machine has been showing 100% battery for last 10 minutes. In fact it's still at 100% percent battery and I'm done writing this post.

I'll bump tarpus' post.

Hopefully it works for everyone else.

In a way I am glad this is happening - may Apple will step up. Although of course I am sorry for all of you. I have had this problem since LION from Snow Leopard. After emailling Tim Cook's office and working with Apple for over a month of diagnoses, memory dumps and logs, they actually told me, this is the way it is with the GPU. It ***** battery like no tomorrow and it's hard to pin down why - CPU can show 99% idle. The fan will spin like an aircraft engine and it's horrible.

LOOK at the same thread in the Apple FORUMS - NOW AT 176 PAGES https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3194235?answerId=19079904022#19079904022&ac_cid=tw123456#19079904

Since many people say battery life wasn't affected for them, I think Apple just gave up. The fact I saw no change going to Mountain Lion is evident of the fact they can't or won't fix it (after 1 year).

Don't bother trying anything NOTHING WORKS - we've all tried for over a year. 😟 😟 :() - some things you can do make it last twice as long for a day or two and then, bam, you are back to 2 1/2 to 3 1/2 hours tops. GFXCardStatus was a program that allowed you to turn off the GPU and this added 30% battery life at least back. Apple hired the engieent - rumor has it.

Tarpus give it 24-48 hours, I can GUARANTEE it will go back to where it was. I guess if we could do a SMC / Reset PRAM every night, we'd have what we purchased. Most people see an improvement but give it a day - as tried by everyone on this 176 page Apple thread on same topic - and it will be back to eating battery faster than a hungry locust!

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3194235?answerId=19079904022#19079904022&ac_cid=tw123456#19079904

I've just reseted PRAM and NVRAM and later I'll reset SMC again. Let's give it one more chance.

HeliosTheMaster - If it were really so simple - it would have worked for the 100's of us in the other thread. It hasn't and it won't. Trouble is, it looks great for a few hours but after the net recharge / wakeup - it's back to garbage...

People, trust me, there is NOTHING you can all try that we haven't all tried. Those of use who've had this problem for over a year and spent weeks trying everything known to man... and I mean EVERYTHING. I spent 5 nights in a row back around Christmas time, on the phone directly with Apple. They concluded - this is now what it is.

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3194235?answerId=19079904022#19079904022&ac_cid=tw123456#19079904

I admit pram reset is just a cosmetic fix, but if you have a newer model, I guess you should be able to do a fresh install as a last resort otherwise apple won't still claim 7 hour on their website and if some people have the problem and some not then it would be faulty hardware and apple should take them back.

Do you guys mind to post your models and specification? juz want to make a summary

I purchased my MacBook Pro - 8GB, 512 SSD, 15"in about August 2011. I have had this same problem since then. Going to Mountain Lion made no difference to battery life (I've been on it for about 2 months (seed program). I was really hoping it would - if only by chance! In the real world, every day for the last year, I rarely get more than 3 hours. On my 4 year old MacBook Pro, 17" under Snow Leopard, I got about the same.

I am showing 3hrs and 30 mins right now, with NOTHING else running other than just safari and just this page (that I can see), 97% idle. And I let it settle for about 10 mins. It's a consistent beast, I'll give it that, not deviating much from 3 hours for most of a day (Although I did get over 6 once or twice are a number of SMC / Pram resets in the right order...

so lion came with this machine when you bought it??

Yes.