Battery life dropped considerably on Mountain Lion.

I totally recognize your problem. I noticed the problem myself as soon as my MBP booted with ML.

It is surprising that a few Apple-dedicated websites (9to5mac, macrumors) have not picked up the issue. If they pick up the concern, maybe Apple will recognize that there is a problem that is being worked upon. .... My wishful thinking .... !!!!

I have noticed considerable drain in my battery since downloading and installing Mountain Lion. I can't watch a movie without having my power adapter next to me. Apple needs to get onto this quick smart.

I bought a mid 2012 Macbook Pro 13 i7 machine that had Lion on it. Upgraded to Mountain Lion and saw my battery performance go from nearly 7hrs under Lion to just over 2hrs under ML. I read several threads and tried all the SMC/PRAM resets, killing email accounts that I don't use much, turning off iCloud, etc. to no avail. They only made a marginal difference.

I was about to call Apple as a last resort, and then look at returning this machine since I'm still inside my return to BestBuy window.

On a whim, I started closing apps one by one that automatically launch on start up. After closing SugarSync, most of my battery performance came back. Closing DropBox helped some as well. Now, it appears that pretty much all my battery performance is back and possibly a bit more than before with Lion.

I haven't tested this for days or anything, but for the last few days I've only been consistently getting a little over 2hrs of performance on a full charge. Now, as of last night and this morning, I'm getting at least 7hrs and sometimes showing over 8hrs left. I've only been running Safari and Mail, but just closing SugarSync and DropBox seemed to have drastically improved my battery performance under Mountain Lion.

Can you do me a huge favour? Please check back in a day or so to confirm that your battery life is completely fine 🙂.

Thanks and good luck!

Sure. I just opened Chrome with about 15 tabs open and battery dropped to half. Closed it and time came back. I'm not saying there's not an issue with battery performance under Mountain Lion.. just that closing a few things that I don't need open all the time seemed to have drastically improved the situation.

Over and over it points to the GPU (bug or feature). Rarely do any of these Apps (even when they are just open), show ANY CPU consumption as the battery drains. But shutting them down gets you "some back". Using GFXcardstatus program to stop GPU switching gets some back as well.

Why should we have to shut down apps that seem to be consuming nothing. Apple blames the apps (sounding like MS).

The bug really is, after a year of having this problem, there not being a proper program from Apple at least saying "what process" (background, GPU, Fan etc.,) is eating all the battery life. Even my Android has that feature now!

All I can say is that I really don't need SugarSync or DropBox open ALL the time... and so far by simply closing those apps and only opening them when I need them, has returned all if not a little more of my original battery performance. That may not prove to be the case in a few days, but so far, so good.

Also, when I said, "some" that was DropBox. My estimated time left went from 7.5hrs to 5.5hrs when simply launching DropBox. If I launch SugarSync, it goes from 7.5hr to 2.5hr. That's more than "some" improvement. That's significant and does actually point a legitimate finger that the apps instead of Apple. Too early to tell for certain though.

Fair enough. I know in the end, Microsoft would recommend people close their applications to extend battery life! Although I thought Apple had set the bar on apps being open without major consumption.

I wonder why closing programs like Dropbox and Sugar sync can add back twice the battery life - even with no CPU consumption!

I will try this work around tonight. I just don't understand why the end user should have to work around the OS instead of doing things as they would normally do. On Lion I had Sugarsync open from startup and worked on Lightroom, Photoshop along with some Safari browser, mail app and almost always got 5-6 hours of battery. On Mountain Lion I can't even go beyond 2 hours with the same set of apps.

I am going to try to do a clean install tonight and not install any apps and see how it looks battery performance wise. Hoping there is a software update soon or maybe just go back to Lion till this issue gets fixed.

I have no idea. I was really surprised it made any difference at all. And, because I've still got about a week to return this new MBP 13, I was planning on boxing it back up and just using my iPad2 for mobile stuff if a last ditch call to Apple didn't return anything satifactory regarding my battery life. Those apps auto launching on startup were set that way by default. They didn't bother me being launched so I paid no attention. I use DropBox some, but rarely even use SugarSync, so I figued I'd try pairing down what I don't really use much. I access DropBox maybe once or twice every 2-3 days, so there's no reason it needs to be active all the time.

Again, I was really surprised that shutting those down made such a drastic difference. I noticed this last night and I've been using my laptop for about 2.5hrs this morning and it still shows I have 6hrs left. If all I have to do is close what I'm not using much and make sure I'm not using a browser with 20 tabs open... I'm good with that.

Don't get me wrong. I'm in no way an Apple fanboi. I've used Apple products for a couple decades now and there have been MANY times I've cursed this company and it's decisions. They've left me in the cold with their planned obsolescence (veiled as "progress") far too many times. I'm not one of those who felt Jobs was some sort of "genius" either. He was a great marketer and seemed to be skilled at hiring great designers.

I too was running SugarSync, Dropbox, CS5, Safari, Mail and Chrome with 15-20 tabs open and still getting about 4-5hrs under Lion. That same setup dropped to about 2hrs immediately after installing Mountain Lion. There's obviously some issue, but trimming down a bit returned all of my performance and then some. Give it a shot. If it works, it's not such a horrible "workaround". 🙂

I thought Apple had set the bar on apps being open without major consumption.

That's not possible. Some apps need more resources than others, and a poorly-coded app may require lots more resources than it needs. Apple cannot be the quality control police for all the apps out there... they get enough flak already for closed systems without trying to take on that unmanageable task!

Battery life depends heavily on what tasks you are doing. I can easily get 6 hours out of a 2-year-old battery in Mountain Lion as long as I don't do certain things. If I decide to fire up something like Portal 2, though, I can't gamble on making it more than maybe 2 hours. Things like that are very demanding of power, for good reason.

Any time there is an upgrade, some existing software will be incompatible with the new system in various ways. Sometimes that can result in reduced battery life. There are many, many possibilities that don't involve bugs in the system. Unfortunately, on long topics like the one you have referred to, there are just a lot of arguing and me-too posts blaming the issue on a bug, and very little of productive value. Once a thread gets past 5-10 pages long, most of the knowledgeable regulars here will consider it to be nothing but a rant thread and will simply never look at it. This one looks like it's heading in that direction, unfortunately.

I know that you have said that you "tried everything" to solve your battery problems, but I doubt that that is literally true. "Everything" would include erasing the hard drive and doing a clean reinstall of the system, and not installing any third-party software until after it has been thoroughly tested. If, after doing that, you still have reduced battery life, there's some kind of hardware problem involved, possibly a dying battery.

ps. I also quit out and turned off launch at startup.. for Mobile Mouse Server that I almost ever use. That seemed to help as well.

Hi guys...

Had similar problems: crazy busy fans, overheating ****** battery-time, all without any form of indication in the activity monitor.

I might have found the reason (at least for some of us). I simply updated to the new version of Dropbox that's supported for ML. So far everything seems to be normal again.

http://blog.dropbox.com/index.php/dropbox-for-mountain-lion/

So, my suggestion is double-check all your installed apps and see if there are updates out yet. Otherwise disable them 1 by 1 to test where the problem is.

Good luck

S.

Anybody care to clue me in to what SugarSync is used for?

Sounds like a nasty little CPU sucker....