Q: Battery life dropped considerably on Mountain Lion.

bartlettpsj wrote:

 

Out of interest, is this ML bug actually causing damage to our batteries or just shortening the run-time of the battery per charge, until the bug is fixed? 

No physical damage.  Folks that have reverted back to OS X 10.7.x, Lion, are seeing normal battery activity again so no worries.

Chris-UK wrote:

 

They say song is the best way to help you feel positive in times of despare!

 

Sing to tune of "Yesterday" from the Beetles (http://www.hamienet.com/midi27929_Yesterday.html)

 

Batt-er-eyyyyyy

Your life isn't what it used to beee…..

I used to get seven hours and now get three…

Oh Apple fix, my batt-er-eyyyyyy

 

Mountain Lionnn

Was told it was going to be the best one…

My life was going to be more funn….

Why did I upgrade, a life of miseryyy..

 

Why I had to upgrade I don't know, I wonder why....

Turned off every feature in the book and still my battery is dry….

 

Apple please...

Could you get your act together…

Mend my Macbook and I will love you forever…

Oh Apple please mend my batt-er-eyyy….

 

.... maybe others can complete this masterpiece :O)

Ohhhh Apple please baaaaannnnn… Chris U keeeeyyyyyyyyyyyy…

I guess that's an happy ending, along with a real fix to this issue that is still there since Lion.

To follow up on my post from yesterday, it appears that disabling Notifications and/or custom backgrounds (per bewmIES) has somewhat resolved the battery issue on my late 2010 11.7" MacBook Air. 

Closed the lid yesterday at 11:24 p.m.   iStat Pro showed the battery at 2:33/62% (matches Mac battery reading exactly).  Opened it at 10:06 a.m.  Battery showed 3:45/56%.  That's where the "somewhat" comes in.  Losing 6% while in sleep mode isn't normal (Power Nap is off)...neither is the increase in hours so things are still unstable, but overall it's not losing its charge nearly as fast.

Ran a 15 minute YouTube video in Safari and afterward the battery is showing 3:17/51%. 

Activity Monitor and iStat Pro show all other functions to be normal.

Finished writing this and it's showing 3:17/49%...meaning I should get six hours of use which is similar to Lion.  Of course running some serious applications will draw that down faster, but again, that's considerably better than before.   

This looks to be mainly a Notifications issue with a few other contributors IMHO.

Glad to hear some of y'all are having success with the two steps I aggregated earlier.  Not my ideas but, again, happy to hear that it's providing relief from this pain.

Now all we need is Apple to focus in on these; I really dug Notification Center (the two-finger side swipe to get at it was hella-conveinent), and I really want my custom background back (which I'm afraid to change, because I don't want to regress).

-r

Agreed, Notifications/Message Center works great on all of my other iStuff.  FWIW Mountain Lion is performing flawlessly on my iMac. 

As I and many others have mentioned, a few odd things like this have cropped up over the years but Apple has always resolved them.  Hopefully OS X 10.8.1 will quickly fix this battery issue as well.

I also confirm on my macbook a lower battery live:

Macbook Pro 2010, 15", core i7

Battery level drop significantly since update to mountain lion. Even reinstallation didn't bring back battery level of mountain lion.

Not all Mac users use these discussion forums or even know about them I think there will be more suffereing this problem than are talking about it here.

Got an email from Aple yesterday aknowledging the problem and again this morning with an attached batter monitor to run and send back so they are working on it.

OK....so I have been doing a little reading elsewhere about heavy discharges to Lithium Ion Polymer batteries and from what I'm getting is that a heavy discharge does in fact not only cause crystaline structures to form in the battery that essentially short out cells in the battery, but also cause long term damage to the Lithium Ion Polymer batteries as a whole. This is just one example of some things I have read:

http://batteryuniversity.com/learn/article/discharge_methods

There are many other pages on just this site alone explaining charging and discharging of these batteries. I'm beginning to think our batteries and components are taking a hard hit to serious damage, with the combination of high heat and heavy discharge that everyone is complaining about. Thoughts?

Like gkygrl I received a call directly from Apple earlier today and had the same experience.  I spent some time answering questions about my MacBook Air's battery performance, use, etc. since installing Mountain Lion.  They gathered some immediate statistics from my machine and had me install another program that will monitor its use from a full to empty charge and report back.

I'm confident that Apple is doing everything possible to addess our concerns and will have this resolved ASAP.  Again, these things never happen as quickly as we'd like, but it is obviously a priority for them.

If they are still investigating the issue it should be clear that we won't see a fix with the next update...

I hope that we don't have to wait for 10.8.2 and Apple offers an update as soon as the problem is fixed.

Sounds good.  My battery use with Mountain Lion on my Macbook Air is nearly 25% in an hour only running Mail, Safari, Notes and with the wireless turned off.  The battery will drain 20% overnight when the computer is asleep (the power nap thing isn's turned on either).  I hope they are able to figure this out soon.  I really regret having upgraded to Mountain Lion this early. 

I just upgraded as well.  My late 2011 15" MBP has had the battery life cut significantly.  I really hope Apple releases an update to fix this soon.

I to have seen significant loss of battery life (Macbookpro mid-2010).  Although it initially was better than when I had 10.6.8 OS X, it changed but I am not sure what triggered the issue.  I began with 5 to 7 with browsing and working in say photoshop or other software and 4 if watching a film and browsing (with mail open).  I now see just over 3 hours if lucky and if I play any media on the net it might get 2 hours a couple of times less than 2 hours.

So far I have repaired permissions (stated I did not need disk repair) and shutdown, started again and I'm now testing.  I seem to lose 1 percentage point every 3.5 minutes with browsing, mail open and playing youtube videos... so  improvement. Tomorrow I will play a netflix movie and see what the decrease is and then see how long this particular fix works. 

My macbook still runs a little hot though.  Hopefully and will be a simple fix.....

hi camtheham -- i'm with you on this -- check out 1st post for Mount. Lion probs -- going by this website -- just this one -- you'd have been better waiting to in stall ML -- so would i - my install is after the 1st post on this site = meaning -- i wish Apple -- who i love -- told us about the probs before the install

FYI - reset Dock as per previous description and disabled PowerNap.  Closed lid on rMBP yesterday (24hrs ago) and open this morning at 97%. Seems to have address at least my devices battery drain issue.