Q: Battery life dropped considerably on Mountain Lion.

Couple of interesting articles/polls on the subject while we're waiting for an update...

http://www.engadget.com/2012/08/03/apple-mountain-lion-battery-poll/

http://9to5mac.com/2012/08/03/mountain-lion-causing-battery-life-issues-for-sele ct-users-poll/

rv|nny wrote:

 

Well, I rolled back to Lion 10.7.4 and after one full discharge, my battery life is back to 6+ hours. *** because I was enjoying some of the new features but battery is more important. Going to wait and see what 10.8.1 brings

Sounds good.  My MacBook Air isn't "mission critical" or I'd consider doing the same.  Glad to hear things can return to "normal" though!

FWIW after a 100% charge my MBA is down to 9% now (lasted about four hours) and the diagnostic program Apple had me install just completed its task.  The results will be forwarded to Apple now.  Hope it helps!

I was lucky enough to have created a Lion installer on USB disk. I erased my primary drive and started fresh.

I use iCloud for my contacts and calendar and they came back 100%

Machine is 100% stable, no issues. I have to reinstall a few apps that are not in the app store but that's it.

As rumo_von mentioned, my battery took a couple of discharge cycles to calibrate and show the correct time remaining. Immediately after the 10.7.4 it was 3:30 (as it was under 10.8 at 100%), then 4:40, 5:25 and now 6:05.

Not bad for a 3 year old laptop and battery!

Just noticed this.

With a 99% charge and no other apps running other than safari, my battery time remaiing is 8:54 minutes.  That's using 50% brightness and the standard other "battery" energy saver settings.  Notifications are on btw.

IF turn on Carbonite (online backup) it drops instantly to 2 hours.

I knew carbonite used a lot of resources, but ****.

Although the Apple rep didn't mention Carbonite, he asked specifically about iCloud (which I use) and other "online services" such as Dropbox (which I use as well).  I've tried turning Dropbox on/off but didn't see any serious changes.

Disabling Notification Center has helped my MBA to some extent and of course it's "cloud" based as well.

Ultimately the battery issue is sounding more and more like it's associated with online activity.

Let us know if reactivating and/or using Carbonite continues to impact your battery longevity one way or the other.

I wonder if other folks are seeing anything similar?

New oddity...after fully charging and discharging my MacBook Air for probably the sixth or seventh time since upgrading to Mountain the battery level initially shows what used to be the normal 7+ hours at 100%.  The best it would show previously was 3 to 4 hours.

Unfortunately the song remains the same...when I start using it the level drops back down to 3 maybe 4 hours at 95% and the battery discharges at an alarming rate, sometimes as much as 1%/min. 

Does anyone else find this in there console and does it have anything to do with the battery life issue and overheating:

SystemUIServer[180]: *** WARNING: -[NSImage compositeToPoint:fromRect:operation:fraction:] is deprecated in MacOSX 10.8 and later. Please use -[NSImage drawAtPoint:fromRect:operation:fraction:] instead.

MB Pro - 13 Mid 2010 ..  days before my upgrade to Mountain Lion, I would average 6-8 hours on my battery, I'm  a UNIX Sysadmin, lot's of VPN, lots of ssh, lots safar/java ... I was very happy with my MBP. After mountain, lion, I'm lucky to get 3 hours out of it now doing the same work. But now I have turned off mail, imessage, icloud and only run necessary services.... wish a fix would come out fast. 

My macbook air 2011/2012 on Lion the battery lasted is about 6h30, after upgrade to Mountain Lion the battery lasted is about 4h. That is so bad.

We need a urgengy update to fix that.

Macbook Air 13", mid 2011.

Battery life dropped at least 40% after upgrade to Mountain Lion.

Have Applecare and requested a callback to solve this problem.

I have also noticed, at least in my case, that "SystemUIServer" is using a lot of resources (CPU).

I did not see this one before...

I bought my 13" (Core i7) MacBook Pro Mid 2012 model 10 days back with Lion pre-installed.

After upgrading to ML, I am getting max 3 - 3.5 hours of battery with normal usage.

Last day I faced one more issue.

When I started my machine, battery was at 96%. Then I plugged in the charger to make it full charge (100%).

After 2:30 hours of work (Xcode, iMail, iMessage, Google Chrome), battery was still showing 96%.

I am bit concerned whether this ML battery issue is effecting physical battery life or not.

Apple please help.

Same story here. I purchased my 13' I5 Macbook Pro Mid 2012 and experiencing the same issues as sandip sah.

I'm new to Apple Notebooks and i'm not impressed with the Mountain Lion battery performance thus far!

My usual day on the Mac would entail basic tasks like Email,Safari,iTunes,App Store etc...

Seeing my battery charge and Health decrease so significantly is not what i expected.

Next OSX upgrade i'll sit back and wait for .1 next time.

I do hope that this issue is not effecting the real battery health!

I have the same problem, did an upgrade from OS X Lion to Mountain Lion and the battery life decreased dramatically. I can watch the battery count down. My System:

MacBook Pro 15" Early 2011

Intel Core i7-2820QM @ 2.30 Ghz

8 GB Ram

AMD Radeon HD 6750M

256 GB Apple SSD

Battery: 45 Cycles

I want to try a clean install of Mountain Lion. What else should I do, you were talking about some kind of SMC reset, PRAM / NVRAM resets, is that necessary / helpful?

I hope Apple comes up with an update in the next days, if that won't work, i'll do a fresh install. If that also doesn't work, i'll revert back to os x lion.

Edit: I realized that the processes "kernel_task" and "WindowServer" consume a lot of processor time. Has anyone else seen this issue? I did reset the dock and disabled Notification Center!

For me SMC reset was helpful gave me my "old" battery back.