Q: Battery life dropped considerably on Mountain Lion.

I have tried a number of suggestions from the thread - turn off iCloud, quit dropbox, still not slowing the battery drainage (and the constant fan, heating up) problem.

Gordian Caesar wrote:

 

Enough discussion already. Apple has a broken ML. Apple absolutely has to fix ML's battery & heat problems.

 

W H E N?

If we told you, we'd probably be breaking the TOU, an NDA or two, really pizzin' Steve off and other assorted maladies.

I have a MBP 13-inch that I bought in Nov 2011. I loved my Mac when it had Lion. Used to give me 5-6 hrs battery life. But after I upgraded to Mountain Lion OS X it has almost halved. The fan is running all the time and the laptop gets really so hot that I cant keep it on my lap! Plus it has slowed down quite a bit. The colorful ball (that means it is processing or loading) keeps coming frequently. Also when I login & type my password the password doesnt come until after about 10-15 seconds after I have pressed the keys - so there is a lag. Apple, you've really given me an untested piece of stupid OS. If Steve Jobs was still alive, this wouldn't have slipped. Miss Steve:(

A simple question.  How come this problem never arose during testing ? 

Thinman.

Indeed.  That's a good question.

Thought I was going mad at first but no, ML has really screwed up my MBP 2011. I can literally watch the battery time drop and a full charged laptop is down to 10% in about 1.40/2 hours. And that is just normal use.

The heat is a second issue, never seen my MBP get so HOT , kitchen table is now showing signs of marks where I normally sit with it

A terrible release and something that I hope they fix in 10.8.1

I hope 10.8.1 is solving this and was released to developers a week ago. When will the rest of us get it?

Check flash player/plug-ins I have had problems with fans and heat in the past with my 2009 MBPS and windows machines that turned out be caused by flash. When the problem occurs kill flash in activity monitor and see if the fans start spinning down. If that turns out to be the cause you probably need to reinstall or upgrade your flash player. Hope that helps.

I also suspect that ML has degraded the battery quality and life expectancy.
This "Service Battery" appeared after the upgrade:

I have a more than 2 hour drive to the nearest Apple service point, so I need to be sure I'm not going there for nothing and that the machine will be fixed while waiting.

Only two years old, this MBP !!

I was contacted by Apple support last week, and ran their data collector programs. 

Hi

I doubt that flash is the culprit as apart from having the ability to kill flash at any time, the main difference I see is between 10.7 and 10.8 even when the apps I use and version of Flash are the same. But I appreciate what you are saying, Flash is a usual suspect always !!!

Just to illustrate how bad it is, have just opened my MBP after being in my bag for the last 50 mins, started at 75% and in the space of 8 mins I am down to 71% already, 8 mins !!

In fact it went down 2 % just writing this post !!

Glad to know I'm not alone with the "Service Battery" issue!

15 month old 2011 MBP 13. On ML upgrade, health dropped to 65% from 89% (while on Lion), after just 174 charge cycles, barely 20% of the promised cycles. Started showing Service Battery right from the day after upgrade. Booked an appointment with AppleCare dealer (no Genius Bar in India), they ran their tests, had multiple hour long calls with Apple India and concluded that I have to pay for a new battery. I am not going to.

Apple's service had been great, though I just don't think they knew about this issue back then. The dealers clearly didn't.

I think it'd be fair for us to ask for a free battery replacement incase ML really has destroyed the battery!

It started today. For no obvious reason (no new apps installed)

All of a sudden, fans go on, checking activities reveals finder at 100%.

Closing all finder windows reduces the CPU load.

Open one window and the finder is instantly at >50% CPU

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I took 3 samples of the finder when in distress, if Apple wants to analyse.

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Possible cause: dropbox (turning it off, restarting without it as login item, seems to alleviate this) not sure just yet.

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After a day of troubleshooting (incl. PRAM SMC resets, time machine off, deleting finder prefs, several restarts..., the only thing that seems to work is restarting without Dropbox on

and/or

signing out of (and back in) iCloud

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The one thing that may or may not have triggered this is: Time Machine threw a warning that it hadn't backed up. Not having the backup disk at hand, I dismissed.

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MacBookAir (mid2012) – ML 10.8

(just noticed that the thread is at MacBookPro. Forgive.

Absolutely.

Unfortunately, I only realized this only after I started getting "Service Battery" message the day following my ML upgrade. AppleCare India does not agree. They tell me to go for a paid replacement.

Upgraded my lare 2010 MacBook Air to ML from Snow Leopard, had no battery issues prior to the upgrade. Now, average battery life is a paltry hour & 45 minutes and I now have a nitification telling me I need to service my battery. Tried calibrating, no help at all. This really needs to be addressed, my machine is becoming almost useless off of it's charger.

I'm experiencing the same problem. I sat and watched battery drain - took 3 hours. I was only searching the internet. No vids, nothing heavy. Just reading blogs and news, etc.

I used to be able to go all day on 1 charge. Now I'm charging 2,3 times.

I purchased MB Pro in March - late 2011 model.