Q: Battery life dropped considerably on Mountain Lion.

Having an OS kill the battery like this is just sad.  Lion has a similar 178 page thread with similar issues that I do not know if that was resolved or not.  I can tell you Mt. Lion was horrible to my battery. Going back to the stabliity of Snow Leopard was my solution until confirmation of 10.8.1 resoving this, I am sticking with what I have now.

I am so sad... My battery life used to be 10+ hours and ever since upgrading to Lion (2010 MBP 13"), my battery life has dropped. And, now, with Mountain Lion, LIFE IS SO BAD. ON A GREAT DAY, it will run for maybe 5 hrs. This stinks.

I too upgraded from Lion to ML with my week old 2012 MBA,  battery 4 hours tops.

I did disable nottifications and power nap, which helped a little, but nowhere near Lion hours out of the box.

I want to revert back to Lion, but in the app store,it says I cant install it on this computer.  I had purchased it on my old MBP.    

Is there anyway to revert back to Lion?  

ML is just not acceptable.

See if you have taken any time machine backups.. restore that on to ur comp. this is what i did..

Pretty Jim wrote:

 

I too upgraded from Lion to ML with my week old 2012 MBA,  battery 4 hours tops.

 

I did disable nottifications and power nap, which helped a little, but nowhere near Lion hours out of the box.

 

I want to revert back to Lion, but in the app store,it says I cant install it on this computer.  I had purchased it on my old MBP.    

 

Is there anyway to revert back to Lion?  

 

ML is just not acceptable.

I reverted back to Lion from ML on my mid 2012 MBA the other day. Look at Imp68's comment here: https://discussions.apple.com/message/19265458#19265458.

However, I've noted that my battery lost health rapidly under ML (won't charge more than 93%) and is not back to normal life after reverting to Lion (not at pre ML upgrade levels). Running only few programs (Chrome and MS Outlook) will give me 4-5 hours tops. More intensive use 2-3. Going to the store to see whether they will replace my batter as this is unacceptable.

I've got the early 2008 MBPro, the last one with user-replaceable batteries (thankfully).  Year-old battery under ML working is like a charm.  By the way, Apple will never verify there is any issue.  It will magically go away in a future update.  Has happened before.

By the way, concerning Tarpus' comment above, depending on the site (or running YouTube), Safari goes into hyperdrive mode.  This has been a constant issue for years.

I think I found an easy way to increase (fix) you battery life

move your mouse to the wifi icon (upper right corner)

turn wifi off (wait a few seconds)

turn wifi back on

rMBP ~ 2.6GHz ~ 16GB RAM  ~512GB SSD ~ ML (10.8.0)

brightness: 40%

running aplications:

safarie (2 times full screen, ± 20 tabs)

mail fullscreen

skype

messages

tweetbot

dropbox

gfxstatus

(ps: it jump up from 5:29 to 6:07 just 0.5 sec before I took the picture, now it's back down to 5:25)

pps: I used 20% in 1:30h so thats consistence with the remaining battery life)

I'll post back when i've used up the entire battery

(please try this and say if it worked for you guys)

I may be wrong about this, and it's okay to correct me if I am. I won't mind.

I believe that the purpose of this forum, is for Mac users to offer useful information, to help other users decide how to proceed. If this is true, I think it's worth mentioning again, that this problem cropped up for a significant number of users last summer, when they were upgrading from Snow Leopard to Lion.

The problem was never resolved then, and still isn't, now. It just seems to be affecting another group of users this year, who are upgrading from Snow Leopard or Lion, to Mountain Lion.

I'm not implying that Apple will never solve this problem, or suggesting that they aren't trying to find a solution. I'm only pointing this out so that people can have some idea of how much of a problem this kind of issue has been, and how long some users have gone without a solution. I think that, by mentioning this information, users can make a more informed decision about whether they want to wait for a fix while using Mountain Lion, or if they'd rather go back to their previous OS until a fix is released.

This forum prohibits speculation, and I'm not even going to suggest that it might be a long time before a fix is released, or imply that the problem may never be solved. I'm only writing this so users know that it's taken a long time so far. That's not speculation, and it's accurate. Hopefully it will be helpful as well.

Here is the link to last years thread:

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3194235?start=0&tstart=0

I bought a macbookair in 2011 and after upgrading to moutain lion the battery discharges after 2 hours without having any open application!! also overheats just immediately switch it on and the fans are operating to the duration of the battery.

Please let me get back Lion!!

I use the mcbookair for work and now is impossible for me!!!!

Been to krcs in Peterborough. Found that the computer (Macbook Air 11 2011) was running a process called ubd that was taking alot of processor grunt. A nice helpful lad has dealt with this issue after looking on Apple Support and lo and behold battery life is now much better and the fan has not started whirling like a maniac.

Fingers crossed that this has solved the problem.

Ive been having this problem as well, but i can't find any significant process in activity monitor.  Please help apple! Early 2011 MBP

Anyone know if the 10.8.1 update resolves the battery issue?!

I don't see this "ubd" process in my activity monitor. How do you turn it off?

Further, when I look at my activity monitor, it says %User CPU usage is at 55-60%, but looking through the list of activities on the activity monitor, they add up to less than 10% with the activity monitor itself taking up 5-7%, so I guess some other programs running in the background not showing up in the activity monitor must be taking up resources and burning the battery down.

RHBC - In the activity monitor, make sure that 'All Processes' displays.  It could be that that some of the 'hidden' process belong to 'root' and, unless, you are root, you may not have access them.  UBD should be available to your user account, though; I don't believe root owns it. 

http://www.macinside.info/process.php?name=ubd

Do you have a phone or other mobile device connected to your computer?    

Not sure what it does but the techie found guidance on the Apple Support Community. Look up ubd process and cpu load.