Q: Battery life dropped considerably on Mountain Lion.

Well, things look fine alright...?! but if your battery indicator is correct and can last 3&1/2 hrs at 55%, that's probably as good as it gets?

What are their brightness settings?

If full (or close to), 4.5 hrs isn't bad at all, wouldn't you think?

tarpus wrote:

 

I AM AT THE APPLE STORE RIGHT NOW IN SAN FRANCISCO.  ALL RETINA DISPLAY MACS IN THE STORE, CURRENTLY RUNNING MOUNTAIN LION, WHEN UNPLUGGED, FULLY CHARGED DISPLAY 4.5 HOURS!

 

***.

Ads say that they s/b getting 7 hours plus on a full charge.  Can you get a Genius to explain why?

richsadams, what you did is simply genius, the idea with the Apple Store, I really like it

Kudos

Sorry, my fault: tarpus is the one with the great idea

RHBC wrote:

 

Well, things look fine alright...?! but if your battery indicator is correct and can last 3&1/2 hrs at 55%, that's probably as good as it gets?

Well, that's the thing, the battery indicator has rarely been accurate since upgrading to Mountain Lion.  Initially it wouldn't show more than 4 hours on a full charge.  After about seven or eight charges it's now showing what used to be "normal", 100% at about 7 hours.  But it drops almost immediately to about four hours and then fluctuates

up and down but overall the drop can be up to 1% to 2% per minute.  Here it is just about a half-hour later...

The only applications open are Mail and Safari and it's dropped from 3:38/55% to 1:39/42% in that time period.

__fb wrote:

 

What are their brightness settings?

If full (or close to), 4.5 hrs isn't bad at all, wouldn't you think?

Brightness is 50%.  That's usually where I run it.  With Lion I'd get anywhere from 5 to 7 hours of use.  Using it exactly the same now, 4 hours at best, usually about 3 hours though.

Hey guys, here's an update on my my side of the issue:

I have an old VAIO that I've been using instead of my MBP, because I figured that if I didn't use my MBP the battery wouldn't suffer, right? Well, I was very wrong.

I stoped using it for a week and, even though I turned my computer off, Coconut battery shows me that my battery life's span dropped from 89% to 87% without even using the computer.

And there's this too:

My battery used to last at least 4 hours now it's dropped to less than 3 hours than a half.

And the percentage just dropped from 97% to 90% as I typed this. Honestly, Apple, this is unaceptable. I'm long time out of warranty so replacing the battery is not an option for me.

I'm beyond upset.

My first on battery only with my MacBook since loading Mountain Lion. Terrible battery performance. It looks to it is almost dead in a couple hours. Next time I will track the time it better.

Quick update from my earlier posts today.  Ran my MacBook Air down to zero and recharged it.  This is the reading when I first started it up...

Full charge no longer goes to 100% and I'm lucky to get three or so hours use out of it now.  After 123 cycles battery health is still 95% though so I guess that's good.

Apple finally got back to me and confirm it had to be my hardware.Fortunately, I replied right away that I finally proved it is Mountain Lion, and this is how. I fiddled with Lion. Definitely a notable improvement over ML. But what if the problem went way back but I simply never noticed it? So grabbed an early 2008 Macbook Pro that had seen its batteries mauled by ML, and I installed Snow Leopard. I had a suspicion that Lion was also a battery hog, (maybe 20-25 %?) but nothing like Mountain Lion. So after installing SL, i grabbed one of those batteries lying around (am not experimenting with my expensive $ 159+tax ones), threw it in and voila the results:

• Will it be fixed? I am not so sure. they never really fixed it with Lion- and I was fully updated to 10.7.8 in one of my recent experiments. And for those curious, no I never use or activated iCloud, dropbox or any fancy stuff. Just word processing, emails, surf (during testing), and graphics or picture editing when not fiddling with OSes.
• I prefer  healthy battery anyday over either Lion or Mountain Lion.
• So to those that used to have Lion: go back. NOW. (create a boot drive or o at your local Apple store and they will reinstall it). No Terminal fiddlign will work. no one can actually help and solve this sort of some significant patch. Lion was good for those machines that came with it out of the box. So reinstall it, especially if out of warranty.
• For those that got ML machines: you are lucky, you have full warranty and a year to troubleshoot it. Either case, am sure Apple will make make it right.
• For those with ML that seem to work- it is awesome your machine works. just remember your machine is not the same as that one of a member posting here. Chips, SSDs, screen, so on..
• Opening cases with Apple is the surest way to make the issue known. It is still the #1 Customer Service and satisfaction company in the world.
• This week am receiving my BTO rMB and will advise again on how it is. Any trace of a problem and am returning it.
• Took me 30- 40 minutes to read, respond, edit, and this mauled battery is working superbly in Snow Leopard, indeed on track for several hours of usage.

Well, I guess I'm 'the newest guy' in town to this battery problem.

I have a MacBook Late 2009 (MC207), 2.8 years based on Battery Health app from the Mac App Store, running Mountain Lion OS X 10.8 like about a week after it launches. And perhaps I let the image below speak for itself.

This screenshot is taken today. Yesterday there's nothing happened to my battery and today all of a sudden when I used it to boot up Windows to play some game, the battery indicator from Windows 7 tells me that my battery needs a replacement. Then I quickly rebooted and swap to OS X and see for myself the problem and I got the Service Battery! status message on the battery menu bar when I clicked it.

After that, I'm shocked after I open Battery Health app when I saw the red 15% health from my battery. Well, I can accept if the battery is diminishing slowly but this is way beyond my expectation after I upgraded to ML from Lion. Before this problem, the battery still holds up to 84-85% health.

I'm really upset with this problem and judging from this 80 page thread, I think this is a huge fault from ML as an OS.

I tried the Reset SMC Controller once and having no luck with that, so I will try to calibrate my battery after this post and I'll get back to you in a couple of hours.

Thanks for the post.  I'm still not clear about it being or not being a hardware issue for you, but in any case I hope you're able to sort it all out.

I'm with you otherwise except for this:

No fiddlign will work. no one can actually help and solve this sort of some significant patch.

That's really speculation as there's really no way to know that yet.  Apple's overcome much bigger issues in the past so I've no reason to believe that they can't resolve this one.  FWIW I had 6 to 7+ hours of solid battery performance with Lion so in my experience Lion worked perfectly fine.

That said, even though my battery health is quite good (95% on a Late 2010 MBA seems very reasonable) I'm still considering returning to Lion if OS X 10.8.1 (or something else) doesn't resolve this über-fast battery drain issue soon.

Best of luck and let us know how things go.

Thanks for sharing alexis23bledel as I had not seen that app - very useful.

A little concerned about the typical Macbook Pro battery life as well now and more converned ML is accelerating its decay. Cant believe after 2.8 years of 471 cycles you are now down to 15% of max capacity.

Mine is 1.6 years old at 226 cycles and down to 84% of capacity.

What is the experience of the community on the general life expectency of a Macbook Pro battery? I know there is all the technical data out there on battery life etc, but how often should we expect to replace our batteries and what is a normal/typical decay rate? and is ML accelerating this and 'casuing' early battery death?

Hey guys, this is really strange. I just unplugged my MagSafe to drain the battery for calibration purposes as I mentioned above and then I checked the battery status. The Service Battery! message is gone and then I got this:

Really weird OS ML is. I haven't encountered with this kind of battery issues before since Leopard, SL, and Lion.

Hope Apple quickly roll out the 10.8.1 update. And I hope that my battery is ok now.

Just FYI guys.

Thanks.

Hey Chris - UK,

As you can see from my post above, ML is really unstable for older portable Mac for sure now.

To answer your question, as far as I know and remember, Apple has been claiming a 5 year life span for a battery since the launch of SL. So yeah, I was a bit shocked when my battery just went crazy in a bad way after just 2.8 years and because I'm not that kind of heavy user.