Q: Battery life dropped considerably on Mountain Lion.

Sure adams,

But if you check anand tech's disection of macbook pros or airs, you will find out they perform differently depending on the component manufacturer. So Samsung screens score higher on color quality. toshibas differ from samsung in read/write yet all follow the same specs. It's just not the same production line. First 3 iphones 4 16gb I had all had the same flaw: were recording 480p (not 720p as intended) with grainy images, and all started with the same 5 serial number. Replaced with another series altogether and suddenly the phone video was as expected. The 4 were not all made at the same location. Different production lines come with different glitches particular to their own line. So maybe apple's specs at xyz factory in China is within specs, but may not have the same tolerances as the identical part assembled at zyx. Or Sony's batteries that caught fire- yet they had been made within specs but the final product was not good enough. Reason why one assembly and production line is beautiful is as one glitch can be universally corrected when discovered. 

Let's hope Apple 10.8.1 indeed fixes the issue and everyone here comes back writing Solved.

Dropbox issues:

Can you try the following and see if it does the same:

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Open Activity Monitor, Select  CPU, show All Processes

Close all finder windows

The finder should be running at less than 1%

Start Dropbox

The finder should still be running at less than 1%

Open a new finder window, random folder with at least one item in it.

Check the % of the finder (probably shoots up to 30% or more)

Close all finder windows.

Finder back to 1% or less

Create a new folder, leave it empty, open that folder.

After all the "creating new folder" procedures are over, the Finder goes back to 1% or less

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Can you verify the above, please?

3A (three amperes) for 40 minutes using Skype?

That would make sense, it is 2 amp hours out of my battery capacity of 4.7 amp hours.  It compares with You Tube videos running at 2 amps, possibly with the iSight camera taking another amp.  Skype video is very heavy on resources.

In fact my battery is in reasonable condition for a 2009 MBP.

Did all of that and Finder hit a high of a little over 11% for a split second during the first bit and then 22% for a moment when creating a new Dropbox folder.  Dropbox came up to 26% for about a moment during the second part and then dropped back to about 0.5% or lower.  Otherwise Finder is running at about 0.1% or idle at 0%. 

Hope that helps!

Thanks to putnik for sharing MiniBatteryLogger and alexis23bledel for Battery Health - these are very useful.

I have noticed one problem with all these apps that they pull the battery manufactured date for the age and this is not accurate. So for example, the apps all say my battery is 20 months old dated 28th Dec 2010 where in fact I first turned on the machine on the date I purchased it which was 8th Jun 2011 which means the battery is actually just coming up to 15 months old vs 20 as the apps show.

What this means is the degradation is worse than I first thought. My battery has had 227 cycles and can now only hold 82% of its original capacity in just over a year. Thats pretty poor.

I have to say, whilst this problem with ML is annouying the heck out of me, I am learning a lot about my battery that I probably never needed or wanted to know! but losing circ 20% of capacity in just over a year - that cant be normal can it? Am I going to have a buy a new battery every year (once ML is stable of course)!

Well chris-uk, it's not because you turned your MBP on in june for the first time, that the machine can't be much older (and had been lying on the shelves for all that time).

If you want to know, check your serial, eg with this site : http://www.chipmunk.nl/klantenservice/applemodel.html

or with coconut battery : http://www.coconut-flavour.com/coconutbattery/

Hey Chris-UK,

You're welcome.

For the Battery Health app shows my battery life span pretty accurate, it's true that next month my Mac will be 3 years old (you can look it back at page 81). I'm pretty sure that an un-opened brand new in box Mac will never be used as long someone (resellers or whoever it is) didn't open it because it will have special seal from the factory AND seal from the distributor.

As for some experience, I've once worked in retail business that sells Apple products (Authorized Reseller) and all the time when I opened a brand new Mac and the registration is still new and never been used at all.

So what I'm trying to say, is there a chance that your Mac had already been used first before you buy it? Like refurbished or...? Just saying.

alexis23bledel was brand new from an Electonics Apple reseller in the UK, however I did buy at the airport (was in a sealed new box etc) so could well have been sitting in the stock room for a long time :O)

I just wanted to add to this thread my experience of mountain lion and battery usage. For me its been a bit odd to say the least.

I have a mid-2010 MBP 15" 2nd Gen Core i5. I have never really been bothered by the battery in terms of it affecting my workflow, i would get 6-8 hrs usage out of a full charge using snow leopard (the meter would say around 7hrs remaining at 100%).

When lion released and I upgraded, (I waited till 10.7.4), I actually got even better reading's of how long my mac would stay alive, 8-9.30hrs. Now i know my battery is only supposed to have a 7 hr advertised life off a full charge so I was a bit skeptical that those times would actually hold up but i did regularly get through a whole day of using the computer on a full charge without having to plug in until late in the evening, exactly my experience with snow leopard. Just had no impact on my workflow.

Since installing Mountain Lion its been a bit strange. Most of the time when I unplug the machine, it will say round about 3:30 remaining, which is a severe difference. I came across this thread when looking for information and tried a few of the tips, sure enough one or two applications seems to cause a massive drain on the battery that i would have had running all of the time on the last two OS X releases where they caused no apparent similar drain.

One was menumeters, I disabled this, and updated rowmote server, which had a mountain lion compatibility update released. After these two changes (disable and update) my battery remaining indicator started displaying 6hrs remaining on a full charge.

Before making these changes i found i would have to plug in the machine after about 3hrs of using it, now i get somewhere around 5-6 hrs. Randomly the battery would say 1:30Hrs left and then just to 3 again. This seems to still be happening although the times have changed but continuously jump around from 5 to 7hrs left @ 100%. Which is great I've got my battery life back seemingly although I have to say that actual power usage under mountain lion seems to be in-efficiant and problamatic.

Serious issues here, too.  Went from having over 7 hours of battery life on a MBP to having just over 4 hours of battery life.  Only programs open are safari, firefox, and itunes.  Apple might be too busy fixing the issue with the freezing on wake problem (which I'm also having) to deal with battery, but seriously, this takes away one of the best parts of owning this computer.

Even I have noticed a slight battery life decrease on my MacBook Pro 2012, which is only 18 weeks old (at the time of this post) as under Lion I was getting the full 7hours (sometimes more) if I didn't use WiFi or kept everything down low including the brightness. But since ML the battery has decreased and I have recent PMU, SMC and done disk permissions repair. Hopefully the first round of ML Updates will help our batteries if not I shall be very unimpressed!

http://www.macrumors.com/2012/08/21/os-x-10-8-1-may-address-mountain-lion-batter y-life-issues/

Reporting on the Softpedia report someone else posted, but also another forum post.

Short update:

besides other things i can't unfortunately remember, I deactivated the Microsoft Auto Update Daemon today and I'm having roughly the same battery life I had before moving to ML. The battery icon is showing at the moment 50% and 3:50 rest time. I will continue to observe whether that tweak helped me improving my battery life...

cu/M.

Hello, I am new, I had the same issue so I found this thread after receiving my MBP Retina and first time owner of a macbook.

My experience is ive just charged my MBPR to 100% with the terminal application open so it reaches '0' charging left even though my status bar shows 100% there was still 20 minutes reamaining to charge on the terminal log, so I got 6:57 minutes left after I fully charged it until the terminal log said 0 time left to charge.

I unpluged the laptop and after a couple of minutes clicking on the battery status it showed just over 5 hours even though it says 100% so I already lost two hours from a couple of minutes, I hope apple sorts this out soon because I am not happy like many of you!

Well folks read a blog/article today that had reports from developers working on 10.8.1 and it was all positive regarding this issue said that the update will increase battery life and percentage/time. Said that one went from 4 hrs of battery time left to 7 hours which is more like it should be. I'll have a look and see if I can find the link again and post it here.