Q: Battery life dropped considerably on Mountain Lion.

Chris-gr

based on your specs, and the age of your machine, i recommend a return to Lion ASAP, clean intall and resets. I tis evident that your hardware may not be able to handle Mountain Lion as it did with Lion. i can assure you, nothing will solve it short of returning to Lion.

Chris

Mid-2012 MBA i7.

Battery life awful, getting about 3 hours max just checking mail & browsing.

10.8.1 made no difference.

Just spoke to Apple Care in UK, who told me they are aware of it but all reports had been in USA so far....?

Anyway he thinks something will be released in the next week or so.....?

Lets see, but this is just not good enough,

John

To those that misunderstood my posts..

Shadow is an example of a working RMBP. According to Apple specs, it should be a RMBP identical to the one that had 4 hours, but shadow gets the full 7+. 'same' hardware, certainly the same OS... Also, there is no proof that a statistically significant number of 2010 to 2012 machines are having the problem. They all use wi fi,open Safari, but very few drop to 50% life. Those that do are called lemons.

Those fortunate to have a Retina MBP with the battery issue, automatically have a waranty. hence their being lucky. It can be used to obtain free testing, a replacement and Apple will do it. Some who post here are only proving that they happened to have gotten lemon Airs, others Macbook Pros. It happends with any electronic device in the world. A percentile - 1 2 or 3, provided not more than 10%, come with issues out of the box. May be their first experience. i had three macbooks with problems (including fried NVIDIA chip) in 5 years. every single other day, the machines, once fixed or replaced, worked flawlessly.

Used to play games and see a new GPU driver nearly fry the GPU. Had to revert. Or nearly fried motherboards playing with BIOS firmware. Some software and firmware affects some macbook users. I proved on an older machine that ML mauled the battery but Lion did less. Problem gone with Snow Leopard. Conclusion? ML is not defective, and my hardware could not sustain ML's requirements even if, according to Apple, it should have. Other machines no doubt, work with the upgrade.

So I claim that ML - software- strains some machines - or batteries- beyond their operating capacity. Batteries or cpu/gpu- and that, all things considered, is hardware at max tolerance. Problem was only exposed by ML. For every person posting with a problem, there are thousands that experience nothing. Batteries last hours, macbooks do not overheat.

My BTO MBA has yet to heat up, to drain a full cycle after using it nearly over three evenings, and it still has about 1 hr left. So clearly Mountain Lion and hardware work properly on the unit I got. Fact is though, it is impossible for this to be the same for all shipped macbooks. There is no 100% performance in any field: automotive, electronics, not even NASA (shuttles launched with 98% mission success rate and lost two shuttles in 200 launches..) Same for aviation. Even if Apple shipped 99,99% perfect machines, that would still leave tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands, of lemonish logicboards or batteries waiting to be stressed. The numbers are so large that it would be impossible to ignore the high count, as well, of those that would get some bad part from some x supplier.

One of my mom's dell was fixed 10 times in its first 6 months. they kept replacing the same parts, until they accepted the graphic card (modified for Dell but no compatible with usage). Once replaced with a higher end model, problem gone. You bet Apple gave me way less grief in several years.

If you experience problems, please contact Apple. On waranty machines- use it right away, it is critical to prove the rapidly draining battery.

For older machines out of warranty, that have the problem, there is one solution: revert to LION. No fix will come, as your hardware will not be replaced outside warranty. Apple will not release a firmware to alter the voltages of 10 million macs for the sake of the one million affected ones. It may be impossible to discriminate.

c

This is my second time posting in this forum as I have been experiencing a decline in battery performance after upgrading to mountain lion 10.8.

After upgrading to 10.8.1 I am still experiencing battery draining.

Currently my mid 2010 MacBook Pro is 71% charged (running on battery online now) and it states 1:55 remaining. The battery is being used at about 1% per every minute.

(An Apple representative called me about a week ago and installed some program to collect some kind of data on my computer and I emailed him the results back.)

Here's what helped me:

System Preferences > Security > Firewall > Advanced

Turn off (Block/Deny) all unnecessary things, (in my case dropbox et al.) that try to accept incoming connections.

If someone can tell me what good turning these on (allowing) for applications like dropbox etc. can do, please let me know.

all works as before now

I had updated to 10.8.1 last evening. I put it on the charger overnight, so it was fully charged this morning. I unplugged it at about 7:30am, and have not touched it until just now (1:25pm EDT), and while sleeping for that time it dropped 5%. Doing nothing, in sleep mode, it's using what I would think is way too much battery.

10.8.2 can't come soon enough... assuming a fix will be with that!

__fb wrote:

 

 

If someone can tell me what good turning these on (allowing) for applications like dropbox etc. can do, please let me know.

 

Dropbox relies on being able to make incoming and outgoing connections in order to transfer your info back and forth. You might as well just uninstall it 'cos it's not going to work properly anymore. The firewall doesn't have anything to do with the battery issues whatsoever. To say it does would mean that the problem is caused by an app/process continually connecting and causing drainage. In this instance removal of the app/process as opposed to simply blocking it with the firewall would be the way forward. Removing dropbox gave me and extra ~10% battery life.

As an aside, updating to 10.8.1 hasn't changed anything for me. Still the same short battery life as before.

Well, I wouldn't have written this if dropbox didn't function as usual, would I?

My problems with CPU usage by the finder when Dropbox was turned on have been described earlier.

While I do not know nor think that this is the same reason as for most others with battery issues, I do think that there is a good chance of all this iCloud stuff being the culprit.

just did a 8.1 update on a mid 2011 MBA,

10.7 - time remaining consistently showed around 6hrs

10.8 - 3:49 to 4:25 depending on scenario

10.8.1 - currently shows 5:25 immediately after upgrade (where it was 4:25 pre-upgrade. Delta update, only took 5 minutes to dowload, install and boot)

Nothing special turned off (like Dropbox, Notifications, etc)

Going in the right direction at least.

Articles with new tests for MBP and ML vs Lion- battery drops:

http://www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/retina_macbook_pro_mountain_lion_battery_ life_10.8_vs_10.8.1/?utm_campaign=feature

and

http://www.macrumors.com/2012/08/24/mountain-lion-os-x-10-8-1-improves-battery-l ife-somewhat/

Chris

Well, I updated (even though I should have waited for feedback first! Still, what harm can 8mb do??) and there is no improvement. It dropped from 96% (which was "fully charged" to 94% in a couple of minutes. Estimated time is 4 hours 09 minutes, all I have open is Safari. Wifi turned off (going through Thunderbolt/Ethernet), Bluetooth off, no iCloud or anything. Biggest running process when checked was Activity Monitor, between 0.7 and 1.8% of CPU. So, not exactly loaded with tasks...

I hope 8.2 fixes it.

I bought the machine at BestBuy on a deal.... can I exchange it at an Apple Store if it doesn't get fixed??

I'm happy to report the the update worked like a champ for me.  MBA - late 2010....estimated battery life back up to 8 hours.

__fb wrote:

 

Well, I wouldn't have written this if dropbox didn't function as usual, would I?

 

No need to be rude. You specifically asked if someone could tell you if there were advantages to allowing Dropbox to accept incoming connections. The answer is yes. It won't work properly if you don't. You may think it's operating correctly, but all you've done is stop it from connecting, not stop it from running.

Anyway, to get back on track again, it seems I may have been to hasty. I've done a full charging cycle since upgrading to 10.8.1 and it seems that I've got about a ~10-15% increase in battery life @100% charge.

Here's an interesting piece from ArsTechnica on the issue:

http://arstechnica.com/apple/2012/08/mountain-lion-update-can-improve-battery-li fe-for-some-mac-notebooks/

Seemingly 10.8.2 has already been seeded to dev's, which isn't much of a surprise given we'll be looking at around 12th Sept for that update. At least things appear to be moving somewhat in the right direction.

And a followup.. now at 5:40pm, after not being opened or used all day since being charged, I open it up, and it's at 93%. In the 5 minutes I've used it, it's dropped to 89% with 4:19 remaining (was down to 3:39 remaining).

Beisarius,

It sounds like your BTO MBA is working correctly with ML; could you share what the configuration (processor, memory, etc.) is and what your total battery life looks like? Nice to hear you're getting good results with that one.

I've delayed ordering an MBA and am looking at alternatives because battery life is very important for me.

Thanks!