Q: Battery life dropped considerably on Mountain Lion.

Clean install... not works.

Clean install and migration assistant... not work.

Update to 10.8.1... not works.

Macbook 5,1, 13", late 2008, unibody alluminium, 8GB of Ram.

Angry.

I've managed to get 10.8.2 beta combo update from iMZDL.com/dl/ and mange to find that it gave me an extra hour but battery drain is still poor.

With nothing open:

6 hrs 17 mins 98% battery power

With safari open only 1 tab open:

5 hrs 10 mins 96% battery power

these are in the space of 10 minutes

I'd forgot to mention that i have disabled the notifcation centre by renaming the file.

1 month, over 100,000 views, 1,500 posts, over 100 pages.... is there is problem Apple - duh!

I contacted Apple Support in Ireland , did a complete re install with him.  Only difference was the heating stopped. Battery went up an hour, now back to the way it was. My total time is about 4 hours.

So from some of the postings a reinstall does not work.

They did not admit there were any problems.

Like Christ-uk , why Apple do or say something about this problem of battery usage.

Would fitting a new battery make any difference.

I logged out of iCloud and it "seems" like I get a boost in battery life.  Perhaps others can log out of iCloud for a while and  report on batter usage and see if that helps.

Hey Dean,

If I had a macbook with your drain, I would just use warranty and have Apple replace and troubleshoot it so much that they would indeed get me a new one. By getting and using 10.8.2, it appears you have not solved the problem and unsure how you could get Apple support.

So the key here- for those with affected units- is not software update, but a total hardware replacement. The macbooks should not have this glitch. Most do not have it.  Hence my recommending a warranty replacement and not waiting for a patch. For all we know some 10.8.5 update will revert you to the battery drain.

For those outside warranty, I obviously sympathize.

After applying the 10.8.1 update, nothing has changed for my mid 2010 mbpro. The battery life is still atrocious, about 3 and a half hours right after unplugging, only light browsing with backlight at about 40% percent. I hoped the updatw was going to solve the battery draining problem. Didn't happen. Very frustrating.

I have a mid 2009 mbpro and experienced the battery drain issues everyone else has described when I moved to Lion. But I also experienced some additional problems (apps seemed to 'forget' passwords - eg Evernote could no longer log in to account etc) - so after having followed al the (useless) advice from Apple Support I wound up creating a new account for myself and transfering everything to that account. That was fine for about 3-4 weeks - until the battery issue popped up again (in my case it was indexing gone haywire). So I created another new account ... which lasted about 1 month... but now I'm on the third account - and have excellent battery life (6-7 hours) and no overheating. No indexing issues, no app problems. And it has now been 6 months since I created the latest account and moved to it.

So I'm not sure if that is any help to anyone - and it is beyond me to explain why this worked in my case. (I have not deleted the old accounts - and when I log into them, the problems with them are stil there).

Not sure I'm going to make the move to ML though.

I'm sitting with a late 2010 MBP still running SL (10.6.8), and based on these 101 pages of complaints, I'm not budging.  My machine works great with SL, so why upgrade to what appears to be a seriously flawed OS X version. I love the portability and power of the MBP, but shortened battery life would greatly diminish its usefulness.  To coin a phrase, Snow Leopard "just works".

This sounds all so familiar.  How many years was XP the Windows version of choice despite the available upgrade to Vista? Maybe SL is Apple's XP.

After losing battery capacity on my Late 2008 MBP running 10.8 I posted here about my problem. Apple contacted me and asked that I run a utility and send them the results. A couple weeks later, they post the 10.8.1 update that is supposed to help battery life. I think that mine actually got a little worse. I hope that Apple puts a little of that 1.05 Billion they get from Samsung into actual testing product. Tim Cook, are you listening?

If you've just upgraded, there is a lot going on.  Give your system a little time to "settle down" first.  Battery performance under Mountain Lion should be similar to what you were getting with Lion. Also... some people use real-time virus scanners.  As an OS upgrade replaces a significant percentage of your files, a virus scan can also be quite intensive... especially when it happens along with indexing.

Is this the same as "MalwareRemoval" ? (http://support.apple.com/kb/HT5244) Does this continuously run ? I'm on Mountain Lion 10.8.1. My battery on a new Macbook Pro Non-Retina is truly 1/2 or, even 1/3rd the power it had with Lion, same applications, actually, less applications, on a custom ordered Macbook Pro. I've checked all applications, Activity monitor and also read the Apple battery usage suggestions (adding a calendar event for charging the battery), the battery just doesn't last anymore and I'm under full warranty.

If there is anything I can do, I'll do it. I've tried so much. I've charged it, left it closed for days without the charger connected and then used it until I had to plug it in, I've tried to "teach" the battery to stay charged using every method I know. There must be something I can do... There ARE Pro applications installed, but they are used then closed. <scratching head thinking>...

Message was edited to include the "MalwareRemoval" that Apple recommended.

I'm fairly convinced its some low-level thing that is draining the battery. I can sit with no applications open, except activity monitor, or the terminal doing a 'top', and there's nothing using more cpu than usual. More evidence to this, is the abnormal battery drain even while the system is asleep.. .something is sucking power while asleep, that used to not pre-ML (or possibly pre-Lion). Something is trickle-draining the battery, that's not necessarily related to any specific process.

I'm on a new "non-retina" 15" and it arrived with Lion installed. I use 3 other Macbook Pro laptops with Leopard, Snow Leopard and Lion installed. Leopard and Snow Leopard do not trickle-drain when sleeping/closed, as you are seeing with Lion/Mountain Lion. Nothing plugged in and everything turned off within the laptops, Snow Leopard will turn on and have the same amount of charge as when I closed or put to sleep. Mountain Lion, installed on my main Macbook Pro that I use daily, the new 15", drains just like you describe.

I installed 10.8.1 in hopes it would help to no avail. It's kind-of worse. I'm doing my best to train the battery, that's all I can do.

d

Wurzel666

Are you an AppleSeed tester?

of course not

I was primarily interested battery health

may battery 85% health after 3 year work, and 5-5.30 hour work good for me.

i continue monitoring, posting second log batery use wait for the evening

P.S

while I can say with confidence that you can not use Safari, many many bugs(memory leaks, crash, freeze....)

while use chrom

i haven't caught up on the last 20 pages or so.  can anyone say if this is happening on a new MBP where ML comes pre-installed from the factory?