Q: Battery life dropped considerably on Mountain Lion.

As I said in a previous post.  Apple Support Ireland told me to re-install the Mountain,( case number to contact them again)   Plus all the re settings that folk here have suggested.  Only improvement is the heating has gone.  However, the battery life is gone to pot.  I cannot now fully charge to battery to 100%

health     original  5770mAh

              current   5322mAh

             cycles     52

             age         1.8 years

hours left             4.4 hours

That is with no backlighting on keys brightness 40% and only the browser open

Further information.

after discharging fully in 4 hours whilst asleep, it has now fully charged in under an hour!!

John

i tried to downgrade back to snow leopard after running ML, and they told me that all the information and data on my external hard drive, once written for 10.8.1, can't be converted or retrieved in snow leopard, so i'm basically screwed.  definitely don't get ML unless you have a saved backup of your last time with snow leopard; unless i can find one on my external hard drive (which ML almost successfully wiped clean), i am stuck with ML or have to start over.

njerisaidhi I just created an external Lion bootup drive and from that I can access all my data on my ML drives no problem. Not tested with SL though.

I have a Late 2010 15" MBP i7 2.66 running 10.8.1 and the battery life stinks. Its utter rubbish. I also have a brand new 13" Macbook Air running Lion. It came installed with Lion, i upgraded to mountain lion and after seeing the battery life hit a brick wall the second i started using it. I did a recovery back to Lion and battery life is pretty decent. I get about 6 and half hours of regular usage as apposed to about 3hrs with Mountain Lion. Im still getting pretty rubbish battery life on the Pro, its very frustrating after owning a plethora of Apple Products from Ipods, Ipads's I'Phones and Mac's that the response time for fixing bugs its utterly appauling. This problem is definately not confined to this forum post because not only are there people that very rarely use their Macbook's on battery because they are either on power at work or tethered to a Thunderbolt/Cinema display when at home so they rarely notice how horrid the battery life is, but there would be people that wont be reaching for help on forums and its absolutely disgusting that Apple have not addressed this issue publicly and constructively done something to fix it. Nothing about 10.8.1 indicates any attempt to rectify this and it would be nice for Apple to acknowledge there is GIANT PROBLEM with the battery situation in mountain lion and are actively trying to rectify it.

Being a Windows User all my life and over the last 4 years switching to many many apple prodcuts and moving alot of people over in the workplace I am left with a very bitter taste in my mouth. I have already made a post in the forum post and while I understand this is a community forum and not a support forum, Apple are clearly aware of the issue as they have contacted a massive amount of people in this forum. Yet no official statment has been Made.

Macrumours, Life Hacker, MacGasm, MacWorld, OSXDaily, MacObserver and even Forbes have reported on how testing has revealed that the battery life on OSX Mountaion lion is affecting an enourmous amount of macbooks. Not just the tiny group represented by these forums posts. It has been over a month since the release date of Mountain Lion. We may aswell hope for 10.9 to rectify this issue ? Because there does not appear to be any light at the end of the Mountain Lion tunnel. Perhaps Apple should stop relying on developers that are paying for the priveldge to be a developer for bug reports and focus on some decently paid employees for product testing as clearly there is a hole in the system.

I'd hate to lie and say this is my last apple product but I certainly wont recommend it to friends & family anymore.

Mark...I also have a newish 13" MBA running ML and the battery usage seems well behaved & normal (right  now);

see my post above concerning my MBA 11 Mid 2011 (battery life is trashed running  ML); your experience & mine with the 13 " MBA's show how pernicious this problem has become..one persons MBA 13 is fine another persons

isn't..APPLE with all its billions & resources would have fixed this problem long ago if they understood its

nature..the older hardware seems to be hit the worst...APPLE might have to issue a recall if this goes on to much longer..

people's batteries are getting trashed big time..

Question is, does everyone REALLY think it's just the batteries that are being damaged??? Any computer engineers out there that DON'T work for Apple want to chime in?

Hey cirr,,

Wow, that log says it all. that is not a normal battery life decay. Hope you save it. you have a very very strong case for battery or machine replacement even if outside warranty, particularly as you purchased ML and it was sold as compatible with your hardware.

B4ore

Question is, does everyone REALLY think it's just the batteries that are being damaged??? Any computer engineers out there that DON'T work for Apple want to chime in?

b4ore,

One does not need to be an engineer to answer. Short, yes, batteries only, not hardware. Macbooks have a fairly sophisticated protection mechanism. For example, if you remove the battery and plug the mag adapter, the macbook will automatically drop voltages (and performance) to prevent a surge. In the craziest experiments I heard of, only current surges (faulty power or PS), or overclocking CPUs, have been known to do damage. For some Macbook owners, experiencing heat, well, the fans might take a beating. that's about it. On hot machines- it is still within specs. If it was not, they would freeze or crash well prior to hardware failure. Some machines exxperience heat and slow down- which is indicative of a problem, likely there before ML's update.  So if you take any 10000 logicboards, and test them, some will not pass, others will pass but fail in the consumer's hands. the whole point of QC is to reduce this number in the very low percentile.

Regarding this issue, what is sure is that batteries are drained rapidly, and their health is also killed super fast.

Am also sure that Apple likely fiddled with battery life or time algorhithms and usage, which explains the very erratic figures some of us get- even on working machines. A new way to calculate health? Consumption? 

So i think there are two possibilities:

- That some logicboards have an inherent defect and cannot perform within specs, not those ML imposes; As such, Apple should offer a replacement;

-  Or ML simply came with firmware that tweaked voltages, ram settings, CPU and whatever else, into operating erratically. Almost as if one firmware was rolled out for everyone. In which case Apple should release proper updates and replace, freely, affected batteries.

What I used to like about Dell was that each generation of PCs had, by series, its own separate firmware/software updates. Very custom taylored for those machines, and could not work on others. is Apple somehow rolling out universally compatible firmware? Or do its updates include customized updates for other generations? I do not know. But why are so many 2009-2011 macbooks are affected? Am still very very curious as to how many users are affected. 1 in 100? 1 in 20? 1 in 10? Hence wishing we could go post on a website the serial number of affected machines.

Chris

Well---I had enuf and went to the Apple Store Greenwich mid morning yesterday and had them reinstall Lion which was not an easy undertaking for them. They said it would be an hour, than 3 more hours, then no call. End of day yielded confusion and they said they had no clue of status and when it would be ready---UGH. Three calls later where no one had a clue what was going on and 1PM today, I was finally told it was ready after I called a 4th time. They restored from my outboard Time Machine back up to Lion (this was a first day online purchase of a new MBA 13)  and I have only since updated certain folders BUT left all applications,etc unchanged to avoid dragging something bad back in. So far, HUGE difference in battery life and almost back to original spec although my battery has taken a hit for sure. Fans have not come on either. Not your typical Apple Genius experice---dreadful, discourteous, clueless, insenstive, etc.

I do get a TON of errors when I try to repair disk permissions FWIW.

I am having a deja vu of buying an iPhone 4S and having 60% of the battery life I had with my 4. I will no longer be one of those junkies (guniea pigs)  waiting till 3AM east coast time to be the first to order anything. I love Apple, but they now have two huge strikes in my book. As a shareholder as well, I'd rather skip my dividend and have them start getting things right B4 they release them as sooner later their reputation will suffer. Count me out on the iPhone 5 until I read that there are NO problems and the battery lasts longer than my abysmal iPhone 4S

Thinman,

You should not have been able to charge that battery to 100% anyway, eve if Lion made you believe it could. That was an arbitrary figure, an algorithm. ML came with its own algorhithms. So for 1.8 years, 52 cycles, current mah/max is 92%. So for a 1.8 yr old machine, is not bad at all. If that number drops rapidly, with ML, then you have an issue. But as it is, if anyone had a 92% healthy battery after 1.8 years, i would say quite good. It would have been impossible for any Li Ion battery to remain 100% healthy even after 6 months of unused storage. A ssuch, Lion was likely misleading you a bit. So if you can update and let us know- is it still dropping with each cycle, as id did to cirr? 5% or more between cycles?

Just want to report after daily use I have definitely notice my fan spins up louder and much longer  and more frequently than ever before with seemingly unchanged use in my MBA.

Jessy,

Sounds like you had a negative experience in Greenwhich. Is it UK?

In contrast, I can say that Montreal and Ottawa Apple staff is super fast and curteous. They fix or replace everything (provided a warranty), including my last iphone 4 (had an extended warranty) that had some battery heating issue. They just swaped, be it that we had not way of heating it up for them in the store. have you tried replacing the 4S with poor battery life? They can also veryfy your phone's log and diagnostic for battery life.

As for you macbook, have you also called Apple? It helps tons if tech support knew about it. Geniuses will not report it as they have no reason to.

Glad to hear you acted quickly it got solved and saved something of your battery. As you can see some posts, some people have essentially lost their battery completely.

Hey Beisarius,

Yup, I'm aware that anything that intensive will kill the battery quickly - this time they just happened to be the two precipating events before the battery went wacky again. I had the horrible battery life issue out-of-the-box with this rMBP. I had to do the resets the first time, but the fact that the issue came back again is still disconcerting. I'm already running battery and temperature monitoring apps, so I'm going to keep recording my data so that I can prove that it was an issue from the beginning if necessary.

Well, I tried a test. I turned off Wifi and put the laptop to sleep, figuring maybe the system was keeping the wifi powered when asleep. I closed the lid at 93%, then woke it up about 4 hours later to an 87% charge.

Oh well, that's not it, has to be something else. This is getting nuts.