Q: Battery life dropped considerably on Mountain Lion.

My early 2011 15" 2.0GHz i7 MBP has the same issues. Since I upgraded to ML, the battery life is half of what it used to be.

On a full charge, with 92% health, I get 3 to 4 hours of doing almost nothing (internet and mail). Even when it is in sleep mode, it loses 10% of its charge overnight. The battery has 303 cycles.

It really is terrible. I'd love to go back to Lion (as I don't really see or use any of the new features in Mountain Lion, or could easily live without them) Will it get better again doing this?

Another data point for my mid-2010 MBP 15" i5:  Max Capacity was 4889 mAh yesterday, today it's 4775 mAh, with cycle count only 42.

This is not nice, not nice at all !

Guys!

Please! Stop messing 2 different issues!

1. One issue is that ML drains your battery really fast. This is exactly the issue which is discussed here.

2. Another issue is that the capacity of your battery is changing on daily basis. Please study this issue carefully on another topics. This capacity is a kind of "breathing" and will be changing constantly! Thus In 10 cycles you can getn 83% of capacity but then in  100 cycles you can see 95% of capacity. This relates to battery memory fenomena issue and does not depend on OS version installed on your Macs. Please do not implicate it with the issue which is trying to be resolved here anymore!

Thank you.

A futher update after my insane drain whilst on sleep last night & very quick recharge time.

Just opened up after sleeping overnight for it to still show 100% ( a first!), I then clicked on the battery icon on the menu bar to find it showed time remaining  13.30 hours....***!

Now clearly this is falling, with it still showing 100% & now showing time remaining as 12.24 hours.

This clearly indicates that something is haywire as far as calibration & estimation of time left is concerned. Now it is 100% & 11.30 within a few seconds.

So I now think, is something burning the battery or is it all maths?

Still, all that said, something very not right.

John

@John,  I think you may have a point.  I'm also starting to think that this problem might be with the battery sensor or what ever is doing the calculating in our machines, that is draining our batt life. 

I did a massive test this week with my WHITE UNIBODY MACBOOK @2.26ghz on a 64GB SSD!

After Calibrating, Reseting memory, SMC... I got the same results in 10.8.1= I lost 1% battery per minute (or 2)

Running ONLY Safari.   When I went to youtube, for get it.  And don't get me started with multi-tasking (mail, web, notes- ON)  I literally saw the percentage dropping.

But I didn't have that problem in 10.6.x or 10.7.x. 

This is were the big test comes in.  I had a back up of Lion and my original SL disks.  So I thought, hey why not go all the way back to SL.  I did it!  Fresh install (no restore) Updated SL to 10.6.4 (or 5) latest, surfed the web and the percentage was pretty stable through out!  I didn't like the UI, I missed the gestures and iCloud sync.  So I knew, I at least need to go back to Lion.  But SL was snappy I wish I had that speed in Lion & MTLion

Ok back to the test.  After I tested it for a couple of hours, it was still in the 60%... I knew my battery was fine.  It was going to last the usual 4-5 hrs.  I comfirmed this when I checked batt health and noticed that it got higher.  (MTLion had mA of 85.7% @ 4670 and estimated a poor 2-3hrs of life, but before the install in 10.7 Lion was 89.4% @ 4873 average of 4-5hrs of life)  Now in Snow Leo 10.6.x It went up to 89.6%. 

After finished testing SL, it was time to go back to the iCloud EcoSystem and install Lion.  Again, got similar test as SL, battery was higher voltage, healthier and reading the usual 4~5hrs.

I think there is something wrong with MTLion, either something literally eaten our battery life.  Or miscalculation somewhere throwing off the charge.

I'm going to stay with Lion for now... what a waste of money.  I know $20 is not a lot... but if I am not using it here, I could have used it somewhere else!!!

Hey all! I've been keeping a good eye on my battery since my last post and i think i've found one way that seems to work but to be honest i'm not sure how. I know many of you may know about gfxCardStatus, a really useful application/utility from Cody Krieger that lets a user know which graphics option is being utilized by the system and can also let the user force the system to use one or the other.

On my system at least, when fully charged and started up and given a few minutes when logged in the system usually reports about 3hr 30 mins, same as my last post, which usually rises to 4hrs 30 mins and thats about it. this is the system using the integrated HD3000 graphics.

When i launch gfxCardStatus and set it to Integrated Only, i.e, same as above the time remaining jumps to 6+ hrs left and for no apparent reason.

Also I noticed that when not running gfxCardStatus the energy saver preferences panel has the Automatically Switch Graphics checkbox but when running Card Status this changes to two checkbox's, one for better battery life (default selection apparently) or higher performance. I presume this is the application changing this code to display these checkbox's instead of just the usual auto switch option.

Since the system at boot up was using the integrated card i can't see why the remaining time would change simply by using this application. Unless the way the application handles the power use on the system is different or by default ML is somehow keeping both cards (integrated and discrete) active. Does anyone know if this may be possible?

Would any of you that has a MBP with switchable graphics units mind trying this to see if it helps you or changes the reading in much the same way as it has for me?

Just for reference my battery is at 87% now and saying 6:13 left.

Hey Shelly, curious. If you had it from the beginning, why did you not return it immediately, like some users did?

You still have warranty though. So I would communicate with Apple.

Umm, if you read the posts, you will find out that, overwhlmingly, reverting to a clean Lion install will solve your problem and salvage something out of your battery. Just do not import apps or user preferences. Folders, one by one.

Umm slego, many users are experiencing both a super fast battery discharge and loss of health. Have you seen cirr's logs? I certainyl experienced the same. And once that health dropped, NOTHING reverts it back... In fact, once you got the service battery logo, DONE- that battery indeed needs servicing. So NO, it is not normal to drop 5% battery health in 10 cycles- even Apple tells that. If it does there is a major problem, hence the point of people here. ML drains and kills their battery health.

John,

I already wrote above about algorhithm problem,and calculation. remember when iPhone 4 came out, the 'bar' (showing 1 or 2 only) issue, and then Apple released a patch that recalculated the bars to reflect actual power?

Anyhow, what matters is that lots of users, including owners of numerous new and old MBPs are only getting 2-3 hrs of charge. Tops. So no matter how the estimate is done, that battery is drained in half its advertised time.

I completely agree that they got the math wrong. They got the SMC messed up. And they got lots of batteries dying super fast.

BACK TO YOU: if I saw 12-13 hrs listed, but only half in actual usage, I would return or trouble shoot that machine. it is not supposed to. No macbook gets 12. So umm, you have a problem.

Ok, I did another sleep test on my Mid 2009 MBP. This time I logged out before I put it to sleep. It was at the login screen, and at 82%. 7 or so hours later when I opened it, it had "only" dropped to 80%. Of course, in the last 5 minutes of using it, it's dropped to 78%, with 3:37 remaining.

Same here hananias, I was  very surprised to see how Snow Leopard was fast, snappy and cool once reinstalled on older machines, and how even Lion had degraded battery life compared to SL. In fact, I would call SL the perfect Apple OS, with Lion and ML declining rapidly in impact. I do not think iCloud apps or power nap be worth the loosing mobility..

boot times? OMG, night and day SL vs lion or ML.

I think i ended up believing so much in the Apple experience that I could not see the obvious glitches that were sneaking in. Same for Apple, they believe so much in their own success they may not see developping issues or refuse it may happe to their brand. Number one rsn geniuses deny it until shown logs: Can't happen to Apple, that's a PC thing... NOPE anymore... They call that tunnel vision and groupthink.

Beisarius,

I didn't say it is normal to have 5% dropped capactiy in 10 cycles.

I said it is another issue. I revealed this fact for myself during being on the Lion.

ML may affect the battery health of course, but I would insist that ML is out of battery health issue.

I've been watching for my battery health bouncing from the beginning of the year. See the dates and percentages on the screenshot below:

Hey chadefallenstar,

See earlier posts, I used years of pc experience and lots of critical thinking to postulate that GPU may have something to do with it on MBPs- on top of other issues. Hence calling it a bad bad flop by Apple. Apple also had problems before, with nvidia in particular.

slego, i understand. What I am saying is that the issues are related in a high number of posts. Drain leads to rapid health loss therefore drain leads to early battery death. i also proved this on two new batteries I tested on ML and returned to Apple.

Qn, how is your 6.2 handling ML? are you back to Lion?