Q: Battery life dropped considerably on Mountain Lion.

I've been following this thread for over a week now and have read your posts surly and I think you're right. Either way this is a ridiculous behavior for an OS considering that it seems to not affect every MacBook Pro. Have you tried using gfxCardStatus as i described?

Hi guys....

Can I ask how you determine a "5% drop in battery" ? I mean... how did u get that figure? I have a 2012 13' MBP (my first apple product.. and unfortunately I'm quite disappointed with this 'first time' apple experience).

In my system report, it says that my full charge capacity is 5477 mAh.

I'm considering to go to apple store this weekend to ask them to revert my mbp to lion. But I'd like to know if I have lost any battery capacity in the first place. I only know that the battery definitely drains a lot faster in ML

Alex

It's been what, about 30 minutes of light web surfing, and just about to put it to sleep I'm down now to 63%. 14% in 30 minutes. I also thought about the graphic card too, but this model doesn't automatically switch - I would have to go into the Energy Saving preference panel and manually make the switch... and log out and back in.

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

Hardly handling 1% per 1 minute, super hot... but no perfomance issue at all.

I'm stIll on ML... not sure how I can return to Lion, since I have had SL preinstalled, then the friend of mine proposed me to upgrade my SL to Lion using his Apple Store account .

Then I've created my own account, bought ML and updated Lion to ML... So, I have the installation disc of SL only...

Will wait for some salvation I think...

I have installed this gfxCardStatus and apparently the 'Google Chrome Helper' process makes my computer switch to the amd radeon card while surfing the web. There might be a flash site running, but nothing really heavy.

Manually switching back does not affect my remaining time. I have checked it at 10% remaining charge (20 minutes, quickly going down)

At 5% I got a warning and plugged in the magsafe. Now it says the battery is not charging. It just stays there at 5%, for over 10 minutes now. Already tried unplugging the magsafe etc.

I'm not happy about this.

so... because my MBP wasn't getting a full charge (98%) no matter how long I plugged it in, two nights ago I let it run completely out, and then charged it again in the morning. Hey presto, 100% charge. Problem solved right? This morning I turn it on, plugged in, to find it's sitting at a 96% charge! Can go no further.

current max:          6370 mAh

current charge: 6141 mAh

cycles: 150

age: 1.9yrs.

...

I'm afraid i don't actually run Google Chrome so have not experienced that particular process activating the Discrete GPU.

I have however come accross the not charging experience on my partners MBP, its an early 2008 machine and this is an annoying issue which i've found no concrete solution to. Can i ask does your light on the magsafe adapter be a light coloured green instead of the full brightness green/orange? On my partners MBP it will sit at not charging if the light is in this light green colour but if i wiggle the magsafe adapter in the port the light will eventually go full green and then turn to orange and the not charging message will switch to charging. Is this at all simiar to your experience of this?

In relation to gfxCardStatus i believe that you have to select the integrated HD3000 before running any applications after boot up and log-in to disable the switching to the discrete GPU. As i said in my previous post, doing this at least for me seems to be working a treat, my MBP has been on for 2h48mins and i'm at 65% remaining saying 4:16 remaining. I realise that this may not work for everyone as i have no idea why its working for me!!

It was not showing any color.

I tried another magsafe adapter and it started charging. I then switched back to my own adapter and it also charges.

If I wiggle the adapter now, the led turns black (not even light green) and after a few seconds it turns orange again. The computer does not note anything, it keeps on charging even when it's black.

It could be a faulty magsafe adapter.

I have had the same issue as your partner on my 2008 white macbook, the adapter there turned light green and stopped charging. The battery in that macbook eventually died (probably unrelated to the adapter), it was doing fine (3 hours on a charge), then I got my new MBP and left the white book closed for over a month, at that point the battery had no charge left, whatsoever (check-leds not even flashing) it refuses to charge ever since, it is plain dead.

But that is off-topic.

I will experiment further with this gfxCardStatus. It is set to only use the intel HD graphics. Back at 54% charge already (in less than 1 hour charging), it says it needs another 1:52 until fully charged, but I guess it will be sooner than that.

i went back to snow leopard, but i lost all my data in the process a downside of going for a cheaper, smaller backup drive; ML immediately took over and erased everything, so now i have nothing here.  i'm going to have to go back; make sure you have a copy of your system from snow leopard, b/c the external hard drive isn't even recognized in migration assistant if you have stuff from ML, you have to restore everything from time machine

@slego,  How to revert back to SL without loosing data?  Simply put, you need a timemachine backup from that SL install.  It helps if you didn't use that drive for ML or even Lion after SL.  Restore from an all exclusive SL backup.  I did it, and it worked fine.  Over wrote my ML disk, and booted to 10.7.4

Same applies to SL.  My old '09 macbook has the SL install disk, and they worked fine.

Steps are as follow:

1. Boot to your desire OS restore disk (DVD or USB of Lion or SnowLeo)
2. Erase or Partition over ML disk.
3. Fresh Install or Restore from Back up Install to the formly ML disk that is now erased.
4. Boot to your SnowLeo or Lion Mac.

It was pretty easy for me, cause I had 2 separate disk for my backups.  (learned from past experience).

Just use one Disk per OS... and it should be easy!

PS- if you don't have or can't use your timemachine backup, you can add all the data by hand/manually.  (For example, your '.plist' or 'Application Support' data into the proper 'Preference' folder respectively)

Hope this help some people go back to a working OS.  I can't understand how Apple allow such a big mistake out their doors, and then try to fix it with an update but fail to do so.

hananias,

Thank you so much for you post and step-by-step instruction. Really appreciated

Salut!

No prob!  Hope it helps.

"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."

Beisarius, I'm curious what your background is in.

My issue is that Apple did a Firmware Update to my Mac Mini Server and it FRIED my SSD. SO......I am struggling with this response a bit. If Apple in fact DID mess around with voltages, settings for CPU in a Firmware Update.....Then THIS would in fact cause "so called security features" to also NOT work properly to keep my machine from self destructing. Know what I mean? If the Firmware or OS is effecting a chip in my battery then WHY wouldn't it also have the possibility of negatively effecting other chips, components in my MBP? I'm not following your logic here as it seems to contradict. I am however not flaming you or trying to pick a fight, simply trying to understand how this could be true.

I tried using gfxcardstatus only to be told it does not work with Intel 4000. I also uinstalled SL on older machines, so unless I get the new MBP 13 (retina) coming up, I will not have the opportunity to turn of the nvidia GPU. But if indeed that GPU turns on, it would answer the vast majority of qns ref heating and battery drainage.

Ref drainage, a quick synopsys that might help it clarify for those that wonder about the relationship between consumption and health. Battery University web site will explain it in depth. I am merely simplifying.

- Quicker one drains a Li-Ion battery, it heats up- an inherent property. test with iPhone- turn the LED flash and let it run. Result is heat- battery , and easy to recognize in the hand.

- More frequently a Li Ion battery heats up, the faster it looses its properties and looses health. So , for example, if one plugs EDD, hdmi mouse and fills all ports and discharges batteries super fast, up an down, one wears that battery dow supe rfast. Using an IPhone to play games- am sure you experienced the warmth feel.

- Or, even if using a system for small tasks, but in heat (like Middle East), that battery will also warm up and loose health bacause it drains 1000mAh but at 55 C internal temperature.

- A 6000 battery will take more cycles to die than a 4800, given same drainage.

- A 1.87 yr old Li Ion battery at 96% will loose health far more rapidly than a brand new battery at 96% even if same capacity. The older one (as is with cirrs at 300+ cycles) is  "tired." So the ML fast discharge is a schock and would kill it super fast. Hence older units mentioned here seem to have lost battery life so much faster. But the problem would be the same. Cirr's battery problem is not worse or less than anyone elses, but at 300 cycles his unit had no chance of surviving the ML issue for 6 months.

So hopefully, in simplified terms, the relationship between fast discharge and loss of health makes sense. Same logic would apply to extreme cold, and so on.

c

What I have done is transferred all my paper work to the iMac and do very little now on the MBP.  Up to the

upgrade I could work on Microsoft  package for up to 7 - 8  hours and no problem.

Now the battery say up to 5 hours and when I did any work it would drain rapidly.

Also had the MBP heat up, however, since I re installed the Ml that has gone.

Have now 88% showing and 4 hours left.  So doing the maths give me a battery life of 5 hours.

A little down on the 7-8 hours I got with previous Mac os X.

All I wonder is how come this did not raise its ugly head during testing ?