Q: Battery life dropped considerably on Mountain Lion.

This is very odd... Is this even right?  This is on my MBP that I just bought in May 2012.  ML has been killing my battery.

My battery health was at 97.7% yesterday.

And now it's 101.1%.  Is that not good?  Your battery's health is going up then.

Edit: you are probably talking about "charge", not "health".  It's natural for charge to get less if you use your book and it's unplugged.  The amount it went down depends on your usage.

Well, yeah, its good that it went up, but I'm wondering what I did to make it go up?

ANd no, I'm not talking about charge.  I'm talking about Battery Health, NOT battery charge.

There will always be fluctuations in mAh readings.  Fully discharging the battery and then fully recharging it can change the readings by quite a bit.  But sometimes it even changes from one day to the next (usually not by as much though).

A few percent are quite normal.  Certainly no reason to say "ML has been killing my battery", when it's more than 100% and 4 months old.

A better way to put it:  ML is DISCHARGING my battery at a very fast rate where I am only getting 2-3 hours.  That's it.  Lowered brightness down to 50%, disabled NC and iCloud, nothing makes a difference.

Yes thinman, some people indeed had the problem on brand new MBPs with ML installed - see the posts. Also some had burn in screens- LG to blame and are being replaced. But if it is 1 in 100, 1000 or 1 in 10 000, it means, statistically, that 2012 MBP or MBA are still performing exceptionally well with ML installed and you need really bad luck to get one. Personally I believe that it is an unacceptable hardware flop along the supply chain, to affect even one percent of units. Also it appears that ML was tested on many machines, but for sure optimized for 2012 units only.

CDN engineer, same here. I observed that Lion also was bad on batteries, but way a slower degradation than ML. Snow Leopard, however, is awesome ont he Santa Rosa platfrom (early 2008). As if both Lion and ML were really not meant to work properly with older battery design and chips.

sf_49 ers,

No major company acknoweldges a design flaw unless there is a safety risk, class action or an easy solution found. I cannot name you a single brand out there that would not come with as many- or more- issues than this battery one.

Where we really were let down by Apple, we got accustomed to believe that new OSes improve on the previous version. Clearly they do- but on new hardware only. Yet all OSes have become more demanding, and potentially, more glitchy.

If we compare, say, with Windows- not all PCs could handle XP. Not all Vista- some even new back then could not. Windows 7 is the best Microsoft ever released, itself optimized for specific platforms. But they were released years apart. So new Windows owners knew to check carefully hardware or simply buy new systems with the new Windows OS. But that was Windows...

With Apple, we became accustomed with flawless upgrades covering even older systems. Think IOS on iPhones.. We were too optimistic at assuming we can take SL, Lion, ML and just about throw it on any Intel based Mac. Yet between Santa Rosa, Penryn and Ivy Bridge the technological gap is gigantic.

I think Apple could have done a better job at cautioning against upgrading on older systems. However, thinking objectively, I was way to optimistic and biased towards Apple's engineering, so I forgot that new software should not work too well with older hardware. 2008 and 2009, let's think iphones alone- they can't handle the same OS, no more than macbooks should not be avble to just fire up and speed with Lion or Lynx.

As for afected 2010or 2011 units, like all of you, am waiting for explanations or developpment. Is it hardware? OS? Should users upgrade their hardware every 2 years mandatorily? That is not reasonable. I lost my eagerness to upgrade an OS X.

Yes, there seems to be something affecting some machines adversely.  I was confronted with a similar problem last year, when I upgraded my early 2011 MBP from SL to Lion.  It nearly halved the time of a full charge.

There seems to be some hardware/software conflict (my guess still is it's GPU related) on some Macs.  The question is what's the commonality.

I thought it was due to my two gpu's (Intel and AMD Radeon), but there are also people with only 1 chip complaining.

Strangely I didn't get any less from ML.  If anything it's up by ca. 30 min compared to Lion, which was the hog for me (although ML doesn't give me anything close to what I got from SL either).  This year it's like the story repeated and many machines coming with Lion have that problem upgrading to ML.

I don't know what it is.  CPU low, GPU running on Intel 3000 with 0.03W to 0.06W and still only 5 to 5.5 hrs., while when I re-installed SL, I got 7 hrs.

Beisarius, I disagree with your statement that this is like a Windows OS update that doesn't run on a computer.  Not having a computer that is capable of running the latest OS is one thing.  And even in the Windows world, an OS update might make your machine come to a CRAWL.  But what's different here is that this problem is leading to actually Hardware (battery) Failures.  I've never seen this in the Windows, so this is completely different.

Also, I was reading that so far ML has 10% penetration.  So, it is clear that Apple intends to sell the OS to more than people who are on 2011 or 2012 hardware.  The reason that some of the 10% haven't complained yet is because that many of them keep their laptops plugged into the AC and haven't seen it yet, or they don't know where to come to ask for help. 

This is a serious problem for Apple.  I've personally told at least a dozen friends and family members not to upgrade until Apple fixes this.  And I can guarantee that I'm not the only one advising others to wait.

If all this was were a drop in battery life from 8 hours to 5 hours; so be it.  But for people to have battery life drop to 2-3 hours doing nothing but surfing the net AND running the risk that their batter health will drop to the "Service Battery" level within a month or two is serious enough that Apple should make a statement or, if not, then they have got to fix it in 10.8.2.  But if they can't do it there, they really need to say something.

I JUST got my brand-new Macbook Pro 13" this August. I immediately updated to Mountain Lion and just recently I've noticed that the battery life is way too short to be normal. My OLD 2009 Macbook Pro 15" never had battery problems and even though it still ran on the outdated Leopard OS, it still got on average 5 hours of running time... now even when I'm only running a few basic applications (Safari, Finder), I get a MAXIMUM of 2.5 hours on full charge and 50% brightness.

I've done the full troubleshooting tests over the phone with an Apple technician and everything was spotless. I then went into the Apple store and they replaced my physical battery (even though after the battery check showed that everything was "normal" and in "good" condition). I went home crossing my fingers that it would somehow fix everything. Unfortunately, it still only lasts 2.5 hours, 3 if I'm really lucky.

I just don't know what it could be... I've done everything I could find on this thread and the previous one (for those who had problems with Lion), and nothing seems to help. I'm just frustrated at this point and resigned to the fact that I'll have to keep plugged into AC power all the time. If it's not my installed software, not my hardware, not the physical battery... at this point, I feel like the only thing left is for Apple to get their stuff together maybe the next ML update will fix all our issues. Sigh.

Hey sratch,

Some people who posted here, also had their hardware crawling slow after ML. The battery issue is affecting a swath, but not all people affected by ML are having the battery issue. But either case, to myself, it is reminiscent of Windows because we ended up doing installs, uninstalls, installs then updates, and so on. Remember the "Relax, it's a Mac!" commercials? this has been nothing like that for forum members. The Windows OS were simply too much for the hardware specification at the time "Vista ready" fiasco so on..

the hardware failure is very specific, and am more and more inclined to believe a combination of:

- logicboard design

- gpu and,

- specific at fault supplier.

Only thus we can explain why so many units have the problem but others simply not.

So on this one, I disagree with ML leading to hardware failure. I would need some voltage/amperage, shorting/surge proof. And like any theory, it must be recreated on any Macbook. Also, had this been the case, most or all ML upgraded machines would have been affected, not a minority. I postulate that hardware was substandard in the affected units and ML simply exposed it. So ML is not frying 10% of batteries out there, rather 10% of units out there, logicboards, SMC controllers, etc, were defective or not ML compatible. The exact nuts and bolts can only be explained by Apple.

As we speak, Apple is replacing an entire swath of Retina Macbook Pros with LG LED screens, as they ... burn in. the fault was, evidently, the supplier but it was easy to identify, and luckily, adress. This battery issue is logicboard related and hence, even at 10%, so widespead that it may be even scary to do the replacement math. At 1 000 000 affected Macbooks that would be x 1000 so 1 billions US to replace affected units, going back 2010.

beisarius, i have the same feeling.. no eagerness anymore. do i should have major compatibility problems if i go back to lion? i'm really thinking to do this..

Did anyone had any problem going back do lion? I'm strongly considering doing it...

I did not have any problems going back to LION on my MBA 11 (2011) which was heavily

affected by this battery drain bug; BUT and this is a BIG BUT..this MBA is NOT my

production machine..so I can't advise you on the state of any data changes made between where you are

now with ML and your LION backup..somehow you have to restore data (not OS) states that may or

maynot have ML dependencies..this becomes very problematic..for example many state in other threads

that its virtually impossi ble to get back to SL from ML w/o a complete disk wipe and major reverts in

firmware states..this problem, I fear, is way bigger than most think and could cost Apple $billions in $ and goodwill..

I was one of the fortunate ones..my new MBA 13 (2012) is and still remains immune to this bug...I will be

VERY VERY reluctant to move off of 10.8.1 until APPLE comes clean on this problem..