Q: Battery life dropped considerably on Mountain Lion.

Your Max health will change at times.  Mine right now stands at above 100% (see below).  It all depends and changes from time to time.  Go ahead and try to do a recovery.  Here is what I did BEFORE doing recovery.

I went to Disk Utility and did 'Verify Disk Permission'.  I found some permissions were messed up on my MBP, and then I repaired them. Then I proceeded to recovering.  Perhaps try that?

this is my battery status after aalmost 20 minutes with this page open only without touching the computer..

is it normal?

There are factors that can affect the battery drainage.  Was your screen on the entire time?  Any processes running?  More than one app running at once?

no nothing.

only the internet browser open.

the screen and the keyborad lights are respectively at 5 and 2 blocks. so pretty dark

What backup you have, Time Machine or a clone?  To go back from ML needs an erase/install because the Recovery Partition is different from Lion.  This therefore needs to be done from outside the existing system, The SL disk is also external to the current system.  In all cases you need to run Software Update after the install to make sure things are current.

Note that after a new installation, Spotlight re-indexes the hard disk, which can take some time and slows the computer a lot. It would also drain the battery so is best left to complete on mains power.  In Activity Monitor the process is called "mdworker".  There may initially be other resource intensive activity such as internet updates too.

You have better battery health than I do, and I've only had my Macbook for a month. At 97% health now.

FWIW, I don't do anything particularly taxing on my Macbook, and I've not really seen whether or not I have diminished battery life (2012 13" MBP, Lion pre-installed, upgraded to ML nearly immediately). What I have noticed is that my battery drained by 50% while it was shutdown over the weekend (Thursday night to Sunday night). I don't think THAT's supposed to happen. The decreasing battery health is also worrying me.

I noticed that the battery life decreased after the last update 10.8.1. with the original release 10.8 battery life was at hte same level than the 10.7.x

hope a fix come out soon or I'l downgrade to 10.8

i don't have any backup yet.. but i will buy an external hd.

i would buy time machine, but i'm a little bit afraid in spending more money that another 2 Tb hd if then i'll have this problems.. so i think i'll buy another one and do an old school back up and then do a clean install of the 10.6.7 dvd that i have in the box and then upgrade it to lion.

by the way i fixed a phone called tomorrow, i hope they will help me.

I followed up on my call to Apple Care a couple of weeks ago with a visit to the Genius bar in Zurich on Saturday. I took my Retina MBP with me and charged it 100% before leaving the house, I opened it up in the store at the Genius bar and it had dropped to 96%, that is while out of the house with no wifi connection, so there should have been no background tasks running while it was asleep. It used 4% power while asleep in 1 hour.

Thw Geniua bar worker told me this was normal for Mountain Lion and the press have quoted the same thing. He ran a full system scan and a battery test and told me the machine is fine, he said that releas 10.8.1 was released to address some of the battery draining issues, but I should wait for 10.8.2 but could not say when this would be released.

I asked about a downgrade, he advised this is possible but not reccommended for the Retina MBP as it's optimised for Mountain Lion. I asked why the battery obly lasts 4 hours when it is advertised as 7 and he said I should read the small print which states that this is with the screen brightness down to minimum and wifi off etc. It still doesn't explain to me why it drains while asleep though. I am not happy with the Macbook right now, it feels like I wasted my 3,000.- and could have just kept using my old 2009 model!

Zane81 wrote:

 

I followed up on my call to Apple Care a couple of weeks ago with a visit to the Genius bar in Zurich on Saturday. I took my Retina MBP with me and charged it 100% before leaving the house, I opened it up in the store at the Genius bar and it had dropped to 96%, that is while out of the house with no wifi connection, so there should have been no background tasks running while it was asleep. It used 4% power while asleep in 1 hour.

 

Thw Geniua bar worker told me this was normal for Mountain Lion and the press have quoted the same thing. He ran a full system scan and a battery test and told me the machine is fine, he said that releas 10.8.1 was released to address some of the battery draining issues, but I should wait for 10.8.2 but could not say when this would be released.

 

I asked about a downgrade, he advised this is possible but not reccommended for the Retina MBP as it's optimised for Mountain Lion. I asked why the battery obly lasts 4 hours when it is advertised as 7 and he said I should read the small print which states that this is with the screen brightness down to minimum and wifi off etc. It still doesn't explain to me why it drains while asleep though. I am not happy with the Macbook right now, it feels like I wasted my 3,000.- and could have just kept using my old 2009 model!

In fact I have just checked the Retina Macbook Pro webpage and it states the following:

http://http://www.apple.com/macbook-pro/features/

"Matching power for power. A 7-hour battery life is impressive for any notebook. But for a high-performance notebook with an ultra-high-resolution display, top-of-the-line processors and graphics, and a superslim design, it’s absolutely remarkable. The built-in 95-watt-hour battery gives you up to 1000 full charge and discharge cycles and up to 30 days of instant-on standby time.3 Which means you can put your MacBook Pro to sleep, and it’ll come back on instantly — after a day, a week, or even a month. With Power Nap in OS X Mountain Lion, your MacBook Pro can continue to receive new email and calendar invitations while it’s asleep. And when it’s connected to a power source, it can download software updates and make backups with Time Machine. So the next time you open your notebook, everything’s right there waiting for you."

The small print is as follows:

"Testing conducted by Apple in May 2012 using preproduction 2.6GHz quad-core Intel Core i7-based 15-inch MacBook Pro units. The wireless web test measures battery life by wirelessly browsing 25 popular websites with display brightness set to 50%. The standby test measures battery life by allowing a system, connected to a wireless network, to enter standby mode with Safari and Mail applications launched and all system settings left at default. Battery life varies by use and configuration. See www.apple.com/batteries for more information."

So this tells me I should be getting 7 hours of life in light use and while connected to the internet, I infact have the brightness below 50% to conserve power.

Anyone got an idea why my battery life is still bad, even though I went back to Lion with internet recovery? Sometimes I get a good estimated time like 8:30 (90% charged), but only when the laptop is idle. As soon as I start simple stuff like browsing in chrome and installing an app like VLC it jumps to an estimated time of 4:30

Same happens to me on my June rMBP, after going to 10.8.1 the estimation sometimes goes as high as 7hrs but the moment I start doing simple stuff like browsing and emailing it goes down to around 4 to 5. Still got hope in 10.8.2 as I really like this machine (aside for the failed delivery of 7hrs battery time) ...

I am doing a clean install of OS X Lion after my battery health dropped from 99% to 97% in one day. Will report if that makes anything better. I have a 

MacBook Pro, 15 Zoll, Anfang 2011,

Prozessor  2,3 GHz Intel Core i7,

Speicher  8 GB 1333 MHz DDR3

Grafikkarte  AMD Radeon HD 6750M 1024 MB

Software  OS X 10.8.1 (12B19)

BTW the battery life was so bad compared to Lion, I didn't like working with my MBP

Stcraw,

The more i understand this problem (and we all have progressed in a few weeks), the more I realized that this is a limited, small problem, affectig very few machines of the millions shipped last quarter. If this was not the case, this forum would have evolved to thousands of pages. But it did not. A small percentile of Apple fans got defective machines, and they always did for each generation going back 6+ years. If oyu search the forums and archives, you will find some issue affecting even the G4 or whatever it was called. that is credit to Apple as they ship lots but have extremely few complaints.

So you got a lemon. Apple will ship you a new one, the same they just reshipped a new MBA, and sent me labels to return the one with the defective trackpas. The only decision you can and should make is contacting Apple. Should you not, then you will have to absorb all the time and efforts troubleshooting a machine that cannot be fixed.

MBP retina should give you about 7-8 hours. Yours cannot, as it a rare lemon. Apple will not fix or patch it, it is not worth their time or the techs, plus it cannot be done. Lemons are meant to be returned. Yours will be labelled DOA on arrival.

Hopefully this helps and you get your replacement soon.

Gianluca,

there is only one way to veryfy. Surf in 30 min blocks, and use a timer. Stove or something. Then when you hear the beep, log your data (coconut or Watts). Then use the rule of 3 to project your 100% time span If your actual usage hovers around 6 or 7, then you are in luck. But it has to be actual usage, 50% brightness, and just, say, wifi surfing.

Chris