Q: Battery life dropped considerably on Mountain Lion.

Hey jt519, just to confirm: you're testing on 10.8.1, right?  Also, just curious, for your experiments, do you have iCloud enabled?

yes, 10.8.1, and yes iCloud enabled. I had disabled iCloud at one point, but didn't see much of a difference, regarding power loss during sleep.

Beisarius wrote:

 

Hey Adams,

 

Just tested this one for sleep, so overnight it dropped 1 to 2 %. As for functionality, some things i noticed too. mozilla firefox takes about an hour off. Difference betweem Chrome and Safari much smaller. Web is also more demanding- flash so on.

 

Looking at how my performance stats changed right after 10.8.1, very reasonable to assume ML tweaked some settings. So at this point it is one of two things, battery or logicboard. If you did a full clean Lion install, my hunch is that were you to change your battery, you would perhaps jump back to 6. Reason I am saying that is I documented that reverting Lion still gave me poor battery life until I experiemented with replacing batteries. So if the ML algorythm, somehow, permanently affected your battery chip and calibration, that would explain why reverting has worked for some, not others. If you replace the battery (and you can try it, while recouping your current one), then the new one gives you 6, just found your culprit. if the new one still gives you 4, take it back and have your old one put in.

 

As the batteryuniversity site explains, if a battery is 'shocked' by sudden demands and drain- ie ML on your system, and it cycles a few times, then it may indeed be damaged and loose health. May say 93% but no longer perform at 93%. Check your drainage. What is your amperage in Power? i found it consistent across systems. if ML says it drains -900mAh, it is, -1200, it is, -2000, it is.

 

So if yours says -1100 range, I bet you it is your battery. it does not have 6 hours worth of juice even though the meter says 93%. that number is artificial.

 

On two older systems I also experimented with three generic batteries. Both ML and Lion just tore them up. I then placed in (after resets) brand new Apple batteries, manufactured last 6 months, and they have been flawless. I bet ML was also  optimized for  newer Apple brand batteries to reduce copyright issues. think the new iPhone 5 dock, speculated to arrive with a built in copyright shake.

 

So the question here is, how many people had the ML issue, did clean installs, resets + new batteries and still had the issue?

 

if it is battery, it still means hardware- be it lemon batteries. Ironically, first batteries were invented in Egypt using lemon acid...

I'm sure it makes sense but I'm a little confused about the drain scenario, however mine shows Amperage is -988. 

For the heck of it I decided to repair permissions, booting into Safe Mode...only one minor repair.  I left it in Safe Mode, WiFi on, screen at 50%.  I used Safari (no other browsers installed) and noticed that the power drain is substantially less...which is to be expected to some extent, curtailed use of GPU, etc., but the improvement was considerably better than I thought it would be.  I haven't reviewed the Console output yet, but there are obviously a LOT of processes executing in the background and apparently don't appear in Activity Monitor. 

To that end I did notice that the kernel task that was very active in ML is almost non-existent in Lion.  Since that's a PID 0 "userland" event, I wonder what all it's doing that requires such high activity?

Also, I put it to sleep at 25% and woke it about 8 hours later at 13%, so a 12% drop or about 1.5% per hour...still above Apple's claims.

The reserve power notice just popped up so I'm going to try the odd SMC reset suggested earlier (reset SMC while the battery is flat, then recharge to 100%) and see how it goes.

Hey,

I am going to install Lion again. 3 hours battery time isn't acceptable :/

But now I have another problem: I've tried to download Lion from the AppStore, but I can't, because I have ML installed. What now? Is there any way to get Lion legally now? Oo

I have only 2 hours **( Why Apple act like we are do not exist?

We could make an open letter to Apple CEO maybe?

There is one thing I do not understand..

I installed iStatMenu and checked my power usage: 15 Watts. I think this is normal?! How the **** is my battery getting emptier and emptier in such a short time, when my power usage is only 15 Watt?! This doesn't make any sense?!

wullewuu wrote:

 

Hey,

 

I am going to install Lion again. 3 hours battery time isn't acceptable :/

 

But now I have another problem: I've tried to download Lion from the AppStore, but I can't, because I have ML installed. What now? Is there any way to get Lion legally now? Oo

I've gone back to Lion but unfortunately it looks like the "damage" is done.  My MacBook Air came with Lion but after I "downgraded" from Mountain Lion to Lion the severe battery drainage didn't improve much...it's a little better with Lion, but nothing like it was pre-Mountain Lion.    However there are a couple of other posts from folks here that have gone back to Lion and they said things returned to "normal" so it's worth a try.

I ran into the same download issue.  Luckily I had a cloned copy of Lion from my iMac.  I just booted up my MBA using the cloned copy on an external drive and downloaded Lion from the Mac App Store again.  Before running the installer I wiped the MBA's drive completely and created a USB boot disk with Lion Disk Maker (works with Mountain Lion too).  That way I'll always have a copy of both OS's for a clean install.

If you don't have a clone or installation disk but have a Time Machine backup from Lion you should be able to restore from that...although after doing so I'd still download a fresh copy of Lion, wipe the drive and do a clean install.  More on a similar discussion here...

https://discussions.apple.com/message/19128434#19128434

If all else fails you can take it to an Apple Store to have them do it...or worst case buy one of the installation drives from them.  Lion is also available from bit-torrent sites, but I avoid those like the plague...your call of course.

Here are directions for a clean install:

http://mashable.com/2011/07/20/lion-clean-install-guide/

http://macs.about.com/od/macoperatingsystems/ss/Perform-A-Clean-Install-Of-Os-X- Lion-On-Your-Mac.htm

mlaukart wrote:

 

I have only 2 hours **( Why Apple act like we are do not exist?

We could make an open letter to Apple CEO maybe?

Apple is aware of the situation.  If you read back through the thread you'll see that they reached out to a number of us here a few weeks ago, had us install diagnostic programs and delievered the results.  Now it's a matter of wait and see.  If they can resolve it they will issue an update.  Updates are never made available fast enough for folks like us that are experiencing the problem but I for one believe that will they will sort it out. 

It's frustrating and patience is not one of my strong suits, but there's not much else to do IMHO.

<Edited By Host>

The problem is, that I do not have Lion.

I bought it in the App Store, but now I can't download it, because Mountain Lion is installed..

Following up on my situation (not that anyone was waiting for it) - but my battery has seemingly gotten a little better on it's own.  For the first two days, the battery was terrible.  One hour maximum - and the fan seemed to run a lot, even when doing basic tasks (email, browsing). 

Then, the fan just...stopped.  It doesn't push hard, anymore.  And the battery has improved.  It's still not good, it's actually down 4% points in ten minutes.

But, Apple agreed to send a replacement out ASAP.  It's just strange that it fixed (or improved, rather) itself on its own.  Still a lemon computer, though. 

wullewuu wrote:

 

The problem is, that I do not have Lion.

I bought it in the App Store, but now I can't download it, because Mountain Lion is installed..

Understood.  That's why I outlined your options in my reply.

That said, if you bought Lion at the Mac App store it sounds like you upgraded to Lion from an earlier OS, likely Leopard or Snow Leopard.  If that's the case, you can use your original installation disks (or the thumb drive that came with Snow Leopard) to get back to Lion.  Reinstall your original OS, download Lion (make a USB boot drive) and then upgrade to Lion.

For what it's worth in the great scheme of things, I have Battery Health installed and have noticed a discrepancy between what is reported there and what is reported in the menubar.

at the same time, here is the menubar screenshot.

Why should these be different? Which is "correct"?

I use Battery Health as well as Coconut Battery and although they can be off by a minute or two sometimes all three readings are usually very close if not duplicated.

If you're giving everything enough time to settle (60 seconds or so) and you're seeing variations like that, I agree, something's off.  Might be worth deleting and reinstalling Battery Health?

I just bought my wife an 11" macbook air (2012 model) and installed ML immediately, so I couldn't to a before and after comparison on battery life.  I then realized that she was only getting about 2.5 to 3 hours of battery life.  I tried to disable notifications and spotlight, but that didn't help much.  I decided to format the drive and downgrade to Lion.  With Lion she pretty much doubled the battery life to about 4.5 to 5 hours (as advertised by Apple).  I hope this issue is fixed soon because I like ML much better.

mhm.. the problem is, that my original Lion DVD is lent to a friend. In my opinion it is much to complicated, but okay. It seems to be the only way.

Does it make sense to go to a apple store? I think they will spend a new battery to my MacBookPro.. better then nothing. ****.

Is it illegal to download a Lion DVD from the Internet, when i have a original license?