Q: Battery life dropped considerably on Mountain Lion.

Hey ellbow,

You have one year warranty but it is important to proceed accordingly. Open a case with Apple, get to a Sr advisor. Let them do their data capture or whatever steps they recommend. And if the problem persists, have your unit replaced. Even with an i-7 you should be getting 6-7 hours of wifi surfing. I get 7-8 hours with a 2.4 MHz wifi Logitech mouse.

Another step is going through the store, and they can do a full overnight test and clean ML install for you. Again, if not solved, they will be able to attest that you loose power fast. That case remains associated with your macbook.  I assume they will first try a new battery, if it works, great, if not, new logicboard.

You may want to check the reviews of the Acer S5 ultrabook, the battery claims do not match manufacturer claims, and is inferior to MBA/MBP. Your call but going to windows may not guarentee you a better experience- provided this issue is fixed for you.

i have machine MBP 13 i7 2012, have same problem, lion 7-8hr after install ML 4.30 hr only. i think u right the ML not for macbook pro/air . just suitable for imac/mac only. sad this happen to my first apple product. maybe back lion after this.

thank you fo your advise

youre welcome ellbow,

go ask friends who upgraded a 2012 to ML, how is their battery life. Ask as well geniuses or check macforums. You will find the number of people having issues extremely small, and many of them are on this forum.

To draw a conclusion you must rule out alternative hypotheses or scenarios. So unless you tried solving this issue, gone through an Apple store, have the battery replaced or logicboard, it makes no sense blaming ML even if you noticed the problem after an upgrade. Let's say they replace your logicboard, an identical configuration, but are back to 7-8 hours with ML. I bet when you see that 7-8 hr reading again, you would no longer blame ML.

Beisarius wrote:

Time is precious. If you love fiddling with OS and hardware as I do, keep at it. If you just want a working MBP, have it replaced.

greghei1 sez:

It's all well and good to say "have it replaced," but for many of us facing this problem, it's not proving to be so simple. 

I've spent more than a dozen hours running diagnostics (and watching those diagnostics temporarily break my machine by consuming >100GB of SDD space), talking to and emailing advisors, working with a genius at an Apple Store, etc.  I'm still having the problem and don't yet have a replacement.  It may come, but I don't have it yet, despite more than a month of working with Apple on the issue. 

I can't *force* them to give me a replacement (absent steps that I'm completely uninterested in taking) - they have to offer it to me, and they have not yet done so.  I'd rather not have to replace it, I'd rather just have it fixed (as I'm sure others feel).

Re: "Lemons" - I don't believe it's appropriate to call the hardware a lemon, because the hardware worked well before and this is the point that others have made.  If you want to use the "lemon" label, it's more appropriate to apply it to the OS or firmware update (we don't yet know which). 

My mid-2011 MBA's battery worked spectacularly well until I updated the firmware and the OS.  It regularly lasted for an entire transcontinental or extended international flight.  Immediately after updating, its performance was dramatically impaired.  Many people posting here have reported similarly (please note that I'm not trying to argue any specific number here). 

It is highly unlikely that all of the people here would coincidentally have an effectively simultaneous hardware failure at the time of the OS/firmware updates unrelated to such updates, so the most likely answer to the question of what is causing the battery problems is that there is something wrong with the OS/firmware as they operate on these affected laptops.  I'm sure you're familiar with Occam's Razor. 

I assume that we can agree that an OS/firmware update should be developed in such a way that it will not itself impair the battery life of a laptop on which it is loaded.  If it does, such an update is the problem and thus the "lemon," not the laptop.  It may in fact be the case that the update has somehow unrecoverably broken the hardware and the hardware has to be replaced, but the update is the cause, not the hardware itself.

The lemon discussion is a side debate of semantics, but the issue of replacement is not.  You have been fortunate to have your hardware replaced.  I have not yet.  Nobody here should be dismissive of the problem that users are facing by saying "just replace it."  It's not so simple.

greghei1

iamkangyoon wrote:

 

I've been following this thread since it's inception and finally decided to downgrade to Lion... I can honestly say that my battery life HAS gone up.. but I'm only getting around 3.5-4 hours on my MBA mid-2011, which is about 1 hour or so less than I got before I upgraded to ML. Strangely enough, according to coconut battery my MBA is actually using about the same power usage as it was on ML. I just wish I could get a refund on ML... I'll be following this thread to see when it's actually safe to upgrade.

I did the same thing, downgraded to Lion on my MacBook Air and am experiencing exactly the same battery life situation. We'll see if it's resolved with 10.8.2 which is due out soon.

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Beisarius wrote:

 

youre welcome ellbow,

 

To draw a conclusion you must rule out alternative hypotheses or scenarios.

Actually, no you don't. 

It's entirely reasonable to choose the hypothesis that requires the fewest assumptions. 

There are X users whose batteries worked well before they updated the OS/firmware that stopped working as well immediately after the update.  Given that they changed nothing else, it would require far more assumptions to analyse the situation and draw the conclusion that something other than the update is the cause of the battery problem.

I would drop the issue entirely as an increasingly annoying semantic debate, but for the fact that you keep suggesting to new posters here that there are no problems with ML as though this was some fact that you possess and are sharing with them.  Unless you're an Apple engineer involved in the evaluation of the problems, you have no knowledge of whether there are issues with ML/firmware causing battery issues.  Please stop telling people that there are none.  You don't know.  You may be right (I doubt it, based upon my circumstances and conversations with Apple, but it's possible), but you don't *know* you are right.  This is so important that I'm going to shout it:  YOU HAVE NO *FACTS* THAT PROVE AN ASSERTION THAT ML DOES NOT AND CANNOT CAUSE ISSUES FOR BATTERY LIFE. 

To say otherwise is misleading at best, and people coming here looking for advice on battery life issues need to understand that.

greghei1

edited to say that I have no idea why there are redaction marks, because there was no word actually redacted, and I certainly didn't say anything "nasty"

ScratchSF wrote:

 

Good question.  My conclusion is based on the observation that the last firmware update for most of the MBP line was last November (based on the dates given by the links to each of the firmware updates).  So, my conclusion of "most people" is based on that observation alone - that the firmware has been out there since November  <snip>

SMC 1.6 (included with ML for most MacBook models) introduced Power Nap.  The latest SMC was installed on everyone's MacBook that has the Power Nap feature.  Any MacBook that has the Power Nap feature has had an SMC update in the case of SMC 1.6 or had Power Nap enabled in SMC 1.5 by Mountain Lion.  This is the only common denominator for this battery issue IMHO.

Apple has an additional SMC download page for the SMC update that includes Power Nap as well (dated July 27, 2012). 

"Additional Information

When Power Nap is enabled, you (sic) computer may be warm to the touch even if it is sleeping. Power Nap operations will be suspended if your computer exceeds a predefined temperature; your computer will not overheat when using PowerNap."

So bottom line, SMC has certainly been updated for MacBooks since November 2011.   It also looks like there is a problem with Power Nap/SMC that Apple is trying to resolve with 10.8.2.  Will this fix the issues we're dealing with?  Only time will tell.

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Everyone...ignore this post...it's my response to Chris

Beisarius - Chris...with all due respect, you come off as a "Fanboy". My 11% loss occurred overnight at 6 hours...not 5 days on a brand new Macbook received on 9/7 ???  Learn to read posts before you continue to interject comments.

This is my first experience with a Mac and what I gather from others is that they've assumed that Apple would take care of them in these times of need and they've been left high and dry.   I know I've been treated poorly by the "Genius" at the Apple Store who probably has a mother that was in grammar school when I first started computing.. 

So Chris - you can throw out whatever data you want on this thread.  It helps no one person.  Most people on this thread really are looking for some answers from Apple - not Beisarius.

THESE PROBLEMS ARE NOT DUE TO LEMONS!

Chris - start your own thread with your own stats about lemons and leave this one alone.  I'm living proof that it is a problem with all Macbooks old/new and it has something to do with Mountain Lion.  I'll receive my 6th computer replacement(2 users) since Mountain Lion was released .  You'll not convince me that Apple doesn't problem!

Barry

....and feel free to contact me anytime but I've grown tired of this thread so I'm checking out!

This is obviously a complex subject, with several factors involved.  SMC and PowerNap are among the usual suspects, but the "ubd" process was causing very high CPU loads and temperatures on my 2009 MBP (in my case during Numbers editing with iCloud).  This is the Ubiquity process used for iCloud syncing.  It might account for the battery drain during supposedly idle periods and the continuing problem even after reverting to Lion.

That's interesting.  If you've enabled iCloud's "Documents and Data" it would seem likely that running spread sheets could easily eat up the battery since it's not only crunching numbers but using WiFi/broadband for the required continual back-and-forth communications. 

I have that turned off on my MBA because I don't really have a need to access my documents on other computers or need them to appear on all of my other Macs .  Have you tried turning it off for a bit to see how it goes? 

In any case, thanks for bringing that up...turning this feature off is a good idea/test for anyone else in the same boat. 

Best of luck!

Hi richsadams,  My comment was more specific to MBPs, not MBAs, the latter of which I do not own.  In the case of the MBAs, you are correct, there is a newer firmware push.  But on the MBP, with the exception of the new rMBP, it looks like the last firmware version is from November 2011.  Since that version was previously pushed out and running on machines with Lion, the fact that we're seeing different behaviors with ML suggests either a 1) ML coding issue, 2) ML configuration (file(s) or setting(s)) issue, or 3) an issue with ML interacting with a component of the firmware that Lion did not interact with.  I don't think it is the latter because some people have had success with a clean ML install; which actually suggests #2 as the problem.  Can't rule out completely 1 and 3, but if I were forced to place a bet, I'd put my money on 2.

The other thing could be associated with iCloud, because I found my battery life improved a lot once I turned it off.  Although I recognize that others have have not had the same experience.  In my case, I had the problem on an early 2011 MBP, whereby I was losing 1% every 2 minutes or so.  I did several things that have helped, which I'll summerize so that people don't have to go back through 134 pages to find it.

1. Turned off iCould.  (I'm not using it anyway).
2. Reset SMC  (After doing the reset, I did a full battery discharge/charge cycle)
3. Reset PRAM
4. Performed to "Dock" fix (have now set my own background again)
5. Upgraded to 10.8.1

I'm not going to suggest that these steps will work for everyone, but it did help with my machine and perhaps it will help others.  I hope that 10.8.2 fixes the underlying problem, what ever it happens (or they happen) to be.  Since I'm not an Apple engineer, although in a previous lives I was a software engineer and a firmware engineer, I'm going to bow out of the thread and let Apple do their thing.  Will probably return with 10.8.2 comes out to report on any changes. 

Good luck all!

Its a Brand New 2012 13" MBA. Before updating The first time to ML i got about 9h of battery with 10.7.4

I bought my MBP yesterday and am really disappointed with the battery life problems. I updated to 10.8.1 and the drainage isn't as bad as it probably was when Mountain Lion first came out (I got 5 hours of usage) but it's still significantly lower than it should be. I really hope a new fix comes out soon.

greghei, your behavior is classic that of a narcissist. Step in and seek to impose your view, but when disagreeing, you engaged in beliteling and berrating personal attacks. I bet that to that one adds a, tendency to outrighteousness and flip if feeling own image threatened. Lack of empathy to understand my argument further proves the bahavior. Arguing is one thing- as is disagreeing. Attacking is a psychological dimension, and am not as meagre as you may assume. Am so good at spottign this you make me laugh.

Another behavioral clue is jumping on a thread between two other people and using that 'you' the same way, in conversations... What am saying will not be understood, as you cannot possibly do so. Calling people 'pigs' and other things tells me as much about your interraction, 'me vs the world' interpersonal conflicts and goes as far as to tell me a lot more about yourself than you imagine..

You are wrong (and accept it) There are no numbers out there to prove there is a problem with ML. Burden of proof is on you. A forum is no proof no more that the forum on defective trackpads IS NO PROOF that Apple ships defective hardware just because I got one.

Lion worked for you.. Really? How about the forum on people that had problem with Lion as update and install...? Were you ever confvinced there was a battery problem or issue with Lion as that forum thought?NO As your battery worked, as you wrote, 'spectacularly.' For that 200 page forum, Lion did not.. Was Lion bad? No, never heard you say it once. But those affected users, many WERE CONVINCED that Lion was bad. A fix never came BTW. you are seeking to dominate and dictate your view that the update is inherently flawed. OR the vast majority of users out there, as much as yourself previousl with Lion, we have no problem with ML on new machines. You cannot convicne us that 2011 or 2012 macbooks are affected by a ML problem. tested, evaluated, failed to find any numbers.

Does anyone here have proof that ML is bad and affects macbooks? Proof meaning, LARGE % numbers (10-20%), statistics, circles of affected people, so on... Initially thought so then realized the more I looked, I could not find it. Can't find affected people. I know they exist, but not being able to find them tells me how small this issue is.

Can you prove ML is defectice?if you can, youre about to become a millionaire BTW , as yu can go at court.. Without that, invariable conclusion, is that ML and 99% of machines out there have no issues - or 98, 97, 96, does it matter? so on- therefore ML WORKS, it is not the culprit but those 3% of machines. Asking me to prove there is no problem (which, invariably, requires proof to begin), is illogical. Philosophy and logical argumentation 101, litterally.

It's like asking me to prove that 99.999 percent of people do not have flesh eating disease, just because some lose legs. Umm, how about we look for how many end up in hospitals worldwide? Voyons... Witht his problems, owners will end up rapidly with the Service Battery charge, as we all know.. So this problem leaves tangible traces, hence, in my view, it being  easy to size up.

Your opinions (which are not arguments BTW as they fail the logic test) would never hold even in a court of law. Can't walk in front of a judge and prove Apple in error.. No facts not argument. Au contraire: Apple can pull its technical records, etc, and prove with volume of sales and technical calls that they have no at fault problem. the judge will rule you likely got a lemon and that's it.

But should Apple come back and admit it shipped a defective OS, return and say they will cover an universal fix, so on, i will come back here, bow in front of you, apologize, kiss your feet and remain prostate in front of you. Umm, I would also send you a locally shippe dbottle of Red French wine.However, I have a feeling this fix is not forthcoming from Apple. Apple will further add that they value customer service and attempt to resolve each client's problem on a case by case.

yes, I do not doubt Cuppertino is studying this, but for a different reason. Those minds are picked top of their class at MIT, and are driven to improve product quality even for 1/1000 defective machines. They think like that. No doubt they are seeking indeed a common denominator, see if something can be fixed further on the production line. A faulty part? supplier? Spec... But I do not believe that they are working on a firmware fix for a brand new rMBP that delivers 2 hrs instead of 7. No way, they could not even roll it out as most users do not require it.

you are also fear mongering and creating insecurity (typical) amongst new macbook users whom have easy at hand solutions. Attempting to convince a brand new owner that a software fix is coming is BS and against Apple practices. Au contraire, like my MBA, they expect the owner to contact Apple or go at a store, have the unit looked at immediately and, more often then not, they will replace it. If a person with a brand new unit and a disastruous 2 hr battery life can do that, i would never imagine holding them back with wishful thinking that maybe a firmware will fix it. How about Apple replaces it and they move on with their productivity. this is all about empathy and care, anyway.