Q: Battery life dropped considerably on Mountain Lion.

Beisarius wrote:

 

In macbooks, the GPU is synced with the CPU (Computer Processing Unit).

CPU = Central Processing Unit.

MiniBatteryLogger

Hey guys. I used to have the same battery problem and here is what "worked" for me.

After allsolutions like SMC/PRAM reset, .killdock, etc. were tried and uneffective, I wiped my 2010 MBP's drive clean and attempted a clean install of Mountain Lion. I waited a couple of days and saw I still had the same annoying problems with the battery drain and the over-heating. I was fed up with ML and then decided to downgrade all the way down to Snow Leopard.

Though at first SL's battery readings were all over the place (showing up to 12 hours of battery available, 6 hours the next minute and so on.) it was easy to feel how Snow Leopard didn't drain battery as fast as ML did and the heat problem was gone as well. Much to my surprise Coconut Battery even showed me my battery life had gone up to 89% after being nearly 80% with ML. I was having up to 7 hours of battery compared with ML's annoying 2.5 total of hours and after some weeks passed I decided to upgrade to Lion and even now, my battery is as good as it was before I installed ML.

I don't feel like going back to ML if it means having a useless, frying pan of a machine that requires to be plugged to the A/C all the time or a battery that will die in a short amount of time (That, as a college student, I don't have the money to pay for). I'm quite content with Lion and while ML was fun, the battery problem severly outweights things like notifications and Facebook integration.

Oh and, as a final side note, I manually imported all my stuff from an external harddrive. It's a hassle but I didn't want to compromise the effective life of my battery by mistakinlgy re-adding any sort of user preference that could have brought the battery problem to Lion.

tl:dr - Downgrading to SL and doing a clean install of it fixed the battery problem for me. So, from my point of view, it's definitely a software issue that comes with ML.

I am also having a major battery issue after upgrading to 10.8.2. Battery last only for just over 3 hours with only 2 pages opened on Safari, brightness wasn't the issue at all, I would only be able to get an extra 15 minutes, if I put it to 50%. I remembered I had about 6:30 hours on Lion which was very satisfying already for me. I really can't figure out what is causing the problem.

I've reformatted the computer, reset the SMC, PRAM, Calibrating battery but still doesn't help at all.

Hope that Apple can release 10.8.3 ASAP, I really do not want to send my computer all the way to Glasgow as it will be really inconvenient for me.

SMC reset seemed to do the trick for me.  Did it two days ago and the overheating and battery drain have disappeared.

Hi Gman for SMC reset is you just press/hold shift+ctrl+opt + power and then release is thats the way how it SMC works right??? mine i do it like 3x now but seems it doesn't help my machine =(

i was thinking of sending it to apple service center but then again i dont want to seprate from my mac its like can't live w/out it... **** its hard to decide... hope there's an alternative solution for this battery... =(

yea that's it (make sure it's turned off)

ah yes to turn off first i just forgot to include in here =D same procedure as what i did but for me no luck =( anyways thank you for your reply =)

Installed 10.8.2 earlier today, and my battery performance got even worst than before. Before ML, i used to get about 7hours battery life remaining after full charge. Then about 5 hours, though sometimes I saw it go higher than this, but with the battery draining fairly quickly. Now with 10.8.2, with a full charge, it's saying 3:59 mins to discharge after a full charge.

Did SMC reset, but no change. This is reaaaally terrible, and annoying. Only reason I purchased this guy was for the battery life, and 4 hours isn't enough for what I need during the day. Really frustrating having to lug around this big block charger all days.

asengskie wrote:

 

Hi Gman for SMC reset is you just press/hold shift+ctrl+opt + power and then release is thats the way how it SMC works right??? mine i do it like 3x now but seems it doesn't help my machine =(

 

i was thinking of sending it to apple service center but then again i dont want to seprate from my mac its like can't live w/out it... **** its hard to decide... hope there's an alternative solution for this battery... =(

Resetting the SMC is different for different models.  Be sure you're following the right instructions:

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3964

@sorcereur same situation with my MBP 13" late 2011 after 10.8.2. Could you share the SMC reset steps so I could try on my mac? thanks

SMC Reset - http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3964

Today, I upgraded my early 2011 15" hi-res pro to mountain lion again. I did not want to do a clean install (I did a clean Lion install 2 weeks ago) and frankly, it should make no difference upgrading or clean installing.

My battery health is around 90%, sometimes +1% sometimes -1%.

I immediately did the 10.8.2 combo update and for the moment all works relatively well, spotlight indexing has already stopped and 99% battery gave 5:25. Currently, 11 minutes later I have 95% and it shows 6:15. It did not show 6+ in the last month, at least not in the all-but-4-bars-brightness mode. It loses 1% every two to three minutes, which would give me somewhere between 200 and 300 minutes of work, which is only 4-5hrs tops. Not too much, but definately more than the 2-3hrs it did when I first upgraded a month ago.

I never had heating or fan troubles, it is silent now too.

(it just did 4 minutes before going to 94% showing 6:14)

I'm mildly optimistic, I can use it as a portable again, without needing to plug it in constantly. I hope it stays this way!

what is the 10.8.2 combo update for ML?

It updates the base version 10.8.0 immediately to 10.8.2, without going through the update to 10.8.1 in between.

It makes all changes from both 10.8.1 and 10.8.2 in one move.