Q: Battery life dropped considerably on Mountain Lion.

That's riduculous! No 77 cylces for almost a 3 year old Macbook Pro. I baby this machine! I use no keyboard backlight, have the display on 1 bar!, Turn off wifi, and buetooth, rarely use the superdrive and stil get crappy battery life. I should never upgraded to Lion then Mountain Lion! I had excellent battery life up until I upgraded for what? I am so disappointed it's not funny!! I have AppleCare and Best Buy BTPP and I want an answer before those warranties run out now! I should have never ever upgraded from Snow Leopard! Whats with Apple not allowing an SMC downgrade for older Macbook Pro's to go back to Snow Leopard so I can have my battery life back!

Jasen,

Unfortunately, you do not baby your machine, in particular, your battery. It has not been operated as designed (cycled) and essentially damaged by being kept plugged in as per your own admission, 77 cycles in 3 years or 25 per year. You may refer to post pp 159-160 ref cycles (and I added a few shots). Off the bat your battery should have been damaged by the parasitic power usage you exposed it, and should not have performed on any machine, with or without ML.

You are welcome to consult sites such as batteryuniversity or Apple geniuses, Apple technical support, they will confirm exactly what i mentioned. Should they decide to replace your battery, I would consider it an extremely generous offer by Apple, and unfair towards others that have been using their machines as designed but have real issues.

Were you to unplug your battery and actually use it, you should notice a rapid health decline within 10 cycles, as well as a incresingly faster discharge times. Your out of spec usage is the primary culprit, and this can be recreated on any macbook whether 2009, 2012 SL L or ML, or even an iPhone should you leave it plugged as such.

Thank you and even did try what you suggested on this thread. I have noticed that the battery times do vary wildly and know that these batteries have smart chips in them too! I unplug the machine and the battery times vary wildly from after being calculated from 7 hours to 4 hours. I am sure I am not the only person to see this too!

Im a bit confused here, what is the best way to charge your macbook for the best health? Wait till it goes to 0% and do a full charge? Keep it in the charger even after the magsafe goes green?

Thanks

My battery life isn't too bad but I would like to keep the battery in good conditions. My estimates usually varry greatly. For example at 95% it could be saying 12 hours of battery life, or 5 hours. MBPR

+1 to you shadow.. me too i really don't know if when or if its ok just to leave it in charge all the time =(

so what i did is when i saw my battery gets red i charge then when its in 100% i unplugged the charger.. but i dont know if this is the right thing to do... =(

and now it really bothers me after i saw the battery of 77 cycles for almost 3yrs.. i have this question why my battery cycles goes 98 for only 16 weeks... /sigh =(

apple please help us.. do some update that can fix our battery... =(

Chris can get more in-depth on the subject, but here are Apple's "official" recommendations with respect to MacBook battery use:

http://www.apple.com/batteries/notebooks.html

I think this is what you're looking for:

Standard Maintenance

 

For proper maintenance of a lithium-based battery, it’s important to keep the electrons in it moving occasionally. Apple does not recommend leaving your portable plugged in all the time. An ideal use would be a commuter who uses her notebook on the train, then plugs it in at the office to charge. This keeps the battery juices flowing. If on the other hand, you use a desktop computer at work, and save a notebook for infrequent travel, Apple recommends charging and discharging its battery at least once per month.

Here's another guide...a little dated, but still pretty accurate.

Apple Notebook Battery FAQ

Belisarius say's I damaged my battery by not using it off the charger but battery universe says that cycling the battery reduces battery life. This still doe not explain why every time I have the OS calculate the battery after full discharge and full charge cyles it varys wildly. This has been tried on Snow Leopard, Lion and Mountain Lion as well. Heck even when using right now the battery life remaining keps fluctuating without losing battery life.

asengskie wrote:

 

+1 to you shadow.. me too i really don't know if when or if its ok just to leave it in charge all the time =(

 

so what i did is when i saw my battery gets red i charge then when its in 100% i unplugged the charger.. but i dont know if this is the right thing to do... =(

 

and now it really bothers me after i saw the battery of 77 cycles for almost 3yrs.. i have this question why my battery cycles goes 98 for only 16 weeks... /sigh =(

 

apple please help us.. do some update that can fix our battery... =(

I'm at 30 cycles and I got mine August 29th.. It really depends on how often you use it. For example, I use mine daily. In 16 weeks, I will probably be seeing the same cycle count as you.

ah ok thanks shadow... yes i always use mine and i really need to charge it because it dies so fast.. =(

Should have not used 'cycled' in my eariler post, but rather 'rapid charged' to separate actual cycling (which could mean 1000 to 0 and 100) from regular usage (80 to 10 is also a cycle). Yes, cycling reduces battery life, ie battery fully charged at 100% (including extra hours for topping) and then followed by a full discharge to 0 (and letting it be, in a macbook, several hours). So important not to be confused by what cycling is in the battery world. In our practical world, Green does not mean 100% in an Apple battery (and there are articles explaining why Apple does it this way), and 0 is neither 0 percent. Apple also recommends charging and discharging once a months- for what will amount to calibration. What battery university and Apple they say is that any other time you must rapid charge your battery. Use'n Plug - below a level plug - 1020 or 30% (or if under load). let it go up to 70 80 90 or green light (remember that is not actually battery 100%- just indicated on your macbook), then immediately unplug and use. Best comapraison is iPhones- which we always rapid charge as we never want them even 5-10% as then we run the risk of not having enough juice for a call. Nor do we leave them plugged -maybe at night only. Accidentally, iPhone usage habits force a correct charge approach to a battery.

Battery university explains rapid charging, as well why not to actually lkeep bringing a Li-Ion battery down to 0 all the time. And they also compare, ni-cad is different than Li Ion and so on.

But lets not confuse issues. Some people no doubt have or will develop a problem battery. But this forum focuses ona  different problem altogether, even though symptoms may be identical (rapid failing health and fast drain).

Well, so much for "clean install of ML will fix the battery life". I thought it was going to be bettery, but sitting here, watching the battery tick down is saying otherwise. I woke it up this morning at 6:57am at 77%, and have done nothing else but use Safari (whoa, all that Mountain Lion processing going on there...) and now at 7:17am.... 15 minutes... it's down to 70%. 7% in 15 minutes.  Yup. So glad a spent an evening doing the clean install... Guess I'll have to keep my power cord close to me at all times... and hope there's a plug around.

jt519 wrote:

 

Well, so much for "clean install of ML will fix the battery life". I thought it was going to be bettery, but sitting here, watching the battery tick down is saying otherwise. I woke it up this morning at 6:57am at 77%, and have done nothing else but use Safari (whoa, all that Mountain Lion processing going on there...) and now at 7:17am.... 15 minutes... it's down to 70%. 7% in 15 minutes.  Yup. So glad a spent an evening doing the clean install... Guess I'll have to keep my power cord close to me at all times... and hope there's a plug around.

Sounds like you're pretty savvy with these things, but a couple of things to keep in mind...since it's a brand new install Spotlight will be indexing for a while and it uses a LOT of CPU/power (check in Activity Monitor).  So that will account for a good deal of drain initially.

If it still feels wonky you might try resetting the SMC, but you shouldn't need to.

In my case I found that after about two to three cycles of charging things leveled out and ended up getting better each time.  So give it a little bit to settle in and see how it goes. 

Best of luck!

I suppose it could be Spotlight, but I don't see the little indicator dot in the icon, nor do I hear the drive chattering away. I've done several SMC resets, but haven't since I've reloaded. I am going to do a couple drain / recharge cycles to see if it helps. As I mentioned, when it was first reloaded and charged, it was showing over 6 hours of battery life, more than I remember seeing. It was keeping in th 5 hours range for a while, but this morning when it dropped into the 70's, it just dropped...

I suppose it could be Spotlight, but I don't see the little indicator dot in the icon...   I noticed the absence of the dot while three partitions on my external disk were indexed today.  The "mdworker" process in Activity Monitor gives you the clue.  I'd suggest any connected disks/partitions are excluded from Spotlight in it's preferences, or you just leave it to finish the job, maybe overnight, and connected to the mains.

So after upgrading to Mountain Lion (ML) my battery life decreased, I updated to 10.8.2 and after doing a PRAM and SMC reset my battery life has gotten much better.

However, a new issue has presented itself, that I think has been around since upgrading to ML.  The problem is when my laptop is completely turned off, not in sleep mode, and not plugged into a power source, it is eating juice at a very rapid pace.  If I charge it up to 100% in the evening, unplug it before I go to bed, approx 18-20 hours later, I lose anywhere between 5-8% battery life while it's off!  I understand it's normal to lose some juice while off, but 5-8% in less than 20hrs is ridiculous.

Anyone else experiencing issues like this?