Q: Battery life dropped considerably on Mountain Lion.

I have never used drop box on my machine...

i do not have dropbox installed

Radium777 wrote:

 

I didnt get the email - but i did get a phone call from Apple based on my original post on here. I guess they have al info based on my login to this forum.

 

They are collecting info from as many users as possible right now. The process took about 45 minutes - I had to download a data capture program and also email 3 files to the support person. I was instructed to upgrade dropbox or unistall it - which i did. I was told it was a commononality between many users. How many of you are using dropbox?

Not ideal. Did they tell you how long they expected it would be before you could use Dropbox again? Seems to me that we shouldn't have to uninstall an app which they are well aware many (if not most) people use daily. Dropbox had been around since before OS X Lion. Why the sudden incompatibility problems? It's not like Dropbox is new or unknown variable and plenty of people must have been using it during beta testing.

Anyway, I've updated it and rebooted. No change.

Uninstalled it and rebooted. No change.

Reinstalled it and rebooted. No change.

So, no. For me it's not Dropbox.

I did get the email, and the call, and did the diagnostic thing on Sunday afternoon.  (Posted earlier about this.)

I did mention that I had all up to date software, and was running Dropbox (installed it, but never used it, seems to be running though.)

Sunday eve I noted which applications were running and then checked every 15 to 30 minutes to see what battery-% remained.  Tomorroe I will make a test with Dropbox turned off, but all else as on Sunday, to see if Dropbox is involved.

Just to repeat, we have two MBA mid-2011 i7 units and both were mauled by Mountain Lion (like the features and the speed in Safari, but the battery situation is absolutely not acceptable.)

Rather than make a lot of work for myself, and doing the job that the Apple Engineers are paid to do, I'm going to leave my system as it is and just wait for Apple to push-out the repair update (and they better not take-away my Power Nap!!)

I'm using Dropbox, but I do NOT have the battery issues on my mid-2010 MBP with 1063+ cycles on my battery. I'm getting 6+ hours in Mountain Lion, much better than I was getting in Lion.

I am using the latest version of Dropbox, the one that was updated for Mountain Lion.

Regarding my post above...I uninstalled dropbox - but no change in battery performance. The tech told me either to update to the most recent version or uninstall dropbox. I never use it so I uninstalled it. Just passing on what we did over the phone. Maybe Apple wants everyone to use icloud? I dont know. Hopefully this all gets solved with everyones input. Im concerned about my battery however if its total cycle count will be lowered becasue of all of this?

Apart from Battary draining problem, I'm facing couple of more issues.

• After updating to Mountain Lion; I'm not able to use my wireless mouse. Getting error - Because a USB device was drawing too much power from your computer, one or more of your USB devices have been disabled. To prevent damaging your computer, the USB device drawing too much power has been disabled. Other devices may have also been disabled. When you disconnect the device drawing too much power, your other USB device will be enabled again.
• The other issue - The charging section of my Macbook Pro is getting to much hot.

FYI, I bought Macbook Pro 8 months back only.

Radium777 wrote:

 

Regarding my post above...I uninstalled dropbox - but no change in battery performance. The tech told me either to update to the most recent version or uninstall dropbox. I never use it so I uninstalled it. Just passing on what we did over the phone. Maybe Apple wants everyone to use icloud? I dont know. Hopefully this all gets solved with everyones input. Im concerned about my battery however if its total cycle count will be lowered becasue of all of this?

Since I read your post I've tried it a couple of times. Actually my last post may have been a little hasty. For the last hour or so I've been playing around with turning Dropbox on and off, uninstalling and reinstalling, having dropbox startup at login or not and have been monitoring the battery life. I began the process with a 100% charge. It seems that Dropbox running is lowering the battery time on average ~1.5hrs.

As to whether this is the entire solution to the problem, I don't know.

Even accounting for the difference Dropbox makes, there's still a shortfall. I fully understand that the battery time indicator is an approximation so I'm keeping everything at light browsing only to ensure a level playing field. Even so I'm only gaining back about half of what I've lost. Will run a full drain (100% - 3%) on the battery again with Dropbox disabled, fully charge overnight, then do a full drain again, this time with Dropbox enabled. It'll be interesting to see the results.

Good to know though that we could possibly be on the right track to finding a solution instead of a workaround though. Thanks for posting Radium777 - it finally feels like I'm getting somewhere.

I just updated to mountain lion, and I had the same issue with battery life.

I have a mid-2011 13" MBA which I could run off the battery for at least 6 hours without problem. After installing ML my battery life has been severely compromised. Yesterday I went from 100% to 74% in 35 minutes with only minimal internet browsing and no downloading or streaming. I called Apple and was instructed to take a few steps such as resetting the SMC, as well as PRAM and NVRAM after he determined that my Mac was configured fine and I didn't have any applications hogging memory in the background and so forth.

After testing it's apparent these solutions have yet to yield a positive result for my MBA. While I understand ML may use a little more juice than Lion, this is a major disappointment and frankly unacceptable. To think that installing this OS would cut my battery life in half is vexing to say the least. I wish I had kept Lion and passed on the new bells and whistles ML has to offer.

this is all very useful information, and we are all grateful for all of the tips. why is it that since snow leopard, battery life on macbook pro's have DRASTICALLY dropped. Resetting of PRAM, SMC, those tricks have been done a billion times yet there are still users out there that are severly affected, which obviously goes to show that apple has yet to solve the problem. there are many background apps running and eating up valuable battery life. every mac user buys these machines because they are simply phenomenal, but for the hefty price tag, apple is not taking care of any of its customers. i apologize for the long shpeil but i know there are others that also do agree.

absolutely behind on you on this one. What once was a great company that not only had good computers to match with undescribable software, is now turning into a company seeking profit SOLELY and to not pay any attention to the millions of customers.

I noticed this issue on my mid-2010 13" MacBook Pro as well. When I looked in Activity Monitor and found that Java was using 30% of my CPU. At 80%, my laptop reported that my total battery life left was 2 hours and 28 minutes. When I quit Java, the total time went up to 5 hours. Instead of dropping about 5%-7% every 10 minutes, it now seems to only drops 1%-3% every 10 minutes, depending on what I'm doing. I'm still checking it out, but for me, it appears to be related to Java.

This is honestly ridiculous, before i updated to mountain lion from lion my battery would last for 6-7 hours now its all the way down to 2 hours i can visibly see my battery dying and i have no applications open besides chrome. I’m using a MacBook pro mid 2010 13" 2.5 GHz Intel core 2 duo with 4gb memory. I’m just glad that I’m not the only one. while i was writting this post my battery went from 86% to 81%, they need to fix this issue!

I want to register my observation too. The moment i installed ML, my battery life began draining dramatically. One thing abt my Mac Book Pro that really impressed me was the battery back up.. Bt ML has taken that away. Now the battery drains really fast like any other normal laptop. Frustrating. The Apple very smartly has taken away the option to display 'remaining time' on battery power, on the top of the screen. This made me feel that Apple knew that ML will adversely effect the battery life.

Its time that Apple got the problem in order and came out with a patch. Else I have a good mind of going back to Lion. Battery is important for me. But it would be a nightmare coming true, if even on restoring to Lion, the battery power remains corrupted.