Q: Battery life dropped considerably on Mountain Lion.

on my macbook air, battery life used to fluctuate by 4-5 hours. sometimes it went to 11 hours if i left it idle. But now this rarely happens. It stays stable on 5-6hours of battery life. IDK if on lion it was meant to go to 10hours.

Allow your macs to get settled with MountainL.

I have a new macbook I ordered last week that has shipped and will be arriving in 2 days.  It supposedly shipped with Mountain Lion installed.  Has this issue affected anyone with a new Macbook with Mountain Lion pre-installed, or just ones that have been upgraded? 

Vince7079 wrote:

 

on my macbook air, battery life used to fluctuate by 4-5 hours. sometimes it went to 11 hours if i left it idle. But now this rarely happens. It stays stable on 5-6hours of battery life. IDK if on lion it was meant to go to 10hours.

Allow your macs to get settled with MountainL.

Mine has settled. I've been using ML for more than a month with the same issues. Once with an install on top of the old OS using the GM and twice using a clean install with a USB made from the app store retail edition.

The battery time is an approximation. What it's really saying is 'you have X amount of battery time left if everything stays the same at this precise moment in time'. When it said 11 or 10 hours as soon as you opened Safari or Mail it dropped back down to 7 or 8 hours right?

I have a new MacBookPro HiRes (Not rMBP) and did a clean install from Lion to Mountain Lion and have not seen the problem people are having in this thread.

I really wonder why!

If we knew, I guess that could help as well solving this dreadful issue.

Hoping, it may get resolved soon for all affected

Well, I've found the source of the battery drain porblem on my rBMPro.

I mentioned in a previous post in this thread that I had seen a bash script in Activity Monitor that was using up a consistent 12% of CPU. It took me a while to figure out how to analyze that, but here is what I found:

* The script file was /usr/bin/stkLaunchAgent.sh

* Looking at the comments at the head of that file, I saw references to "Send to Kindle".

* A Google search revealed how to remove launch agent references.  (Delete the appropriate plist file in /Library/LaunchAgents or ~/Library/LaunchAgents)

Deleting the launch agent for Send to Kindle has eliminated overheating, excessive CPU usage, and my battery now behaves normally. A one-hour session with the laptop resulted in about a 20% drop in battery level. Previously, I would have gotten at least a 50% drop in one hour.

That is an obwcure enough launch agent; I don't imagine everyone in this thread (and others) is using that one. But I suspect it's possible that if this launch agent could create trouble, there are other launch agents that are also incompatible with something in ML. Might be worth a look to see what launch agents are running (as well as Login Items).

This particular process name was simple "bash". I had to click the Information icon in Activity Monitor, and then click on "Open files and ports" to find the source file name for the script. Note that it had a .sh extension, but all scripts might not have that.

Hi,

i got the same problems with my MBP 13 "2011". The temperature is high and the battery life is not the same like on Lion.

The tipp with the Mailsynchronisation was good. The book cooled a littlebit down.

The next thing: i saw that the kernel_task works all the time with a high cpu-usage and a lot of memory usage.

Okay, after rebooting to the rescue system (CMD+R at startup) then doing nothing there but rebooting again and turning off the check for sources from which software may run (dont know the english term at the moment... it's under Security -> Allow programs from the following sources (or similar) -> Check "No restrictions"), the problem vanished!

Battery life is up to 5 hours again (not fully charged), DVD Player is working, I can install python again (at least that can surely be attributed to the security settings )... Maybe others can confirm this?

Do you mean that you changed this setting:

...to "Anywhere" and that your battery life is back to normal?

Clinton

I cannot tell whether it was from changing this setting or simply rebooting, but these two things are the only things I changed. So... Yes.

I may well do this also and ask Apple for a refund on ML as it is not fit for purpose.

Any good tips for going back to Lion as I have quite a lot installed to go reinstalling everything again.

Has anybody asked for a refund of ML and had experience with Apple on this? if not Im about to.

At the moment, I have a process called diskarbitrationd, which is using 100% CPU. Anyone know what this process does?

Old posts, but maybe they're worth something:

https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/Darwin/Reference/ManPages /man8/diskarbitrationd.8.html

http://hintsforums.macworld.com/showthread.php?t=105944

It's just used for managing disks - Firewire, USB, etc. It's always running - mine is using 0.0% of processor % and I have three Firewire disks and one USB stick mounted just now. You should be able to quit the process without any problems. It will likely restart but it really shouldn't take up any CPU overhead.

Clinton

Same issue with everyone else. I have a Macbook Pro 13" late 2011. Had about 7 hours of battery life before upgrading from Lion, now with Mountain Lion, the most I can get is about 5 hours.

I have a MacBook Air, 13", Mid 2011. With Mountain Lion the battery life is 2-3 times shorter than with 10.7 while using it the very same way as before. I did a direct update from 10.7 to 10.8. Hoping for a fix from Apple.