Q: Battery life dropped considerably on Mountain Lion.

New articles on the issue.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2012/08/07/links-7-august-apples-mountai n-lion-battery-problems-edition/

http://arstechnica.com/apple/2012/08/tests-show-mountain-lion-may-indeed-degrade -battery-life/

Ok, I've done... a lot of awful things to my MBP over the past few days, but battery now SEEMS to be OK.

Here's what I did:

1. Clean install from a USB drive.

2. Run for a day or so to make sure battery's OK.

3. Give up on trying to set everything up the way I like it, create a temp user, nuke my user and Migration Assistant my old settings back.

Like I said, battery seems to be working normally... for now.

Thanks Adrienne1984 - good suggestions as I did this and did find permission problems with my GUI system files which looked promising. Fixed all those issues now and done your steps, but battery still draining. I have dropped from 100 to 92% in 15 mins and no CPU process is over 2-3%, also done SMC resets etc, turned off all notifications, only running mail and Chrome and less then 4 hours battery left with an SSD installed (should be north of 7 with SSD as it was in Lion). Good suggestion but did not fix my issue. The fact here is there is a ML problem that Apple need to fix. Something is burning CPU/memory that is not showing in the monitor.

Go into iTunes and look at your account purchases. Didpute the ML purchase and Apple will contact you. As for your money back as it does not function and you have removed the product.

Battery was running 4-5 hours, which was a little frustrating given the marketing. I had to get to that number by never using Chrome again since it uses so much battery.  Upgraded to Mountain Lion and it is considerably worse.  3-3:30 hours is about it.  How amazingly frustrating this is.  Anyone have anything?  I know we can wait for a patch, but I feel like reverting back, and I certainly am not going to upgrade to the Retina Mac with things so unsettled like this.

I'd hope with $100B cash they can fix a simple OS issue draining power. I do hope Apple acknowledges this as they seem to be going the way of other large companies and ignoring the fact its real. Lets hope they dont try and do another iPhone hack where they just change the counter vs fixing the drain issues. Come on Apple get your act together there are loads of people like us who helped you get that $100B in the bank - now please spend some keeping your loyal customers happy before you give them excuses to consider other options. Your competition is hotting up.

I didn't think to mention it at the time, because it seemed kind of stupid, but I always change a couple of basic settings when I first set up my laptop. I'm still running ML, and still no battery problems so maybe there's something to it:

In "Desktop/Screen Saver", I change the screensaver to "Flurry", and set it to run "Never".

In "Display", I set it to full brightness and turn off "Automatically Adjust Brightness". I dislike dim screens and I can adjust it myself, thank you.

In "Energy Saver" I set the display to sleep in 20 minutes and the HD to sleep in either 30 minutes or 60 minutes with power supply connected. I use the default settings for battery power.

Who knows? Mentioning this can't hurt...

Note to the community of this discussion started from "jpengland96":

Shortly after I posted my message to his comment I got a mail from Apple where they asked me to give support in data logging which I agreed to.

When they called we started logging various data of my MBP early '08 as well as my wife's MB late '09. During the logging session of approx. 75 min the MBP dropped down from 100% to 13% battery power storage whereas the MB dropped down from 95% to 28%. The activity monitor didn't show any special spikes but you can see how the battery power dropped down.

Apple is analyzing the data files together with lots of others they have logged and wants to come back with a solution asap.

From my point of view we should wait for a while and give these guys a chance for clarification.

When I look into this community discussion it shows that various MBs and MBPs with various programs and accessories are affected and in the background of the whole system something is running extremely busy which is not shown in the activity monitor.

Let's cross our fingers!

Message was edited by: ArWilhelm

Ran manual test for the last 26 hrs on MBPro retina 2.3. Dropbox off, keyboard light off, no Bluetooth, integrated video.  Here are results. Start time was 1am Tues morning, end time 2:40am Wed morning. Started at 100% battery and plugged in when display showed 14% remaining. My use is piecemeal as you see. Total use time 6.23 hrs or 6 hrs 14mins (chart below wrong).

...waiting for 10.8.1...

and fingers crossed!

I installed ML on my MBP early 2008 (NOT a clean install) and for a week it ran good, but when i changed the gatekeeper settings to "anywhere" my laptop loses 1% every 2 minutes. I'm using the my girlfriend's MacBook Air 2011 (ML NOT clean install) and her laptop is behaving good, she didn't changed the gatekeeper settings from the original status.

Switching back the gatekeeper to "Mac App Store" or "Mac App Store and indentified developers" doesn't reverse the battery problem
I hope this information could be useful for someone....

I upgraded to mountail Lion and now my battery life is about half of what it was before upgrading. Shouldn't the update improve battery life? Also, what can I do about this? how to fix it ?

I have the same issue. Tried even a clean install but hasnt solved my problem.

Using a 7 months old MBA 2011 13 128 and after ML clean install the batterylife has jumped up from Lion 6h to even over 7h with screen brightness a notch below half. This even with Skype on which used to be a battery hog with Lion. As some others have reported Chrome seems to be draining the battery a bit more. Currently having Safari, Word, Vidalia browser (TOR), Firefox, Skype, Google drive and Activity monitor on and the battery shows 96% and 7h17min.

Between the time I searched for this thread and finished this reply (2 minutes), my battery percentage dropped from 20% to 14%. Only Safari is open. I am angry.