Q: Battery life dropped considerably on Mountain Lion.

I wish i never upgraded. Performace of my MBP early 09 decreased dramatically, it heats up and battery lasts about 3 hours compare to 6 hrs before that. I have tried killing processes, removed dropbox etc. and it remains at 3 hrs. I hope there is a fix soon for this... My only fault is that i did not do a backup before upgrading... ughh...

Thanks for all the feedback here.  I have not found a fix yet though. I have a brand new 15 Retina and have been getting just over two hours since day one with light use. I've been on the phone with Apple twice and into the store and tried every thing they have suggested.  At this point they have advised me to completely erase the drive and do a fresh install.  Seriously?  I've spent hours and hours on this issue as it is and for a computer that I need remotely I'm extremely dissapointed. After waiting a month for it to arrive in the first place this is unbelievable. A removable battery would answer the hardware question pretty quickly, too bad that's no longer an option.

Battery life considerably reduced after upgrading to MLion(OSX 10.8).

Details: Macbook pro 13 -  Ivy bridge 2.5Ghz. Just 2 months old.

Using only 3 tabbed web browsing. Tabs like gmail, facebook etc only. No other applications running other than finder.

Before updgrage:

showed more than 7 hours of battery life after full recharge with 50% brightness. Scrolling was smooth. Smooth animations while using mission control, app expose etc....

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After upgrade:

consistently showing 5 hours 20 minutes of battery life only. And drains much faster and needs recharge in 3-4 hours with 50% brightness and switched off keyboard light completely. Also noted the laptop is heating up more after the upgrade.

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- Monitored everything like Disk activity, CPU, memory etc. Nothing unusual.

- Tried to Switched off every ML features which would hav done this like "Notification Center". There is no way to do that. So took every applications off notification center. Scrolling is not smooth.. and animations while swiping fingers for mission control etc. are very rough.. The graphics of ML is not displaying it smoothly at all.

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All i want is to downgrade to Lion(10.7). Nothing more. It was working perfectly fine. smooth scrolling, smooth animations. better battery life.

Apple please let me downgrade to Lion. I don want ML.

Add me to the list...

I've got a late 2011 MBP, 17 inch.

I've disabled Notification Center, reset SMC & RAM, verified disk, corrected errors, etc.  Nothing seems to help.  I'm still losing about 1% every 2 minutes.

If the next update doesn't fix the problem, I'm going back to Lion.

Guy from California at Apple just called me. (I live in Brazil!)

Said they've seen my post and wish to help me. Yey!
He asked me a bunch of things about how I use my Mac and gave me instructions to send him some logs so engineers can work things out.

We spoke for 15 minutes. My battery dropped 14% whilst talking to Apple.

Lets hope they came out with something before my battery is severally permanently damaged.

I just purchased a brand new 13" macbook air with mountain lion, and the battery is lasting barely 4 hours. It also loses a significant percentage in sleep mode. My 13" 2011 pro that I had before this always lasted closer to 7, and I really only use it for web browsing. I called apple support to inqure about the battery and they told me that 4 hour battery life is normal for a macbook air and "what most users report"?!?! I asked him if they could be in any way related to mountain lion and he said no! Should I return this computer?? I never had any problems with my macbook pro, but I simply cannot use this new air with such unreliable battery life. I don't live near an apple store, so returning this thing is going to be a big hassle. Ugh.

how many days we will have to wait until apple fix this...20 usd for this crap?

if any have a plan to upload a website like www.batterydeadwithML.com just tell me...

what Jobs may say about all this?

Well, I'm having the same problem, but i thought it may be related to the wifi, because if i stop it, the battery lasts for at least 7 hours (using xcode and pdf reader), with wifi on it lasts for 5 hours (more or less). What it's realley curious is that it depends on the day. I've running ML in my macbook since July 27th. Solving this problem is really important, because one of the main reasons for buying a macbook pro was its long lasting battery.

I can also say that I've noticed that the battery life on my Mid 2010 Low End 15" MacBook Pro. And not just a little drop, a BIG drop. In the Summer I mostly use my MBP plugged in to the electricity. The battery drops a few percents slowly (around 5% in a week or more), now it drops 3% in two days.
But that's not where I noticed the big drop in performance. I started up my MBP around 20 minutes ago, it had 97% battery. Only thing I have open is Dropbox and Chrome with 6 tabs (no videos and no flash! just text pages!), and right now the battery is already at 85%...lol make that 84%! So I lost 13% battery in only 20 minutes. A lot worse than it was when I had Lion.

I hope Apple fixes this, if not I might just downgrade, the problem is I don't like Lion that much...btw 25 minutes now and down to 83% --'

Had had a call from an Apple collaborator earlier today regarding this issue. Apple seem to work pretty hard to find a solution as soon as possible, They put a lot of effort in gathering information from users reporting the battery life problem. Thank you Larry, from Apple, for calling today and taking the time to check my config.

Waiting for a fix I'm quite confident, that Apple will find a solution soon...

I've tried everything from erase/install, reset SMC and PRAM, checked Console and Activity Monitor: all normal usage.  Mine's a brand new 15" with 256 Apple SSD but it's not Retina, just high res.  My battery is falling the most when the computer is asleep.  This am before I left for work it was at 44%.  I returned from work 9 hours later and it's at 23%.  It was asleep: computer was cool to the touch and no applications were left running when I left except, of course, Finder.  That's where the bulk of my problem is-sleep drains power quickly.  Power Nap is unavailable for my model (despite being a 15" 2012 Macbook Pro with Apple SSD).   When using it, brightness is at 50% and I usually run Safari (no video watching) and maybe TextEdit.  Battery life:  no where near 7 hours.  I hope they are working on this.

Well, it just gets worse here, after all the procedures SMC, reset PRAM etc etc delete desktop plist still the same only now with no use and on charge for two days will not go above 99% and shows only 4.20 min left and this morning opened up the Air unplugged the charger and in less than ten minutes with no activity other than to take everything out of notifications it's dropped 4% already.

It would seem Stve Jobs departure has had a dramatic eefect on the quality of Apple service and product and I certainly hope this gets rectified before to long because they wont stay profitable and poular if they allow this type of problem to persist. Very Very dissapointing like the last time he left and Apple nearly went down the pit until his return to save the company abd bring some innnovation back.

Unfortunately for all of us this time Steve will not be returning,

NEW TRICK!

Installed Snow Leo, put all my apps back, delete Lion patition...guess what? Everything is smooth and cool, batery is back, no more cooking eggs on my mac (low temps).

I duplicated most of the iCloud sync stuff (using dropbox and variou hacks).

So yeah I dont have the latest candys(with bitter filling) but my laptop feels snappy and great.

Oh, I write this after 2 months of heavy load (my MBP is the primary and only pc I have).

Same boat as everyone else, Massive battery drop after mountaion lion I would say almost 50%. Ive got a MBP and a MBA, Both with Mountain Lion, both with crap battery life. This is the Wifi saga all over again, This wont get fixed anytime soon. fml

I just moved back to Lion. Works better than ML. I think we should give apple some time to investigate and figure out what is going on. I got a few friends, some of them having problem same problem. Over heating, dropped batter life and some of them actually got performance improved. It looks like there is a variable factor which is causing the trouble. For OS development, things like these takes time to figure out. I am sure once they figure out, rolling out a quick patch would not be a problem.

We all deserve good support from Apple, but let's give them a chance

Goni