Q: Battery life dropped considerably on Mountain Lion.

Hi every body,

I have the same problem as many of you : The Battery - With my basic MBRetina.

• BEFORE ML : When i bought it, full charge, just watching newspaper and writing on Word2011 on the same window, more or less 7h30 to 9 hours.
• AFTER ML : Since Moutain Lion, i can use it only during 3-4hours (maybe 5hours exceptionnaly, but not more impossible) even i'm using the same app (watching newspaper and writing on word2011).

I hope this will be fix during the next month ! Let Apple and all the engineers, find the right solution and not the fast one.

I invit Apple to be more transparent, clear, with this more or less important problem.

Same problem here. Battery life time is more then 50% shorter than before.

Also my CPU temperature is always between 70 and 90 degrees - before ML it was 45 to 55degrees ... something is working in the background. As a result of that the fan is working (and making noise) all the time.

For testing purpose: i idle's exactly 72sec's - in that time battery dropped from 85% to 84%- by doing exactly nothing. CPU temperature was between 72 and 75 degrees - when typing that text, CPU temp raised to 80 degrees.

Stefan

After upgrading to Mountain Lion, it seems to take four times as long to charge, and twice as fast to discharge.

I'm attaching a couple of screenshots below. Things might not be consistently as bad as the case was when I took these screenshots, but after installing ML, my MBP's battery has never lasted even 4 hours.

While connected to the adapter, it shows that it needs 1.5 hours to charge 9%.

While on battery, it shows that it needs 2 hours to discharge 91%!

I hope this is addressed in the next update.

Good one.. n i hope the update comes out sooner than soon..

I called support last night and spoke to about three different people. They pretty much acted like there wasn't an issue that they were aware of, and proceded to troubleshoot third party applications. Afterwards, they finally admitted it seemed like an OS issue and had me create a new user (test) account to see if that fixed it; it did not. Did the SMC / PRAM reset, did not work. Booted into safe mode and used that for about an hour (what an awful experience safe mode is on the retina); it did not fix anything.

I've been a PC tech for 15 years and this is my first personal Mac (though I've supported / repaired plenty of Macs in the past). I figured I'd go all-out and buy the Rolls Royce of Macs, only to have buyers remorse with this Geo Metro computer. How they did not catch this incredibly apparent issue on their brand-new Retina models is so beyond me.

Today is my last day to either return it to a store (after waiting three weeks for its arrival), or try to revert to Lion.

Curses actually Id agree with your other point - the charging time is much much longer.....

I drained my battery completely and have been charging for 3 hours and its just hit 80% - used to charge much faster than this before.

I am having the same problem with my battery. I upgraded my OS to Mountain Lion and have experienced a huge reduction in battery life. I am running on a 13" early 2011 Macbook Pro. I unplugged the computer last night to watch a 20 minute episode of a TV show and in the past, it would only drain my battery  to 95%. Now, however, I was at about 75%. At a full charge, my indicator says I only have about 4.5 - 5 hours of battery life, whereas in the past I had 7. I was really happy with my battery life until I upgraded to Mountain Lion!

At first I thought my battery just needed to be recalibrated since I was at 10% but still hadn't received an alert that I was low on battery. When I recalibrated, however, nothing changed. Any help you could provide would be great!

Curses, you brought up a good point that I forgot to mention on my last post. Fully charging my MBP also takes longer now than when I was using Lion.

I guess I was so preoccupied in my mind with the fast discharge that I completely forgot about the time it takes to charge.

Finding better battery life after disabling notifications.  Seems to be helping

The confusing part is that the ML battery issue affects sleep battery consumption. Mine uses 15-20% of the battery during sleep mode at night.

Hi,

I have the same problems since days, but now I noticed that may battery stays at 99% with cable plugged in and the system says it is fully charged.. ;(

I also found strange files on my mac and I don´t know where the came from or where they are located on my mac...

Their time-stamps are from april 2012 and november 2011, so before ML was released..  really strange that whole issue... I have never seen this files before..  and there are lots of them!

The message says, "The alias "stringtable.xml" could not be opened, because the original file was not found".

With best regards!

OK, finally got down to doing a bit of testing on the ML 12A269 GM Seed partition I have. While it is nowhere near as drastic as some of you have suffered (I'm down to 59% charge after about 40 minutes + overnight sleep + 90 minutes total use so far), it is significantly different from what the Mac normally lasts on battery. Would be interesting to test if this install behaves the same as that derived from the currently available commercial installer. This is a totally barebones system, just has XCode 4.4 GM Seed, gfxCardStatus 2.2.1 and BwanaDik 3.3 on top of the base install.

So when I get in contact with the Apple Support guy who wrote yesterday to set up an appointment, I'll be able to chime in a bit.

For those of you with fan problems, check to see if you have a program called "SMC Fan control" installed.  This program has not been updated from Mountain Lion yet. Not only do you have to quit the program but do a search for any files with the same name in Finder and delete them.  This should fix the fan problem.

Yup, ive seen the battery be that crappy. At one point i was at 87% with only 1 hr 50 min left. After taking note of the battery times and the several instances I have let it die in order to calibrate it, I have noticed that it is never consistent. All ive had open is Word and Safari. sometimes I get four hours sometimes 3. Ive had up to 7 hours after verifying disk and repairing disk permissions.

Weird.

noiseordinance,

Now that you mention it, I've also noticed the sleep battery life issue. I'm thinking the OS upgrade has done something to the system BIOS (not sure if it's called BIOS on a Mac or not) that is causing this. Which would also explain why some users are stating it is also taking much longer for their machines to charge, as well.